Eastwood is tops in my book!
Toochis
--- Kirby McDaniel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The New York Times
> February 13, 2005
> FRANK RICH
> How Dirty Harry Turned Commie
>
> THE day the left died in Hollywood, surely, was the
> day that a few too
> many Queer Eyes had their way with Michael Moore as
> he set off on his
> Oscar campaign. The baseball cap and 1970's leisure
> ensemble gave way
> to quasi-Libeskind eyeglasses and spiky hair that
> screamed "I am worthy
> of a cameo on 'Entourage.' " But not worthy of an
> Oscar. "Fahrenheit
> 9/11" got zero nominations, leaving the Best Picture
> race to five
> apolitical movies. Since none of those five has yet
> sold $100 million
> worth of tickets, let alone the $350-million-plus of
> a "Lord of the
> Rings"-level megahit, the only real drama accruing
> to this year's Oscar
> telecast was whether its ratings would plunge as low
> as the Golden
> Globes.
>
> But two weeks out from the big night, the prospects
> for a little
> conflict are looking up. Just when it seemed that
> Hollywood had turned
> a post-election page in the culture wars, the
> commissars of the right
> cooked up a new, if highly unlikely, grievance
> against "Holly-weird,"
> as they so wittily call it. This was no easy task.
> They couldn't
> credibly complain that "The Passion of the Christ"
> was snubbed by the
> movie industry's "elite" (translation: Jews), since
> it nailed three
> nominations, including one for makeup (translation:
> really big noses).
> That showing bested not only "Fahrenheit 9/11" but
> "Shrek 2," the
> year's top moneymaker. Nor could they resume
> hostilities against their
> perennial bogeymen Ben Affleck, Susan Sarandon, Sean
> Penn, Barbra
> Streisand and Whoopi Goldberg. All are nonplayers in
> this year's
> awards.
>
> So what do you do? Imagine SpongeBob tendencies in
> the carefully
> sanitized J. M. Barrie of "Finding Neverland"?
> Attack a recently
> deceased American legend, Ray Charles, for demanding
> that his mistress
> get an abortion in "Ray"? No, only a
> counterintuitive route could work.
> Hence, the campaign against Clint Eastwood, a former
> Republican
> officeholder (Mayor of Carmel, Calif., in the late
> 1980's), Nixon
> appointee to the National Council of the Arts and
> action hero whose
> breakthrough role in the Vietnam era was as a
> vigilante cop, Dirty
> Harry, whom Pauline Kael famously called "fascist."
> There hasn't been a
> Hollywood subversive this preposterous since the
> then 10-year-old
> Shirley Temple's name surfaced at a House
> Un-American Activities
> Committee hearing in 1938.
>
> No matter. Rush Limbaugh used his radio megaphone to
> inveigh against
> the "liberal propaganda" of "Million Dollar Baby,"
> in which Mr.
> Eastwood plays a crusty old fight trainer who takes
> on a fledgling
> "girl" boxer (Hilary Swank) desperate to be a champ.
> Mr. Limbaugh
> charged that the film was a subversively encoded
> endorsement of
> euthanasia, and the usual gang of ayotallahs chimed
> in. Michael Medved,
> the conservative radio host, has said that "hate is
> not too strong a
> word" to characterize his opinion of "Million Dollar
> Baby." Rabbi
> Daniel Lapin, a longtime ally of the Christian
> right, went on MSNBC to
> accuse Mr. Eastwood of a cultural crime comparable
> to Bill Clinton
> having "brought the term 'oral sex' to America's
> dinner tables."
>
> "What do you have to give these people to make them
> happy?" Mr.
> Eastwood asked when I phoned to get his reaction to
> his new status as a
> radical leftist. He is baffled that those "who
> expound from the right
> on American values" could reject a movie about a
> heroine who is
> "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to
> work hard and
> persevere no matter what" to realize her dream.
> "That all sounds like
> Americana to me, like something out of Wendell
> Willkie," he says. "And
> the villains in the movie include people who are
> participating in
> welfare fraud."
>
> What galls the film's adversaries - or so they say -
> is a turn in the
> plot that they started giving away on the radio and
> elsewhere in
> December, long before it started being mentioned in
> articles like the
> one you're reading now. They hoped to "spoil" the
> movie and punish it
> at the box office, though there's no evidence that
> they have succeeded.
> As Mr. Eastwood has pointed out, advance knowledge
> of the story's
> ending did nothing to deter the audience for "The
> Passion of the
> Christ." My own experience is that knowing the
> ultimate direction of
> "Million Dollar Baby" - an organic development that
> in no way resembles
> a plot trick like that in "The Sixth Sense" - only
> deepened my second
> viewing of it.
>
> Here is what so scandalously intrudes in the final
> third of Mr.
> Eastwood's movie: real life. A character we love -
> and we love all
> three principals, including the narrator, an old
> boxing hand played by
> Morgan Freeman - ends up in the hospital with a
> spinal-cord injury and
> wants to die. Whether that wish will be granted, and
> if so, how, is the
> question that confronts not just the leading
> characters but also a
> young and orthodox Roman Catholic priest (Brian F.
> O'Byrne). The
> script, adapted by Paul Haggis from stories by F. X.
> Toole, has a
> resolution, as it must. But the movie has a powerful
> afterlife
> precisely because it is not an endorsement of any
> position on assisted
> suicide - or, for that matter, of any position on
> the disabled, as some
> disability-rights advocates have charged in a
> separate protest. The
> characters of "Million Dollar Baby" are complex and
> fictional, not
> monochromatic position papers outfitted in costumes,
> and the film no
> more endorses their fallible behavior and attitudes
> than "Ray" approves
> of its similarly sympathetic real-life hero's heroin
> addiction and
> compulsive womanizing.
>
> "I never thought about the political side of this
> when making the
> film," Mr. Eastwood says. He is both bemused and
> concerned that a movie
> with no political agenda should be construed by some
> as a polemic and
> arouse such partisan rage. "Maybe I'm getting to the
> age when I'm
> starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but
> people are so angry
> now," he adds. "You used to be able to disagree with
> people and still
> be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and
> everyone who believes
> differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both
> on the right and
> the left." His own politics defy neat
> categorization. He's supported
> Democrats (including Gray Davis in the
> pre-Schwarzenegger era) as well
> as Republicans, professes the libertarian creed of
> "less government"
> and "was never a big enthusiast for going to Iraq
> but never spoke
> against it once the troops were there." In other
> words, he's in the
> same middle as most Americans. "I vote for what I
> like,"
=== message truncated ===
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