08 January 2006
Million Dollar Baby
Steven and I spent a lazy day watching t.v. I was hoping to catch some ice skating competitions, but no such luck. He had recorded some movies of the HD channels, so we ended up watching Clint Eastwood's movie, Million Dollar Baby. I had no interest in seeing it in the movie theater, even after hearing he'd won awards for it. Did Hilary win an award for her performance? I have no idea. If she didn't, she should have. If anything, she should've won for having ABS OF FRICKIN' STEEL. But I didn't realize how sad it was. Here she is, rising above her trailer trash past, having a chance at this million dollar purse, then gets sucker punched by a former German whore (who looks like a man, baby, yeah) and BAM...her life is over. At first, I thought she was dead. Then again, death would've been my first choice if I could no longer breathe on my own, move on my own, and had a leg amputated. I cried a little when she asked him to end her life. And I cried a little more when he finally told her what the Gaelic name meant.
I think the best part of the movie--and I didn't realize it until later when Steven and I were talking about it over dinner at Swensen's--was the scene in the locker room after her first fight. He'd trained her some then passed her off to some sleazy Donnie Brasco type.
"You gonna leave me again?" she asks him.
"Never," he replies.
And he didn't. He was with her to the very end. Even when her trailer trash family came to visit and wanted to sign over all her earnings to them. (I'd wanted to reach thru the screen and slap her whole family upside their heads with a dirty bedpan). She and her trainer weren't blood family, but they should've been. Because that's what a father does. When she said, "You remind me of my father", I was thinking the same thing. Loyalty. It's all about family loyalty. I haven't seen Clint Eastwood--how old is he anyway?--in anything in a long time. Steven bought some of his old "spaghetti westerns" (like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) where he still looked young-ish (like in his late thirties or something). This is the first recent movie I've seen him in and he looked so old and he sounded so gritty. Maybe grittier, if possible. And I told Steven, "when this man dies, the whole world is going to weep."
That's the best kind of legacy to leave behind, I think.
