Toole published in 2000 under the title “Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner,” Paul Haggis’ script is centered on the low-rent but homey downtown Los Angeles gym run by old school boxing sage Frank (Eastwood). He’s got a lot on his mind - mortality, moral decisions, living with mistakes and what one makes of one’s short time on earth - and he continues to hone his filmmaking style in a way so highly refined it approaches the abstract.īased primarily on a 40-page story called “Million $$$ Baby” that was one of six brilliant short stories by veteran boxing cut-man F.X. With so much success behind him, Eastwood continues to fearlessly tackle disturbing material that offers no assurance of public acceptance. faces a similar challenge with this one to transform certain critical acclaim into winning box office. “Mystic River” greatly surpassed anyone’s commercial expectations for a genuinely downbeat film, and Warner Bros. As an Academy Award winner, I believe this: someone should have euthanized this picture.Staying at the top of his game when most of his contemporaries have long since hung up their gloves, Clint Eastwood delivers another knockout punch with “ Million Dollar Baby.” As if “Unforgiven” and “Mystic River” weren’t grave enough, this endlessly resourceful filmmaker goes just as dark and deep in this slow-burning drama of a determined female boxer and her hard-shelled trainer, a tale Eastwood invests with rewarding reserves of intimacy, tragedy, tenderness and bitter life knowledge.
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Had it appeared on Lifetime, I could have forgiven it. It's a mediocre movie, made in a mediocre manner, but with such pretensions and aspirations to greatness that I can't help but hate it.
#Million dollar baby danger movie#
But as a Best Picture and Best Director winner, as the leading film of the 21st century's most overrated director, and above all as the movie which featured Hilary Swank's corny slice of Americana winning the Best Actress award over Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine, I loathed Million Dollar Baby. Were I watching this film in a vacuum, I probably wouldn't have loathed it so much. And I'll echo the party-line from all non- Eastwood lovers: post-1992's Unforgiven, every Eastwood-directed picture has been as standard as it could be: competent-looking and professionally made hackwork. Outside of the hard left turn that the film takes in its final act, it really is just a heaping bunch of maudlin cliches from boxing cliches, delivered in voiceover by Freeman, to the absolutely vicious portrait of Maggie's families as worthless white trash, the film hasn't met an easy shot it didn't like. No, I can't believe it: the battle-hardened ex-boxer who spoke longingly of one more fight stood up to the bully and protected the simpleton!? Who could have predicted it? And don't even get me started on the scene where the gym's bully is picking on Danger and Eddie puts on one glove to put the bully in his place. Which is why, in Million Dollar baby, Frankie and his sidekick Eddie ( Morgan Freeman) don't just train Maggie, they also let "Danger" Barch, a semi-retarded youth who dreams of being a boxer, hang out and train in their gym. Barton ponders his options and finally offers: "How about.both?" The executive ain't happy - even a cliche monger like him wouldn't have the audacity to both in one film.
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In Barton Fink, the studio exec tries to get Barton started by reminding him that every protagonist of a wrestling picture must protect either a dame or a retarded kid.
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Sure, it's utterly preposterous that female boxer Maggie ( Swank) would show up in Frankie's ( Eastwood) gym and ask him to train her and - even though he doesn't train girls and she's too old - he trains her, she warms his heart and melts his curmudgeonly exterior, and becomes the best boxer in her weight class. Million Dollar Baby has that mixture of predictability and preposterousness that only Hollywood movies can muster. You know in Barton Fink, when he's asked to write a terrible, cliched, melodramatic B-movie wrestling picture starring Wallace Beery, and he can't? Well, Paul Haggis, adapting some short stories by F.X. Stars: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman