In The Line of Fire

The reviews are out for Million Dollar Baby. I'll give you a little sample:

USA TODAY:
"Better than last year's Mystic River, which may have been mildly overrated, Million Dollar Baby is as good as Unforgiven. Or, to put it another way, as good as any movie Eastwood has ever directed. (**** out of four)"

NY TIMES:
"Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" is the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year, and not because it is the grandest, the most ambitious or even the most original. On the contrary: it is a quiet, intimately scaled three-person drama directed in a patient, easygoing style, without any of the displays of allusive cleverness or formal gimmickry that so often masquerade as important filmmaking these days."

I haven't been this dumbfounded since the camera panned down to show Jaye Davidson's penis in The Crying Game. THIS MOVIE IS TERRIBLE. It's twists and surprises are unearned, its dialogue is hokey and unconvincing, its laden with cliches, and its filmed with faux artifice (read: moody lighting) spread thicker than jam in a jar of jam.

Even these reviews detail the mind-numbing list of overdone cliches running rampant in this film with seemingly no awareness of how ridiculous it all sounds.

From the NY Times review (cliches in bold):
"Mr. Eastwood...plays Frankie Dunn, the owner of a tidy, beat-up gym tucked away in a shabby corner of Los Angeles. His best friend, who supplies world-weary voiceover narration to help the plot through its occasional thickets, is Eddie Dupris, (Morgan Freeman) a former fighter (nicknamed Scrap) whom Frankie managed long ago.

"Both men carry some heavy frustration and regret - Frankie has lost a daughter, Scrap has lost an eye - but they bear the weight gracefully and with good-humored fatalism, reconciled to loneliness and the diminishing returns of age. Scrap spars with the young would-be tough guys who hang out in the gym and watches out for the slow-witted orphan [SLOW-WITTED ORPHAN!!!!!]who is both their mascot and their scapegoat. Frankie, meanwhile, reads Yeats, studies Gaelic and goes to Mass every day, mainly to annoy the prickly young priest with inane theological challenges."

Again, I'd like to point out that the cast of characters in this movie includes a SLOW-WITTED ORPHAN. A slow-witted orphan who, I shit you not, at one point has the very "comical business" of asking Scrap (his name is SCRAP!), "How do they get the ice into the bottled water? The hole is so small!"

And can I also point out that this review actually says with absolutely no negativity, "His best friend, who supplies world-weary voiceover narration to help the plot through its occasional thickets..."

First of all, let me tell you that the narration is so thick in the first 15 minutes of this film, I almost thought we were watching a book-on-tape with actors pantomiming to the narration. There's far more narration than dialogue, in fact at times you find yourself wishing Scrap would shut up because a person who's actually on the screen starts talking and you can't make out what they're saying because Scrap keeps on talking too. It's ridiculous.

Secondly - narration in a film used to "help the plot" is a sign that the film is BAD. Very, very BAD. If you can't get out of "thicket" after "thicket" without a character explaining everything to us outside of the dialogue of the film - then your film sucks.

Of course, A.O. Scott also loved Space Cowboys, an even worse Clint Eastwood movie, so maybe Scott and reviewers of his ilk are just overwhelmed by Eastwood's mystique, spinning his awful, cliche-ridden movies into nostalgia because they can't handle the idea that Dirty Harry might be a piece-of-shit director.

Or maybe this year's movie releases have really been such a weak skulk that anything reaching the heights of middling mediocrity is hailed as auteur theory, just to keep from writing off 2004 as a complete waste of celluloid and light.

Or maybe George W. Bush's reelection and the subsequent battle over values has already led us down the dark path of rewarding bland hackwork over anything truly thrilling because its familiarity and geniality gives us a nice, warm feeling in our tummies without ever engaging our brains.

Either way, the only review I've found so far to actually speak the truth about this film comes from Salon.com (unadulterated truth in bold):

"Is Clint Eastwood the Manchurian Candidate? He must be. Brainwashing seems the only plausible explanation for the extraordinary praise given his drab, plodding movies. The overdeliberate, humorless revenge drama "Mystic River" was directed and hailed as if it were Greek tragedy -- and next to Eastwood's new "Million Dollar Baby," it is.

A compendium of every cliche from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, "Million Dollar Baby" (written by Paul Haggis from stories by F.X. Toole) tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction -- it's solemn, inflated and dull.

As GWB himself might say, "Amen, Salon.com. Amen."