Feel Like A Million Bucks

(Warning: spoiler alert!)

After watching Clint Eastwood’s feel-good movie of the year, Million Dollar Baby, I felt like jumping for joy off the 15th floor of our building. Notice how the movies directed by him are so positive? In A Perfect World, Kevin Costner befriends his kid hostage and gets shot right in front of him. In Bridges of Madison County the lead characters may have “done the nasty” on the bathtub, but they don’t end up with one another. In Mystic River everyone is morose or worse, have no sense of humor. In Unforgiven, Morgan Freeman gets killed. After Freeman's character stopped a beating from happening in Million Dollar Baby, I was half-expecting him to be lynched while he was watching the title bout on TV. It is to Eastwood’s credit that he restrained himself from killing off his film partner yet again. But a death still occurs in the movie, and what started out as a female Rocky turned into a moody debate on mercy killing. By the time the lethal injection was administered to a lead character, I felt like killing myself too. That Clint Eastwood sure knows how to make his viewers feel like a million dollars.