Posted on 04/21/2005 10:30:58 PM PDT by paltz
I saw Million Dollar Baby, the movie that's "not a boxing movie but a love story." I hated it. You probably liked it. If you haven't seen it, you should stop reading this right now -- unless, of course, you want some additional reasons why you don't want to see a father-daughter love story that's not really a boxing movie. Million Dollar Baby is the kind of boxing movie that makes one long for the gritty realism of the boxing sequences in Rocky IV.
Reason 1: Trailer trash girl walks into a gym to learn how to be a good boxer. She says the line mandatory in all movies revolving around someone trying to rise up from their station: "If you take this away from me, I got nothin' left." Oh really? Without boxing, which is something you're not terribly good at yet? What about going to Apex Technical School to learn welding or refrigerator repair, financial aid if you qualify, you leave here with your own set of professional tools? Oh, but if you did that, there'd be no movie.
Reason 2: Since when is a career as a boxer a woman's ticket out of the ghetto/trailer park? There's even less money in it than there is for men; the vast majority of boxers need second jobs just to pay the rent. (Even Laila Ali, the female boxer who can command the highest purses, only got $350,000 for her last fight. Divide that sum between trainers, promoters, taxes, time between bouts...you get the picture.) Wouldn't this soft-spoken gal thinking to use her body rather than her brain for an income choose the traditional route of being a stripper? Her "training" for this "million dollar" payday would be more believable if we saw her buying a Lotto ticket every Friday.
Reason 3: When she's lying in the hospital bed, she reminisces about her career, which included "being in magazines." Really? But the presence or influence of the media, which would have been considerable and utterly overwhelming if we're to believe this premise in the first place, is entirely absent from this film! I suppose that's so Clint Eastwood's character can be the one to finally (touchingly!) reveal the meaning of the Gaelic term written on the back of her silk boxing robe -- something that would have been pointed out and asked about in each and every single interview she did.
Reason 4: Now that's she's all incapacitated, what does her trainer think to do? He brings in a brochure from the community college! (See Reason 1.)
©Lynn Snowden-Picket
NOTE: Lynn's ten months training as a boxer are detailed in her 2000 book, Looking for a Fight.
I don't know anyone that's gone to see Clint Eastwood's much 'acclaimed' movie. Was it a box office hit or bust? I haven't seen it because I read reviews of the plot and decided that an afternoon at the dentist's office would be more enjoyable. I wouldn't even want to rent it at Blockbusters.
Interesting article, the site looks pretty interesting too. There certainly seem to be a lot of Jerseyans on there. But I was glad to see that Lynn Snowden-Picket is a gal, I was wondering about a guy with a name like being being on a "tough guy" website!
I really didn't care for the movie myself.
$99 million domestic, $184 million worldwide.
Yeah, it's a hit.
Well the oscar campaign and controversy over the plot + Terri Schiavo controversy helped as well.
Sucky movie. Clint Eastwood's "acting" is more like a cranky old alzheimers patient who grunts once in a while.
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