Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood 2004)
Posted on November 30 at 0.00, 1999 by Eric Mahleb
You have to give Eastwood credit for trying. One of the most powerful men in Hollywood, he could easily go down the easy road and direct one shallow commercial film after the next, a la Ron Howard.
Instead, he attempts to tackle difficult subject matters, keeps his camera steady and free of the fluff and superficiality that is so common today, and is known as an actor’s director, one who can bring out the best in Sean Penn or Tim Robbins. But while he tries hard, it seems at times that there is still inside him a more commercial director, one who tries to balance his desire to break the rules with a more innate desire to please, and perhaps to do well at the box office. This results in films that are torn, incomplete, ambivalent, wanting to be something but ending up being half of that only. Like a Spielberg finishing what a Kubrick started.
My vote: 
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One Response to “Million Dollar Baby”
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Letters from Iwo Jima - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
April 14, 2007 at 17.15[…] The problem I have with Letters from Iwo Jima is the same I had with Million Dollar Baby or Mystic River and with Haggis’s Crash. These films are only a semblance of what they claim to be. They pretend to depict a reality that in fact can only exist in a romanticized view of life. They pretend to deal with a certain harshness of life but can’t help burying this harshness under a pile of motivational speaker-type messages. They want to talk about the evil in the world but spend more time talking about the good. They are afraid to contemplate imperfection and only imperfection. They want to depict the average person’s suffering but only succeed in describing stereotypes and people whose personalities and actions make them stand outside of the norm. […]