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Million Dollar Baby 26 March 05
Section: article
Categories: Film / in-a-cinema
I basically like Clint Eastwood. He is a contradictory, talented and I think honest man. He puts things right out there, for better or worse. Worse being of course things like Hearbreak Ridge and White Hunter, Black Heart, to name two where he falls into being a staggering statue of his own cliches.
The film Mystic River was one of the more interesting U.S. films of the recent past, based on one viewing anyway. As I remember, its main point was interesting and remained virtually unspoken in the film, and will remain unspoken here in my comments. I also found it significant that he worked with Sean Penn, who I admire, during a time — in the context of Penn’s courageous stance against the U.S. war against Iraq — when there was (is) growing pressure to suppress dissent.
I am not claiming that he is racist, but Eastwood made it easy on himself with the film Million Dollar Baby by weaving the movie together out of social currents of racism and national chauvinism, not that it is unusual in the industry — hence the Oscar stamp of approval for pulling it off so well, with a balanced finesse.
One embarrassing device used in the story put the film on the same reactionary ideological level as, for example, the Rocky films: in Million Dollar Baby the antagonist is a Black woman from the former GDR (East Germany), who is presented as, of course, an inhuman fighting machine. The racial comparison is clear to anyone who remembers the first Rocky films. The ideological equivalence is in one of the later films where Rocky goes to fight the high-tech, robot-like blond “Russian.” That film, by the way, tied in well to Nazi ideology: the “Russian” portrayed perfectly the Nazis’ propaganda of “der Russe” who was threatening their Lebensraum and their very existence.
Title: Million Dollar Baby
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by: Paul Haggis
Based on stories by: F. X. Toole
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman…
Year: 2004
- Title: Million Dollar Baby
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