Whatever I end up writing in this journal entry remember, please, I started off by saying that the 2004 Best Picture Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby is well worth seeing.
I saw the movie last night on a date. In the same mall in Glendale, CA we ate first at a Chinese restaurant which has as a name a huge pictograph (?) of what in English, so the waiter told us, the equivalent of 'Prosperity/Blessings/Tips.' He added the last with a broad smile. I copied the Chinese writing as best I could onto a scrap of paper and will send it to my 'date's' Chinese Mother in the Philippines for true translation. It was fun being on a date with my wife.
Still not having killed enough time after eating, and tipping, we decided to see the very end of Million Dollar Baby of the previous screening, first, then wait for the movie to begin again. Serious stuff, sober, so dark it looked as if shot in black and white. Directly behind us a middle aged, grossly overweight woman was sobbing. To my right, also behind us, a man was snoring.
I'd received about a week ago a movie-review clipping from my New York buddy, Dick, written for the New York Post by Maggie Gallagher. She titles her review, "At The Movies Killing is Love." Her timing was made especially effective by coupling to her review the illness of the Pope, and William F. Buckley's opining in his column that the Pope would be better off dead.
Amazing that the plot of Million Dollar Baby didn't become debate fodder when the movie first opened. It's chances of winning an Oscar might have been dimmed.
The subject is so huge I won't go into it today. Trying to make a hero out Howard Hughes was more reprehensible than showing via dramatic narrative that young people, especially young people, would rather be dead than incapacitated, in spite of what Maggie Gallagher claims as fact that incapacitated people very often are just as happy after a period of mourning, as they were when whole. Humans, in other words, can triumph over catastrophies.
- Barry
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