Million Dollar Baby Questions

Million Dollar Baby has good things in it: Hilary Swank is wonderful, spirited, huge-hearted; if you have to break my heart by breaking someone, she's just perfect. And if you have to paper a film full of voiceover narration, you can do worse than Morgan Freeman's slow-measured voice. It's a voice so authoritative you often forget that what you're hearing can be pretentious drivel, plus he has a scene where he dons a pair of gloves that for me is the highlight of the movie.

I do have problems with many of the details. David Walsh points out that in that scene with the mother, it's 1) hard to believe that anyone could be that much of a bitch that she would put down a house and lot free and clear and the daughter's profession that bought that house, and 2) hard to believe even if she is that much of a bitch, she can be so dumb that she would prefer a rinky-dink welfare check to a house and lot, free and clear.

Walsh attributes it to contempt of the lower classes; I'd say it was more a failure of observation of the lower classes, in a rather strained attempt to make Swank more sympathetic.

In the penultimate fight scene, we know going in that the ex-prostitute fights dirty, we presume Swank's watched the video of the ex-hooker's former fights, yet Swank goes right into battle seemingly innocent of the girl's dirty tactics, nor does Eastwood have any concrete strategy to deal with her. I remember seeing the girl attack an opponent when she was down or from behind on TV, and I for one, having seen that, would never leave my back exposed, or let my guard down at any time.

Beyond that, it seems unbelievable that this would be the first time Swank dealt with anyone who used dirty tactics; surely she'd have dealt with someone like that before in her rise up, and learned to deal with it accordingly; at the very least Eastwood should know about it and train her accordingly.

Might as well point out here that the boxing circles depicted in this film are surprisingly clean--no bookies, no crooked deals, and while the managers and agents look sleazy, they don't actually do anything sleazy, like maybe try cop a feel off Swank's ass. Walsh also said something to this effect.

Finally (SPOILERS) the death. Eastwood walks into what looks like the darkest corridor in hospital building history (I've seen hospitals in the poorest corners of Manila that are better lit), lugging a bag fullof adrenaline (where did he get that?), detaches a respirator and leaves it off, injects her with a lethal dosage (why take her off the respirator then?) that he's not worried would show up at an autopsy, and takes his sweet time while the monitors scream out flatline readings.

Also, first time I've ever heard of an American hospital where the nurse's desk didn't respond to a code blue, coffee break or no coffee break (the nurse who took the break was talking to someone, so the desk was manned). Worse of all, there's no sign that Eastwood gets investigated after all the shenanigans. Was Eastwood right to have had her checked in in that place? Someone should have been sued, big time. Plus, injecting a bubble of air would have been simpler, harder to trace, and just as painless--remember she can't feel anything from the neck down. Someone's not up to his euthanasia research.

Other than that--yeah, it's entertaining, solid, meat-and-potatoes filmmaking. Not my favorite of the year, though, not by a long shot, I still don't think Eastwood's a filmmaker, and I sure as hell don't think he's an actor. Freeman and Hackman might have been a better choice--hell, their moment together was one of the best things in Unforgiven.

"Babae sa Breakwater" on Senses of Cinema's Filipino Section

Issue 34, Jan-Mar 2005 of Senses of Cinema presents a special section on Philippine cinema, and includes my article on Babae sa Breakwater, which went to the 2004 Cannes Festival's Directors' Fortnight (the first Filipino film to do so since Lino Brocka's Orapronobis, in 1989):

Manila on the Edge of Realism

Plus Alex Tioseco's interview of filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz:

Family Meals, Family Values and Philippine Cinema

Plus Brandon Wee's interview of Lav Diaz:

The Decade of Living Dangerously

They wuz robbed!

From peoplesforum:

Jim Cavaziel's underwear for "Best Supporting Loincloth" in The Passion of the Christ.

Through thick and thin and one of the most sadistic scourgings ever recorded on cinema, this heroic crotch towel managed to mask Cavaziel's modesty (no wonder they called him the Son of God!), even if most of his skin didn't make it.

