Free Republic

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...

The story is, by now, a familiar one: A female boxer from Missouri takes a terrible beating in the ring and winds up brain-damaged. She’s initially suicidal, but with the help of family and friends, she rallies, takes up painting, and speaks out about her life and the value of all life. Wait a minute, you say: That’s not how Million Dollar Baby ends. In the Academy Award-winning film, the injured boxer begs her coach to kill her because she can’t face life as a quadriplegic, and he complies. But a real-life boxer, whose life story likely inspired the film,...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Better dead than disabled?By Nat HentoffPublished March 7, 2005          An admirer of many of ClintEastwood's films, I found, when interviewinghim some years ago, that he has no resemblance to "Dirty Harry." Moreover, as a working jazz pianist in his youth, he felt the life force of that music. But in his current success, "Million Dollar Baby," he is tone deaf to the life force of the disabled as he encourages euthanizing some of them.     For many years, I have reported on disability rights, and have come to know people diagnosed as "vegetables" in their early...

Euthanasia is enjoying its greatest renaissance in the Western world since Nazi Germany. Together with so many other social ideas first popularized in modern times by Nazis and Communists — from abortion to easy divorce — euthanasia's time may have come. Doctors in the Netherlands are euthanizing disabled infants even without parental consent, and Britain's Labour government may be about to legalize widespread euthanasia there. Our own state of Oregon has a physician-assisted suicide law. Hollywood's elite, ever on the cutting edge of evil, gave their implicit imprimatur to exterminating the unfit to live by granting Academy Awards the other...

Border Patrol agents deliver baby in truck THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- A pregnant Mexican woman who got caught after crossing illegally into the United States gave birth in the back of a Border Patrol agent's vehicle. The baby is an American citizen because she was born on U.S. soil. But her fate, and that of her mother, are still uncertain. The girl was born 2 1/2 months prematurely and weighed less than 2 pounds. She was named Sarai Marisol in honor of Marisol Cantu, one of the agents who found her mother. The woman told authorities she...

Washington, D.C. — “Hollywood continues to pound the American public with the message that the lives of the disabled are not worth living; that such a life is a commodity that can be taken at one’s own whim,” said Shannon Flanagan, college outreach director of American Life League’s Rock for Life. “Last night’s Oscar success for the pro-euthanasia movie ‘Million Dollar Baby’ is just another example of the Culture of Death seeping into our everyday lives.” The highly controversial movie carried off four Oscars at the 77th Annual Academy Awards. “This movie has been hailed as a love story,” said...

IF ACADEMY AWARDS were given for the greatest lost opportunity, Million Dollar Baby would have won them, too. (snip) Nor is this a story line of recent vintage. Indeed, in the past movies were made as explicit propaganda to promote the legalization and legitimacy of active euthanasia. The most notorious of these is the 1939 German movie, I Accuse (Ich Klage An), a film that, with Goebbles's blessing, both promoted voluntary euthanasia as well as the propriety of killing disabled infants--to blockbuster success at the box office. (snip Secondly, while it is true that many people who become quadriplegic later...

Note: in order to speak frankly about the issues raised in the film, this article reveals major plot points. As my wife and I waited in the lobby of the theater to go in and see Million Dollar Baby, she said that she hoped there was at least one puppy in the movie. I responded that I did not think there were any puppies in it at all. Neither of us really had any idea whether there were any puppies in the film, it was simply the casual banter of a married couple. Sure enough, when Maggie, sitting in the...

-snip- O'REILLY: So it was a surrogate father attached to a young woman who is striving. So to you, it was a more relationship film. That was a primary focus of the film. EASTWOOD: Exactly. O'REILLY: And then it gets blown up into an issue film, the euthanasia. Did that surprise you? EASTWOOD: Well, I don't — it could be blown up, but I didn't see what the blow-up is. It's — it wasn't that — it isn't a message for anything. But nowadays — in the old days, it was everybody was talking about the knee- jerk liberals. Now...

Life League Pans 'Million Dollar Baby' "Hollywood continues to pound the American public with the message that the lives of the disabled are not worth living; that such a life is a commodity that can be taken at one's own whim," said Shannon Flanagan, college outreach director of American Life League's Rock for Life. "Last night's Oscar success for the pro-euthanasia movie 'Million Dollar Baby' is just another example of the Culture of Death seeping into our everyday lives." The highly controversial movie carried off four Oscars at the 77th Annual Academy Awards. "This movie has been hailed as a...

