Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
|
Post by Capo on Nov 30, 2005 20:34:59 GMT
Million Dollar Baby Clint Eastwood 2004 USA An ageing boxing coach who hasn't seen his daughter for years reluctantly takes on a girl for a year and a half, and takes her to a Championship bout. What seems to be an update of Rocky turns, half an hour from the end, into something more akin to The Champ, which audiences and the Academy found fresh and energising, and extraordinarily powerful. The boxing scenes have a brutality to them best appreciated on the big screen, or with the advantages of surround sound, but they're never really convincing... Eastwood's best film remains Unforgiven, as if he was born to star in and eventually direct Westerns; indeed, when he steps outside his most comfortable genre, he falls completely flat, into contrived stories which don't really explore much because the storytelling gets in the way. The director himself puts in the film's best performance, but it was Swank for whom everyone fell. In the background, Freeman plays more or less what he always does, the supporting, once-great vet who is now too old to serve a narrative on his own but needs to, and must, as our wise and all-knowing narrator, prove his worth again by beating up a young bully. The fact that the character whom Freeman defends in this throwaway scene is heinously written and played is telling of the director's wasted talent... or just plain tendency towards cliché.
|
|