{"id":289,"date":"2005-02-25T23:31:43","date_gmt":"2005-02-26T06:31:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/25\/a_million_dollars_and_no_sense.html"},"modified":"2010-01-09T14:16:56","modified_gmt":"2010-01-09T22:16:56","slug":"a_million_dollars_and_no_sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/25\/a_million_dollars_and_no_sense.html","title":{"rendered":"A Million Dollars and No Sense"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sorry, that&#8217;s a bad pun, but it&#8217;s only appropriate for a bad movie.  In early January, I went to see <I>Million Dollar Baby<\/I> just before it came out locally.  I hated it, in a word, and though I was in the minority, I wasn&#8217;t <a title=\"Like Anna Karina's Sweater: The Clint-Swank Redemption\" href=\"http:\/\/filmbrain.typepad.com\/filmbrain\/2004\/12\/the_clintswank_.html\">completely alone<\/a>. Walking out at the end of the film, I couldn&#8217;t understand how legitimate critics could call it the best American movie of the year.  I thought it was simple-minded, clich&eacute;-ridden, sappy, two-dimensional, and insulting.  Apparently now it&#8217;s left-wing pro-euthanasia propaganda as well, but before we even got to that, I felt like it was a very mediocre movie at best, certainly a step down for Eastwood and a far cry from any kind of award-worthy material.<\/p>\n<p>Aimee is on her February vacation this week, and spent today catching up on some movies she&#8217;d missed, including <I>M$B<\/I> (or should it be <I>$MB<\/I>?), which I&#8217;d gone to by myself &#8211; a sore point for awhile, but I think she&#8217;s over it now.  I was totally prepared for her to love it, and would not have thought anything was strange if she had.  Plenty of intelligent, thoughtful, and critical people have <a title=\"Million Dollar Baby (2004): Reviews\" href=\"http:\/\/www.metacritic.com\/film\/titles\/milliondollarbaby\">fallen over themselves<\/a> to express their adoration for this film.  So when we had dinner tonight, I was almost looking forward to hearing her positive take on the film, so I could just file my distaste away as an anomaly.  But, as luck would have it, she disliked the movie almost as much as I did, and found it cheap and clich?d (&#8220;white trash&#8221; stereotypes instead of actual characters; yet another old, wise, black narrator played by Morgan Freeman).  As we make our Oscar picks and head to Josh&#8217;s on Sunday for the big event, I&#8217;ll be praying that anything but <I>Baby<\/I> wins for picture, actor, and director; perhaps I can ask the stereotypical and out-of-place foul-mouthed priest character from the film for some pointers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sorry, that&#8217;s a bad pun, but it&#8217;s only appropriate for a bad movie. In early January, I went to see Million Dollar Baby just before it came out locally. I hated it, in a word, and though I was in the minority, I wasn&#8217;t completely alone. Walking out at the end of the film, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1915,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions\/1915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doubleperf.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}