Offside (2006) – DVD

August 27, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Iran, Sports

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Sima Mobarak Shahi, Safar Samandar, Shayesteh Irani, M. Kheyrabadi
screenplay by Jafar Panahi and Shadmehr Rastin
directed by Jafar Panahi

Offsidecapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Offside finds Jafar Panahi in a light mood. At least, in a lighter mood than when he made The Circle, his previous dissertation on the depressing state of women's rights in Iran, which painted the nation as a Kafka-esque hell full of paranoia and punishment for any woman with the fatal courage to get out of line. That movie is a brilliant sucker-punch you don't easily forget, though its huis clos mentality leads one more to despair than to hope that something can be done. His latest film is the flipside to The Circle: a tribute to the resourcefulness of young women who will get their football fix any way they can while still pledging allegiance to the idea of their nationality–even when the reality is a hostile force bent on keeping them at home. It is, against all odds, funny, mischievous, and brazenly positive; and it'll send you out soaring, your faith in humanity restored under conditions you never thought possible.

Surf’s Up (2007)

June 12, 2007Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Sports, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Don Rhymer and Ash Brannon & Chris Buck & Chris Jenkins
directed by Ash Brannon & Chris Buck

Surfsupby Walter Chaw I guess it's fair to say that Ash Brannon (Toy Story 2) and Chris Buck's mockumentary Surf's Up is a successful send-up of the Endless Summer-style documentary recently revived by Stacy Peralta's Riding Giants–but its triumph as such is relegated to so microscopic a genre that its usefulness as satire is negligible. It might delight a few guys who revere Bruce Brown's waterlogged hagiographies or, closer to the vein, the handful of folks who'll actually recognize that surf legends Kelly Slater and Rob Machado make cameos–but we're a long way here from a roomful of toys coming to life when their owner is gone, and while it's tempting to laud Surf's Up for being ambitious, it's frustrating that the picture has to dedicate a tedious amount of time to the usual slapstick gags just to apologize for its obscure premise. Far from condemning it as the next Shrek, though, I'd say the worst thing about Surf's Up is that it's clever enough to leave you expecting more–and inoffensive enough (unless scenes of a primitive tribe of cannibal penguins can somehow be traced back to Native-fear flicks or intolerance towards Polynesians) to leave you wishing some of the "nuggets" its anachronistic Chicken Joe (Jon Heder, in the first performance of his career that didn't leave me wanting to punch his mother) mentions were in more obvious display in the filmmakers.

Major League (1989) [Wild Thing Edition] – DVD

May 9, 2007Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Corbin Bernsen, Bob Uecker
written and directed by David S. Ward

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Major League doesn't have clichés, it is clichés. The film is a collection of sports- and slob-comedy riffs designed for maximum familiarity and a minimum of creative fat. What you see is what you get–and if you don't like what you see, there are legions of sports fans behind you who will, and have, to the extent of justifying a "Wild Thing Edition" DVD covered in Astroturf. Of course, sometimes we don't want anything beyond obvious underdogs obviously set up to obvious victory, and if you're in the mood for such faits accomplis then you could do a lot worse than to suckle at this comforting cinematic teat. But for the most part, lovers of cinema are warned to not get their hopes too high, while fans of crackling dialogue are advised to seek their kicks elsewhere.

Philadelphia Film Festival ’07: The King of Kong

April 13, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sports
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters**/****directed by Seth Gordon by Ian Pugh Sarcastically described as Rocky for video games, The King of Kong is superficially about how human beings will latch on to any opportunity to acquire fame and admiration--but really it's about how easy it is to laugh at nerds. The documentary follows the subculture of obsessive retro gaming, because there's a shake-up in the works: junior-high science teacher and family man Steve Wiebe is closing the gap on the (world-record) high score for "Donkey Kong" held by pretentious hot-sauce mogul Billy Mitchell. These middle-aged oddballs are…

Blades of Glory (2007)

March 29, 2007Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Will Ferrell, Jon Heder, Will Arnett, Craig T. Nelson
screenplay by Jeff Cox & Craig Cox and John Altschuler & Dave Krinsky
directed by Will Speck & Josh Gordon

