Million Dollar Baby on AMC

good movie.. but am I the really the only one who thought that the way she got hurt was extremely fucking absurd?

 

It was absurd...a terribly random and a one-in-a-million shot. But that was the story of her life: Couldn't get a break, and even when she did, something horrible happened.

I've watched the movie once, and yeah, the "after" part is numbing. My wife occassionally menitons that she wants to see it, but I change the subject. Deeeeeeeeeepressing. I imagine we'll see it at some point, though.

 

It was supposed to be a fluke, which occurred as the result of someone else cheating (making her even more of a victim), and I thought it worked pretty well. And if you don't know anything about the film coming in, it just comes completely out of nowhere.

And I love that Danger turned up as one of the stoner buddies on "Knocked Up."

 

i'll chime in that it's a top 25 pick pic.

 

I won't say it's total dreck, because the direction is fantastic and there were some excellent performances (Morgan Freeman was perfect).

However, it still sucked and, as I've posted before, here's why: they spent the first hour or whatever up until the injury setting up her character as someone who never quits. Never. She is dogged in her pursuit of everything. Then she gets injured and up and quits on life.

They didn't stay true to her character, they used a random, implausible scenario for her to get injured and then expected the audience to go along with it all. I couldn't.

If that makes me a "mongoloid retard," well then ...

It's not about "expecting a Girl Rocky" as Arnold Babar so condescendingly put it. It's about a film that wasn't true to itself.

 

See, I disagree completely. Throughout the movie, she was constantly moving, constantly frenetic. Even when Eastwood only mentions bouts, she's up and punching and bobbing and weaving. then she gets hurt, and it's not that she lost her shot or won't get to box — she realizes she won't ever move again. Then, to me the most heartwrenching scene in the movie.\

The doctor tells her she might have to lose a leg. Eastwood is staring out the window with an empty bed behind him, and Swank comes back in a beautiful cut — minus a leg.

That was the final straw for her, the realization that there was no up for her anymore.

And I think they played it perfectly.

 

Perhaps the worst best picture flick I've seen. I usually like Eastwood, but this was excruciating.

 

shit, beaks, you're one of those cats who wanted to hate the flick because you hated the ending, aren't you?

first post of yours that ever raised a brow on ole TP's face.

 

So you're saying "mongoloid retards" might have been excessive? I'll be damned.

The people I put in that category are the ones who complain that it was a cool boxing movie and then got all depressing. Yeah, she was having a cool boxing life and then it took a turn -- it's called life, and was kind of the whole point of the fucking movie. For all the good perfomances, if she goes on and wins the title, that's just another movie.

But I will argue to the death (more hyperbole?) the idea that the ending wasn't true to itself. She did what she did BECAUSE of her determination and spirit. That character wasn't one who could live the future that was in front of her -- and with no hope of recovery, would you want to live another 50 years as a vegetable? With the only people who give a shit about you a few years from death themselves? I would rather die than live that way, and based on what we know, so would she.

I know that in most movies, they would have had her defying the odds and fighting and being that one in a million patients who walks again. But that's not reality. As they explained her injury, she had no chance. She had to look at a future of laying in a bed with a tube down her throat, shitting herself, for decades.

She didn't make the easy choice, she made the hard one -- I don't call that giving up.

 

Gotta disagree ... the easy choice was to end her life. The hard one would have been to go on being a quadriplegic after being so active and athletic her whole life.

I don't know how I would have gone about ending that movie (I don't think the one-in-a-million walks again ending would have been very satisfying either -- too hokey), but I just felt let down that after spending all that time rooting for the never-say-die underdog, she does just that and says "die."