Double Feature: The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby

Whoa. After seeing these two films, the parking bill at the Grove was $9...seven hours! All right, we got there early, since the Grove is a nightmare and sat in a bit of Closer - which looked great...especially Clive Owen....in between the Aviator and Million Dollar Baby.

The Aviator started off strong - it was exciting to watch charming, young, Leo-depicted Howard Hughes trying to buy his way into Hollywood and into the airline industry. He charms the women, charms his coworkers, charms nearly everyone except Louie B. Meyer. But like many biopics, it grows slow and I got rather tired of it during the 3rd Act. The two other major problems were that I couldn't buy Leo as a 40 something year old towards the end...and his whole OCD thing was rather annoying. I felt like shaking him and saying: get over yourself, you kook! This film was Scorcese trying to make a Citizen Kane...too bad for him that film was already made. If he gets an Oscar, it's simply the one they owe him from Raging Bull....which brings us to...

Million Dollar Baby, the film I was more excited about seeing. This movie, much, much smaller in scale, was one of the darkest films I've seen in a long time...both the cinematography and the subject. This movie starts sad and gets sadder. It gets great as Hillary Swank not so much charms Clint into training her, but just insists upon it...finally they get together and we follow this female boxing story, turned into daughter-father tale.

In front of me, a 50 year old man watching the film by himself, was weeping by the end. Clint has something to say the human existence, which he sees as an essential tradegy with outbursts of extreme violence, an existence that cannot be explained through religion and faith, but only through a Kantian-esque ideal of the "categorical imperative," whereby the individual behaves as he thinks the rest of the world ought to. But there is even more than that, something one might want to call the heroic exception - where a single man is asked to go above and beyond his fellow man for a conception of right...maybe more along the lines of the Nietzchean uber man. I'm not sure. I need to brush up on my ethics.

His filmmaking is a bit old fashioned, although I love the cinematography...which is dark, dark, dark...and the single image of silhouetted Clint with Hillary punching the bag beats the shit out of any of Scorcese's crazy camera work and movement, in my humble opinion...Something about the silhouette of Clint, his body, slumping a bit with age, but still solid, with the shape of post-John Wayne maniliness, standing there, invisible...to me, is extraordinarily powerful.

Lastly, there is Morgan Freeman, perhaps the only living actor to be able to do voice over exactly how they don't teach us in film school...saying exactly what we are seeing and it still is mesmorizing. There is something so digified about Morgan, even as he cleans up toilets, and he might be the only one who can literally share the screen with Clint.

But I didn't love this film. It's not about me. It's about this east coast Irish sensibility, maybe even sentimentality, which I find appealing, but doesn't touch me the way some other films this year have - Sideways and Collateral, to name a couple.

Regardless, I'm glad Clint Eastwood is 75, directing, starring, producing, and composing films.