Bladesofgloryby Walter Chaw A goodly portion of Will Ferrell's fame has to do with his complete comfort with his body and sexuality. No surprise, then, that Blades of Glory's one-trick pony is straight men doing gay things in what is widely regarded as the gayest sport at the Winter Olympics. Not necessarily that figure skating is dominated by gay men (aside: isn't it?), but that the sight of men in spandex and codpieces pretending to be swans is uncomfortable for great swaths of middle-America and thus subject to ridicule and hatred. The first shot of the film suggests the divide as little Jimmy MacElroy (Zachary Ferrin as a child, the untalented Jon Heder as an adult) joyfully Salchows on an ice rink segregated from the "normals" playing hockey below. Recognized for his nascent useless talent, he's adopted by a megalomaniacal millionaire (William Fichtner in too small a role) who grooms little Jimmy into an Olympic champion whose only rival on the ice is portly sex machine Chazz (Will Ferrell). When the two get into a fistfight on the awards stanchion, they're banned from competing in their division–leading, of course, to their decision to return to glory in the pairs division. I'm not suggesting that Blades of Glory is hateful, really, so much as facile and easy. If you think Ferrell not wearing much as one half of the first man-man figure skating team is hysterical, and if you consider the gag of straight men touching each other's groins for the sake of a spectacle that's already beyond parody to be comedy gold, then have I got a movie for you.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

August 4, 2006Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Sacha Baron Cohen, Gary Cole
screenplay by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay
directed by Adam McKay

by Walter Chaw I feel about Will Ferrell the way I feel about Jack Black: that they're good second-fiddles on occasion, but put them in a lead role and my eyeballs roll into the back of my head. Imagine my surprise that Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (hereafter Talledega Nights) showcases Ferrell's Faulknerian idiot man-child to great advantage in a vehicle that's sharp, smart, topical, and funny. It's an exuberant satire in every sense of the abused term–a twisting of familiar elements into grotesquerie that brings to light the essential absurdity of the familiar, sketching a portrait of the divide between the blue states and the red states with a feather bludgeon. It's this year's Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, doing for anti-intellectual animals and effete eggheads what that film did for the racism leveled in popular culture at "favoured" minorities. This is the finest document yet of the special brand of idiocy that compels our noble Congress to rename French Fries and French toast in their commissary or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the air of noblesse oblige that taints the highbrow's mincing, faux-outraged response. Credit Talladega Nights for this: no one's necks have ever been redder than those sported by these self-described retards, and no brainy gay Frenchmen have ever been this gay and French.

Nacho Libre (2006)

June 26, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sports, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera, Héctor Jiménez, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Jared Hess & Jerusha Hess & Mike White
directed by Jared Hess

Nacholibreby Walter Chaw Nearly unwatchable from an aesthetic perspective, Nacho Libre is also invasively offensive and cheap-feeling in its gags, its performances, and its targets. Lampooning Mexican professional wrestling seems an onanistic pursuit at best insomuch as, clearly, the sport is already busily in the process of self-parody–but letting Jared Hess (single-handedly bringing the Special Olympics to Wes Anderson) tackle it along with Jack Black doing an "oh Ceeesco" accent in skin-tight tights is a particular kind of torture. The film's going to have its defenders (Uwe Boll has his defenders, too, I hasten to add, as does Hess's Napoleon Dynamite), and I'm thinking that it's going to be along the lines of "Well, sure, it's not Citizen Kane." But does anyone go to anything expecting it to be Citizen Kane? Moreover, have people who like this bullshit actually seen Citizen Kane? It's germane to talk about this because sooner or later it has to be pointed out that pictures like Nacho Libre exist because pictures like Napoleon Dynamite were popular: mean pictures about small-minded folks picking fun for no profit at slow-witted caricatures of racial groups and social classes. Pictures like this exist because people are used to lowering their expectations so much that they're actually irked when someone doesn't. It's most instructive to take a minute to look at how low we go now to construct the straw dogs we mock.

Cars (2006)

June 9, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Pixar, Sports

*½/****
screenplay by John Lasseter & Philip Loren & Kiel Murray
directed by John Lasseter

Carsby Walter Chaw Soulless and anchorless, Pixar's Cars is the company's first all-around failure. It's got something to do with the lack of a human grounding: the only other time Pixar stumbled was with its similarly bleak A Bug's Life (that picture resorting, like Cars, to racial caricature as its primary tentpole), which is also the only other time the company has neglected to ground its story with homo sapien ballast. It's telling that a company pioneering machine-tooled animation so relies on that hint of humanity for its effectiveness; in its place, Cars resorts to cheap name-games (all the cities are car-parts except, dubiously, Los Angeles) as its primary gag and relies on a string of racing in-jokes (Darrell Cartrip, get it? Yeah, me neither) to lubricate its worn-down gears. It's the product of the "Larry the Cable Guy" school of redneck effacement tacked onto a tired redemption romantic comedy, even more tired fish-out-of-water malarkey, and finally an inexplicable blanket criticism of all things urban. Sub-vaudeville gags with weak payoffs and rudderless execution are the things one would rightly expect from a DreamWorks flick–pity that their strain of high-concept lack of inspiration seems to respect no host.

