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Monday, February 21, 2005
 
Million Dollar Hype-Fest
No, this isn’t a post about the poker tournament I played in. That’ll be tomorrow. Today’s angry, jaded post is brought to you by the letter C and the number 5.

Average. Enthusiastically average. That’s how I feel about the movie that is almost sure to be christened Best Picture, Million Dollar Baby. I saw it with Michelle over the weekend. My friend, Mr. ADD, would be so disappointed that I went to see it, as he was railing about Clint Eastwood, blah, blah, blah, hype, blah, blah, blah, people talk about the crap he churns out as being so great, blah, blah, blah. I wanted to see it because all the reviews were so positive. And the movie had a nice pace for a while, until it got really . . .

SPOILER ALERT!

. . . gloomy. And full of pap. I mean, it was trite long before the sucker-punch thing. Frankly, the only thing keeping my interest during the turgid hospital-bed scenes was finding out what the Gaelic phrase “Mo Chuisle” meant (and my prediction, “my daughter,” wasn’t far off). The whole One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest ending was telegraphed, much in the same way that Eastwood did with the more-enjoyable Mystic River.

/SPOILER ALERT!

Look, I’ve now seen two of the Best Picture nominees, and I can’t tell you how much better Sideways is than Million Dollar Baby. (Actually, I can: A lot.) Fine, Sideways is a “small” movie, but Million Dollar Baby is formulaic crap. Seriously. Yeah, there’s a nice “plot twist” that’s an unexpected punch to the gut, but it’s a total drag . . . and not in an interesting way. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t care.


In other news, Jeff Gordon drove 500 miles around an oval track in a moving billboard faster than anyone else. Yay. Woo. Go, NASCAR.

Oh, and my mom’s opting to have a “procedure” to repair her quite-possibly fractured spine. The one that the ER doctors said wasn’t fractured when they sent her home (alone) with a scrip for vicodin and valium. More on THAT later, too.