MORE MILLION DOLLAR OBSERVATIONS

JUST BE GLAD THAT YOU DIDN'T STEP INTO IT


I'd tell y'all where I first saw this little gem but I was simply clicking on links and followed them to where I found this 'premake trailer' to the Empire Strikes Back. When you let your imagination take you, you can see where everything fits together. The black and white 3-D movie looks and feels like it COULD be the trailer for 'Empire'.

Thing is, the black and white ISN'T an advert for the classic Lucas movie, which was the best of all the films in the Star Wars story. It reminded me a lot of how out here in journals we can read what folks write and put ourselves in their situation. That 'likeness' we percieve, the insight that we may believe we have is the illusion that we may 'know' what a person is feeling and our advice, well intentioned though it may be, is still a study in subjectivity.

It occurred to me watching the movie 'Million Dollar Baby' on AMC this afternoon. Today was a beautiful day and I did have intentions of going out and doing something. But I caught the beginning of the movie and it wasn't long before I was hooked.

Margret (Maggie) Fitzgerald who was played by my girl Hilary Swank, is a 32 year old Missiouri girl who is in LA trying to find a way into her dream of being a professional boxer. The world where she is coming from is typically depressing background, left behind her widowed mother who along with he single parent sister was more interested in gaming the system(she was STILL claiming a dead child on her case with DHS!!). She also had a brother who was on his way to being released from prison...

She would have to win over her trainer, Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) who was intially against the idea of training and managing women fighters. At first I thought it was a case of sexism but as the story spooled out, I would feel differently about his intial hesitancy. Later in the movie, it seem that he saw Maggie a surrougate for his own daughter, with whom he was estranged from.

While Detroit is a good place to be from (I keed, I keed... kinda) none of the implied problems that Maggie had were really a part of my experience. And though like Frankie I am estranged from one of my daughters, I don't believe that whatever is at the root of our problems warrant my making mass a must do activity for years (and even if it is, oooh welll).

So I could emphathize with the both of them as well as Morgan Freeman's character of John (Scrap Iron) Dupris, Frankie's good friend and one of the people he feels responsible for. And the thing is, he may be right and he could have done better by his good friend but ultimately, the choice was Frankie's and there would have been a different set of consequence to come from 'the road not taken'.

At any rate, John stays in the gym and cleans up around the place for Frankie. In fact it was John who saw how serious that Maggie was about becoming a fighter who gave her some help in learning how to train like a fighter. Other than the actual boxing scenes (which were among the worst fight scenes ever), everything else was a pretty accurate representation of the kinds of relationships that develop in professional boxing.

The kind of loyalty that she displayed when John set her up to meet the 'connected' guy I remember a moment like that from my psuedo-career. That she maintained that fierce devotion to Frankie is something to be remembered towards the end of the movie.

Of course there is more meat to this movie than what I am covering, but when I would feel quick to draw comparisons to the movie, like with Maggie and Frankie's relationship with their families, I would hear the words that begins 'Anna Karennia' echo in my head. "Happy families are alike. Unhappy families are unhappy in their own way" And that is the guts of it, is it not?

No matter how much I wanted to say I understood their motivations, the truth of the matter is I couldn't, especially when I considered what haunted them in the o'dark hours. What was it that burned in Maggie for her to make a cross country journey in hopes of finding 'it'? And I couldn't know o ever speculate as to what caused the break between Frankie and his daughter. But it was at the end, when Maggie was left hospitalized by a freak accident in her title bout that I dared to bring myself up close to the characters.