The Ringer (2005) – DVD

May 23, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Romance, Sports

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Johnny Knoxville, Brian Cox, Katherine Heigl, Jed Rees
screenplay by Ricky Blitt
directed by Barry W. Blaustein

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of fascinating things embedded in the premise and execution of Barry W. Blaustein’s Farrelly Brothers-produced The Ringer, the story of Steve Barker, a broke cubicle monkey who tries to do the right thing and ends up trying to rig the Special Olympics by impersonating a mentally-challenged athlete. One is the notion that it’s easier to feign retardation to the non-challenged than it is to the challenged; and the other is that, in taking Barker’s “Jeffy” at face value, there’s actually less offense in this broad play for sentimental, slapstick chuckles than in the Oscar-winning/aspiring pieces (Forrest Gump, I Am Sam, Rain Man) Steve uses as research. “There’s the secret,” a habit-clad Kate Winslet confides to Ricky Gervais in the brilliant debut of his new show, “Extras”. “If you want an Oscar you have to play a mental.”

The Champ (1931) – DVD

May 1, 2006Posted in1930s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Sports

*/**** Image B Sound C Extras C
starring Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Rosco Ates
screenplay by Francis Marion and Leonard Praskins
directed by King Vidor

by Walter Chaw So dated now as to seem nigh prehistoric, King Vidor's silent era-bound The Champ is broad melodrama of the underdog-uplift/precocious-kid variety, and though it's sorely tempting to condescend to it by placing it within its historical context, watching it now is like getting a screw drilled into your forehead. Doing road work with his lovable boy Dink (Jackie Cooper, more than a marionette, less than a creature of flesh and blood), The Champ (Wallace Beery) is a cartoon of a lush and a punch-drunk boxer who makes silly shadow-boxing gestures in long, unbroken takes, requiring Beery to ad-lib business that segues uneasily late in the film when the same Beery shtick must carry pathos. We can't think that a Vaudevillian's conception of a retarded drunk and a compulsive gambler is adorable and then reorient ourselves into thinking he's feeble without confronting the same conundrum the film itself presents a modern viewer. Either The Champ is fabulous–for a picture made in 1931, that is–or it's only accessible for a theoretical, contemporaneous audience, lacing any ascriptions of quality with that one major caveat and thus rendering them exactly as useless as that kind of equivocation always is.

Chariots of Fire (1981) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD

April 3, 2006Posted in1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports, UK

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Nigel Havers, Cheryl Campbell
screenplay by Colin Welland
directed by Hugh Hudson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Crushed by the upset win at this year's Oscars, a critic friend of mine bemoaned the fact that "until the Earth crashes into the sun, Crash will have won Best Picture." I couldn't help thinking of that while watching Chariots of Fire, a film that would have been forgotten long ago had it not copped its own surprise Oscar in 1981. I still can't wrap my head around its slipping through the cracks: though there's an awesome professionalism at work, it's remote and inhuman enough to push you far outside the action, making it seem as if its rather primitive story is being viewed by astronauts looking in the opposite direction. The film is so obsessed with the dead surfaces of period detail that it winds up stifling its simple underdog narrative. Watching the virtuous come out on top isn't much fun when the filmmakers appear to be thinking of anything other than that triumph over whatever.

Two for the Money (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

January 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Al Pacino, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Sports

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Al Pacino, Matthew McConaughey, Rene Russo, Armand Assante
screenplay by Dan Gilroy
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Finally, a movie as loud and incoherent as Al Pacino himself. He's the resident corruptor of Two for the Money, and the film gives him massive monologues of dubious insight just so the Duke of Hambone can do his thing. Sadly, he's not the one running the show–that honour belongs to the perpetually-ripped Matthew McConaughey, whose role requires him to look mesmerized as Pacino talks of things that "pucker your asshole to the size of a decimal point." Two for the Money sure has that effect: the experience is assaultive in so many ways that you're likely to be riveted even as you wish it would all go away.