It wuz robbed!

boxing films

From peoplesforum:

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Wise's The Set Up (1949) is that it's taken from a poem (by Joseph Moncure March), happens in real time, and occurs in a confined space (the boxing ring, its dressing rooms, and the street in front of it). Wise emphasizes this somewhat, by using long takes, a camera crane, and angled shots that link Robert Ryan's dressing room with his hotel room, where Audrey Totter sits waiting for him.

The dialogue is pretty good, terse and realistic, even if the overdetermination so characteristic of noir tends to get to you--the fate of every character Ryan meets is an object lesson or commentary on his own; every person or thing Totter meets or sees is either a threat to her marital fidelity or a reminder of her husband's mortality.

It's a pretty good boxing film; the fight scenes are wonderfully edited (Wise, after all, cut Citizen Kane) and executed (Ryan was a former boxing champ). Maybe my problem with it is that while Wise is skilled and versatile and all, he's not a flier; if say Welles handled this film, it would have been much more baroque, more stylized, more dank; maybe every shot and not the first few would have been a long take, to further unify and emphasize the claustrophobia of the little world Ryan moved around in. It's also (until maybe the last ten minutes) too well-lit for my taste; the boxing ring scenes in particular, well--

Take Body and Soul, done two years earlier. Abraham Polonsky's script isn't necessarily inferior (the dialogue here also rings true), but the plot mechanisms are even more blatant--John Garfield's best friend (played by Joseph Pevney--who, incidentally, goes on to direct some of Star Trek's best episodes, including Amok Time) points out and denounces Garfield's Moral Malaise, then gets knocked down by a car straight after, just for dramatic effect; the girlfriend and mother (Lillian Palmer and Anne Revere) are I suppose Garfield's Voices of Conscience, but also so unforgiving and relentless you feel a little sorry for the man for having these two harridans on his back.

The film is pure hokum, humanist melodrama...and yet the film as a film, thanks to Robert Rossen (who also directed All The King's Men, and that masterpiece of tension and visual design The Hustler) and the great James Wong Howe (The Sweet Smell of Success, Hud, Seconds, Jesus, what didn't he make look great?) simply blows The Set Up right out of the water. The shadows are darker, more menacing, the grit grittier; and when Howe (who was himself a boxer) climbs into the ring perched on a pair of roller skates with a handheld camera, he achieves a sense of immediacy and nightmare (the shimmering, strobelike light that keeps Garfield blinking, as if someone had just whacked his (and your) head with a two-by-four) that not even Raging Bull can equal.

Was looking at Requiem for a Heavyweight recently, and while the script may be the best of the three (by Rod Serling) and the acting as strong (Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rooney, Julie Harris, Jackie Gleason), the directing is gimmicky and overdone in the worst way (Pevney might actually have done a better job). Which only proves the point I was making, about dialogue being dialogue, and plot structure having its own demands and needs, but film as film...uh, what was I talking about again?

From Hell

Not a book, a graphic novel--Alan Moore's From Hell.

Heard a lot about this one and I agree, there's a lot more going on here than what actually found its way into that awful movie adaptation.

It's a perfect marriage of text and art, I think. The problem with Moore is that, in something like Watchmen, I never really thought the artwork measured up; the impression I got was that as long as the artist could draw all the details Moore wanted to put in, or draw the equivalent of a close up, or a zoom in, or a match cut, then Moore was happy.

With Eddie Campbell, I think he's met his match. Campbell's drawings evoke Victorian England in a way that helps Moore's text--enhances the period feeling (they look like ink sketches--storyboards for some Victorian idea of an animated feature), possess a beauty all their own, and still get in all the details and camera moves Moore wants.

And it's not a literal visualization of the source book, Knight's The Final Solution: there's an appreciation here of the geographical and architectural features of London that immerses you in a web of dark, unseen forces long before Jack starts cutting up his first victim--a web so pervasive when Netley starts vomiting, you don't raise an eyebrow in puzzlement, you nod your head in sympathy. There's a gift for characterization--Moore's finest talent, I think--that I can't imagine Knight could ever match, much less surpass.

