Million Dollar Baby

I went to see Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby last night, purely to annoy the right wing.

I haven't been to see an Eastwood flick since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and haven't seen Hilary Swank act since Boys Don't Cry. Apparently, I haven't missed much. Without the queer interest of those earlier films, I was mostly adrift in this maladroit effort to be unsentimental about boxing. No more sentimental subject exists. Characters developed like clockwork, the cinematography is so murky and depressed that several props like bottled water and an advertisement for the Apprentice are needed to remind us that the story is set in the present and not in some nostalgic 'period' dustbowl.

I actually surprised myself by rejecting Swank's decision to die. She chooses suicide over the possibility of developing in some direction other than the purely physical. She wants to die because if she cannot beat other poor women to a pulp in the ring, then she has no reason to live. Now that's actually depressing.