Glory Road (2006) + Last Holiday (2006)

January 13, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

GLORY ROAD
½*/****
starring Josh Lucas, Derek Luke, Emily Deschanel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Christopher Cleveland & Bettina Gilois and Gregory Allen Howard
directed by James Gartner

LAST HOLIDAY
*/****
starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu
screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman, based on the screenplay by J.B. Priestley
directed by Wayne Wang

by Walter Chaw There are two big laughs in Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer's African-American Hoosiers, Glory Road. The first comes when some white guy says derisively, "Can you imagine what basketball dominated by Negroes would look like?", while the sight of defeated Kentucky coaching legend Adolph Rupp (Jon Voight), vilified by history perhaps unfairly (though there's no question that he's vilified unfairly by this film), mourning the loss of the National Championship Game to an upstart team prompts the second. Both moments speak to the biggest problems in a film riddled with little ones: the former because it makes the audience complicit in–and comfortable with–the picture's callousness and casual blanket racism, and the latter because everything that happens in the film is already a foregone conclusion. The only appeal left is rooted in seeing the black players put on exactly the kind of degrading sideshow the picture suggests they're too human for. Glory Road is smug, offensive, and ignorant in the way that films with no self-awareness are ignorant–wrapped in a story designed specifically to make people cheer and believe that this one game in 1966 changed peoples' attitudes towards African-Americans in sports instead of simply bolstering the idea that the black athlete was advantageous and alien rather than just merely alien.

Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) – DVD

December 8, 2005Posted in2000s, Adventure, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Romance, Sports

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Lindsay Lohan, Justin Long, Breckin Meyer, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant and Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Angela Robinson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There’s this girl, Maggie Payton (Lindsay Lohan), who wants to be a NASCAR driver. That much I got. Her father (Michael Keaton) is, of course, an overprotective wuss who wants to shield Maggie from masculine pursuits. I’m right with you up to there. The only way to prove she can handle the danger is…to drive a self-propelled VW Bug that does all the work for her? Such is the logical conundrum of Herbie: Fully Loaded, which comes on like a female-empowerment comedy-melodrama while depriving its heroine of autonomy over the career she so desperately craves. As the damned Beetle completely destroys any attempt to make its pilot a prime mover, there’s really nothing at stake for anyone behind the wheel–and while this is fine if you’re a schlep like Dean Jones, it doesn’t do much if you’re trying to sneak in feminist subtext.

Cinderella Man (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

December 5, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, DVD, Sports

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko
screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw Of the many ways that you can read the ending of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, the one I like is the suggestion that the artist will disappear when the masses decide to gratify themselves at the trough of empty spectacles and popular melodramas that do nothing to feed the soul. Ron Howard is at the forefront of greasing that along. Not entirely unexpectedly, his current work in television (he's the producer and narrator of "Arrested Development"), where he got his start, is, at least for the medium, complex and sophisticated. Yet his philosophy for the silver screen seems to have something to do with those three no-evil monkeys: His films have all the edge and subtext of a greeting card. They're handsome, big-budget productions with big, pretty, empty faces, and they're Pollyannaish and generally awful, uniformly, with Splash still the lone bright spot in his career. It is, after all, the only one of his films to feature an ambiguous protagonist and an existentially disquieting conclusion. The only one that acknowledges a possibility for the guys in the white hats to have a shadow as black as coal.

DIFF ’05: The World’s Fastest Indian

November 10, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Japan, New Zealand, Sports
*/****starring Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Chris Williams, Annie Whittlewritten and directed by Roger Donaldson by Walter Chaw Kiwi filmmaker Roger Donaldson follows up his intensely impersonal The Recruit with the intensely personal The World's Fastest Indian, a fictionalization of a documentary he shot some thirty years ago about dotty old coot Burt Munro, who in 1967 set a land speed record for motorcycles under 1000ccs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Funny how the results of both are sanded down almost beyond recognition: so baptized are they in the scouring attentions of high-grade clichés that they're inhumanly frictionless. See Burt…

Fever Pitch (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 5, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Romance, Sports

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Drew Barrymore, Jimmy Fallon, James B. Sikking, JoBeth Williams
screenplay by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw Ben (Jimmy Fallon), a Red Sox fanatic and middle-school math teacher, falls in love with corporate minx Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), who, as is often the case in Farrelly Brothers films, is perfect. She's beautiful, bug-eyes and all, and when she simpers in her mealy-mouthed way that she loves Ben as much as Ben loves baseball, all the men folk are supposed to melt–but I have serious doubts as to whether Barrymore is romantic lead material. Though she's fine getting hit in the face with a hard foul (her best roles are as the benighted bimbos in Adam Sandler trainwrecks), much of Barrymore's sultriness has to do with the idea of her as a naughty schoolgirl (Poison Ivy), not as a savvy woman of the world. She's no Mary, in other words, and her lack as one-half of Fever Pitch's romantic pairing is distracting–if not actually crippling, since leading man Fallon is himself a stammering vanilla doormat.