His sketches of Marie Kelly and Abbeline are very fine, especially the touchingly awkward pas de deux the two perform in a pub, the resolution of which is particularly knotty--she may have lied to him, but reason one makes her look like a bitch (and adds all kinds of shadings to that burst of anger Abbeline vents, early in the novel), reason two makes of her a particularly tragic figure forever beyond his grasp. Even William Gull earns our sympathy, and Moore's take on his final act of murder and the reason why it went the way it did is perversely moving (I only wish you could glean it from the actual pages and not from the appendix, as I did--well, I suppose it's possible, but that's how it happened with me).

Finally, there's a mystical vision towards the end of the book that ties everything together, causes us to feel interconnected in a more profound way than Gull's citywide pentagram could ever hope to achieve (can't help but suspect, though, that Moore borrowed this 'vision' device from Stapledon's Starmaker). 

More defense (of sorts) of Catholicism

From peoplesforum:

Speaking for myself, all that blood and flesh-eating never really bothered me. I kept looking up at that figure hung up there on the crucifix--and in Catholic churches it was always anatomically accurate, unlike those cleanly abstract crosses in Protestant churches--trying to figure out how those wounds were created, and what they felt like.

Catholicism is a sensuous religion. Gibson got that part right, but he put the sensuousness to a limited use, made us hate what's happening to the hero, and unwittingly, hate those who put him in that situation (and thanks to Gibson's clueless fidelity to Emmerich and Brentano's text, the primary object of that hate are the Jews). There's no love, no sense of sacrifice to counterbalance the suffering, the way a real Catholic (and not some literal-minded ninny like Gibson) would put it.

Like I said in my article, Scorsese's violence always pointed to something beyond the physical suffering--to a guilt that had to be eased, or redeemed. Gibson's snuff flick is simply aerobics with plenty of bodily fluids, with a supernatural loincloth thrown in to hide the sex organs.

Glenn H: I think the Catholics are the only one's still into Transubstantiation these days.  We Episcopalians understand the concept of metaphor.

Shit, we not only believe in transubstantiation ( a concept Philip Dick finds so fascinatingly weird he includes it in his novels), we believe in exorcism.

Yeah, the Body of Christ compels you!

Earl Hartman: Well .... erm .... uhhh... urgh.... ahem.... uhh... So....uhhh...how does G-d taste, Noel?

His flesh is crisp and flaky; we have a cashew-flavored treat wrapped in that kind of bread, very popular in Manila. Interesting flavor.

The blood is like a sweetish liqueur with a medicinal flavor. Microwaved cough drops with a mild kick.

Ode to Ebert

From pinoydvd (I know it's bad poetry, but it's really a tribute to an annoying pinoydvd poster):

For what it's worth, his kind of soft shoeing
underneath the stars is kind of nauseating to look at.
can anyone understand that? Or is it
kind of a coded message I need to make clearer. To be

'xact, I mean Ebert's been doing this thing
all the time, and I for one don't think it adds to his credibility one bit.
god, what a moron.
eeneways...

until his kind gets bounced out of the media
press, we're still going to get that kind of wholesale whoring of mainstream and

hollywood movies no matter what.
it's kind of disgusting to think of, really, crass and
so depressing.

hindsight would tell us that
anything ebert praises
is probably too mainstream to be worth
reviewing, and anything he condemns is too provocative to be worth missing.
you have to go and see what he's got his panties in a bunch about.

so the best thing for us all
to do, probably,
is to not read him. ignore him.
can't be influential if he isn't listened to. he might as well go fly a
kite, jump a lake, something like that.
you dig?

at least, that's how i
see it.  so on with the
show...

to arms, man, keep the good fight
in play, keep these darned 'critics
laid under,

he needs a good trouncing,
i say, a good bouncing. well, his weight at least has gone down. that's progress of
some kind. if i

ever meet him, i'd probably tell the
nincompoop that he should
get a life; more, he should get a sensibility.
like he ever will, of course.
is it too much to ask him to at least improve his prose? it reads and
scans like newspaper wrapping.
hell on the eyes.

if you can stand him, good for you.
my tender senses can barely read five
pages before i start to nod off.
really.
of course, he doesn't exactly inspire confidence as a
virtuous journalist. when a friend of mine, diane, spotted him in the street,
ebert had the choice of going into an arthouse cinema or a porn movie. ebert
shuffled into the porn movie theater.