Following in the footsteps of both The Golden Globes and Grammy Awards, ratings for Sunday night's 77th Annual Academy Awards were down this year. Some 41.5 million viewers on average watched ABC's Oscar telecast this year, a 5 percent drop from 2004, according to Nielsen Media Research. The sweep by "Million Dollar Baby," the Clint Eastwood boxing flick that won four of the top six awards, drew a 25.2 rating and a 38 share, according to figures released Monday afternoon by ABC. A rating represents the percentage of total U.S. television households. A share represents the percentage of homes with...

Sunday night’s Academy Awards going to “Million Dollar Baby” for Best Film, to the movie’s stars Hilary Swank for Best Actress and Morgan Freeman for Best Supporting Actor, and to the movie’s director Clint Eastwood sounds a clear signal that Hollywood has taken on another project -- promoting the culture of death. In Florida, helpless invalid Terry Schiavo’s parents fight to keep her alive. At the same time in D.C. the nation anticipates a Supreme Court appeal ruling to protect Oregon’s 1998 law allowing doctors to assist their “clients” in committing suicide. And in Hollywood, the world watched American society...

Tonight is oscar night. So the million dollar question is Clint Eastwood going to get Oscar for Best Director? This will be revealed in a few hours. But Million Dollar Baby is a Hollywood flick that is anti-Christian. Eastwood -- not as director -- but as star, kills his lover in this film. How can Eastwood be a good guy and kill his lover? The plot is basically that he is a love with a brain injured woman [before the injury]. He feels the need to take her life. [Please note I have not seen the movie -- but that...

Best Motion Picture of the Year: Million Dollar Baby What it is about: a female boxer who at the end asks to be given 'mercy killing' because she became disabled. Best Foreign Language Film of the Year: Mar adentro What it is about: The real-life story of Spaniard Ramon Sampedro, who fought a 30 year campaign in favor of euthanasia and his own right to die

LOS ANGELES - The boxing saga "Million Dollar Baby" was the Academy Awards (news - web sites) heavyweight Sunday, claiming best picture and three other trophies, including honors for director Clint Eastwood (news), lead-actress Hilary Swank and supporting-actor Morgan Freeman (news). Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator" came away with the most Oscars (news - web sites), its five awards including the supporting-actress prize for Cate Blanchett (news). Eastwood, who at 74 became the oldest directing winner ever, noted his mother was with him when his Western "Unforgiven" won the 1992 best-picture and directing Oscar. "She's here with me again tonight, so...

Clint Eastwood made my day. It happened during a recent interview with The New York Times in which the actor-director said he was baffled by the controversy surrounding his latest film, "Million Dollar Baby." What Eastwood finds frustrating is that a movie that isn't really political has had to endure political fallout from right-wing talk show hosts who insist that the film — in a plot twist already revealed elsewhere — pushes liberalism by promoting assisted suicide. Given that Eastwood is the former Republican mayor of Carmel, Calif., and a movie star who once played hard-nosed Police Inspector Harry Callahan,...

Clint Eastwood has acknowledged that a plot twist in Million Dollar Baby that raises the issue of euthanasia "does hit you with sort of a left hook," and that when he attempted to raise money to produce the film "nobody seemed enthralled with that." In an interview appearing in the current issue of Time magazine, Eastwood suggested that he was able to keep the plot twist secret because the movie was made "under the radar. Nobody knew we were making it, and nobody gave a damn that we were making it." Eastwood said that he was surprised that it took...

Feb. 28 issue - Dan Glickman isn't exactly the Hollywood type. More comfortable in pinstripes than Prada, he's a former Clinton Agriculture secretary, Kansas congressman and president of the Witchita school board—and nothing like the flashy, debonair Jack Valenti, the legendary head of the Motion Picture Association of America. After 38 years at the MPAA, Valenti has become a celebrity in his own right, landing his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But as Glickman heads toward his first Academy Awards since taking over for Valenti as the industry's chief lobbyist, he's the one schmoozing Hollywood directors and...

Regarding Clint Eastwood movies: Some things never change. He doesn't do middle class. He prefers a well-told story to fashionable technical experiments. He's not afraid of corniness. And his characters will fight to maintain decency in indecent times. His films operate in a moral universe that's more particular to movie genres than to the real world. To do right in an Eastwood cop flick, you have to do a little wrong. There is also suffering, punishment, hurt sometimes meted out with a hefty side of sarcasm (Eastwood is the most unheralded comedian in Hollywood). These traits are constant. But some...

If you give Million Dollar Baby half a chance, you're gonna cry. "You're gonna cry," the ticket-seller, a Spanish lady in her late fifties, told me. And she was right. Million Dollar Baby is about two kinds of hunger: The hunger for glory that gnaws at those who seemingly have no chance at it, and the hunger for the love that bonds a father and a daughter, even if the two are not father and daughter. Clint Eastwood is hot again. In 2003, his movie Mystic River, in which he did not act, was up for all of the major...