Ice Princess (2005) [Widescreen] + Because of Winn-Dixie (2005) – DVDs

August 12, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Sports

ICE PRINCESS
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Michelle Trachtenberg, Joan Cusack, Kim Cattrall, Hayden Panettiere
screenplay by Hadley Davis
directed by Tim Fywell

BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE
*½/**** Image N/A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring AnnaSophia Robb, Jeff Daniels, Cicely Tyson, Dave Matthews
screenplay by Joan Singleton, based on the novel by Kate DiCamillo
directed by Wayne Wang

Iceprincesscapby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Sort of a distaff Friday Night Lights, Tim Fywell's Ice Princess transcends its myriad stigmas–not the least of which that babyish title–with a candour I dare say is unsolicited. In fact, the lesson of the picture is that despite that it wasn't strained of conflict by some sensation-fearing executive, no riots broke out, no claims were filed, and no bills were passed. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it a sustenance-free afternoon at the Ice Capades.

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005); Murderball (2005); The Aristocrats (2005)

August 11, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Documentary, Sports, Theatrical

DEUCE BIGALOW: EUROPEAN GIGOLO
*/****
starring Rob Schneider, Eddie Griffin, Til Schweiger, Jeroen Krabbé
screenplay by Rob Schneider and David Garrett & Jason Ward
directed by Mike Bigelow

MURDERBALL
**½/****
directed by Henry Alex Rubin & Dana Adam Shapiro

THE ARISTOCATS
**/****
directed by Paul Provenza & Penn Jillette

by Walter Chaw Oftentimes, as if in a freaky mescaline dream, I find myself defending in polite company Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, this story of an astonishingly ugly, balding little troll enlisted into the man-whore trade by myopic pimp T.J. (Eddie Griffin). Homophobic in a chiding, self-deprecating way, the picture has going for it a surprising tenderness that sees Deuce (Rob Schneider) demonstrating real humanity towards his disabled clients–finding him, for instance, taking a Tourette's Syndrome-stricken young lady to a ballgame, where her outbursts are cause for celebration. It also found Griffin, with his astonishing arsenal of insane euphemisms (twat-sicle, mangina, she-nis, he-pussy, and so on) delivered rat-a-tat with his manic, immaculate comic timing, crafting in frenetic T.J. a character with a penchant for savouring water-logged food and capped teeth that predict Hilary Duff's recent funhouse makeover. But most importantly, it had the benefit of Kate (Arija Bareikis) as Deuce's love interest: a beautiful, feminine, smart, funny woman who happens to be missing a leg. Disability is rarely, if ever, proudly on display in American cinema–funny to find it in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.

Million Dollar Baby (2004) [2-Disc Widescreen Edition] – DVD

July 28, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Sports

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Jay Baruchel
screenplay by Paul Haggis, based on stories from Rope Burns by F.X. Toole
directed by Clint Eastwood

Milliondollarbabycap

by Walter Chaw As a fighter, Clint Eastwood's boxing flick Million Dollar Baby telegraphs its punches, demonstrates some muddy footwork, and, when all's said and done, doesn't pack much of a wallop no matter how many roundhouses it throws to the rafters. It stretches for timelessness, which Eastwood seems to equate with poor lighting and a lack of coverage, and it casts Morgan Freeman in another one of those Morgan Freeman roles where he contextualizes, in his homey, lightly-accented basso profundo warmth, the life and times of the white iconoclast for whom he is the catalyzing agent and confidante (The Shawshank Redemption, Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Almighty, Clean and Sober). The picture has a framing story and a movie-long narration, two more ingredients in the neo-noir/American Gothic stew that Eastwood has continued to perpetuate long after his twin Americana triumphs A Perfect World and Unforgiven rendered the conversation–at least inasmuch as Eastwood is capable of carrying it–moot. Not to say that Million Dollar Baby is a total mutt, just that it's an obvious, self-important, overwritten thing designed to appeal to specific, stodgy, awards-season prestige audiences that love film so much, this will be the first movie they see this year.