[ThisWeek] Million Dollar Baby at the Kenworthy

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre-

Million Dollar Baby (PG13)
Friday, May 27
7:00 PM
Saturday & Sunday, May 28 & 29
4:00 and 7:00 PM
$5 adults, $2 children 12 and under
KFS passes accepted for Sunday shows
(See Review below)
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy-

Schultze Gets the Blues (PG)
Friday, June 3
7:00 PM
Saturday & Sunday
June 4 & 5, 4:15 & 7:00 PM
* * *

June at the Kenworthy-

The Upside of Anger (R)
June 10, 7:00 PM
June 11 & 12, 4:15 & 7:00 PM

Dear Frankie (PG13)
June 17, 7:00 PM & 9:30 PM
June 19, 4:30 & 7:00 PM

Wonderworks presents
Cool Cat
by Elizabeth Eagles, with music by Dan Bukvich
Saturday, June 18
7:30 PM
Tickets- $6 adults, children under 3 years are free

Melinda & Melinda (PG13)
June 24, 7:00 PM
June 25, 4:45/7:00/9:15 PM
June 26, 4:45 & 7:00 PM

Summer Matinee Series
Wednesdays
Coming in June-

Shrek (PG)
Wednesday, June 15
1:00 PM & 3:15 PM

Spongebob Squarepants (PG)
Wednesday, June 22
1:00 & 3:15 PM

Fat Albert (PG)
Wednesday, June 29
1:00 & 3:15 PM

Wednesday matinee prices:  $4/adult, $1/child 12 or younger

Thanks to the following Wednesday matinee sponsors:
Insty Prints & North Idaho Athletic Club, Tom & JoAnn Trail, U.S. Bank,
Wells Fargo Bank


Coming in July: Ala Zingara, Racing Stripes, Millions, Two Brothers

Regular Movie prices:  $5 adult, $2 child 12 or younger.
Wednesday matinee prices:  $4/adult, $1/child 12 or younger
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
For more information, call 208-882-4127 or visit http://www.kenworthy.org
* * *

This week¹s review-

Million Dollar Baby

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, and Morgan Freeman
Running Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Rated PG-13: It has some very brutal fight scenes and some salty gym-rat
language. Plus, the third act theme (the main theme in ³The Sea Inside²)
generated a lot of heated debate.
Academy Awards: Morgan Freeman (Best Actor in a Supporting Role), Best
Picture, Clint Eastwood (Directing), Hillary Swank (Best Actress in a
Leading Role)


As reviewed by A. O. Scott writing for the New York Times

Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" is the best movie released by a major
Hollywood studio in 2004, and not because it is the grandest, the most
ambitious or even the most original. On the contrary: it is a quiet,
intimately scaled three-person drama directed in a patient, easygoing style,
without any of the displays of allusive cleverness or formal gimmickry that
so often masquerade as important filmmaking these days.

At first glance the story, about a grizzled boxing trainer whose hard heart
is melted by a spunky young fighter, seems about as fresh as a well-worn gym
shoe. This is a Warner Brothers release, and if it were not in color (and if
the young fighter in question were not female), "Million Dollar Baby," with
its open-hearted mixture of sentiment and grit, might almost be mistaken for
a picture from the studio's 1934 lineup that was somehow mislaid for 70
years. 

Which is not to say that Mr. Eastwood, who is of Depression-era vintage
himself (who will soon be 75), is interested in nostalgia, or in the
self-conscious quotation of a bygone cinematic tradition, or even in
simplicity for its own sake. With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its
visual thrift and its emotional directness, "Million Dollar Baby" feels at
once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same
time has nothing in particular to prove.

Mr. Eastwood treats the conventions of the boxing-movie genre, its measured
alternations of adversity and redemption, like the chord changes to a
familiar song - the kind of standard that can, in the hands of a deft and
sensitive musician, be made to yield fresh meanings and unexpected
reservoirs of deep and difficult emotion.

Mr. Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, the owner of a tidy, beat-up gym tucked
away in a shabby corner of Los Angeles. His best friend, who supplies
world-weary voiceover narration to help the plot through its occasional
thickets, is Eddie Dupris, (Morgan Freeman) a former fighter (nicknamed
Scrap) whom Frankie managed long ago.

Both men carry some heavy frustration and regret - Frankie has lost a
daughter, Scrap has lost an eye - but they bear the weight gracefully and
with good-humored fatalism, reconciled to loneliness and the diminishing
returns of age. 

Frankie is the latest in a lengthening line of crusty old-timers Mr.
Eastwood has played since he became eligible for AARP membership. Perhaps no
American actor besides Gene Hackman has ripened with such relish, becoming
more fully and complicatedly himself as he grows older.

As a director, Mr. Eastwood's innate toughness has mellowed into a sinewy
grace, and as an actor his limitations have become a source of strength.
When, late in "Million Dollar Baby," Frankie sheds tears, the moment brings
a special pathos, not only because we're unaccustomed to seeing Mr. Eastwood
cry, but also because we might have doubted that he had it in him.

Frankie, a gifted professional whose timidity - he prefers to think of it as
common sense - has kept him away from the big time, receives a second chance
in the unlikely person of Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank, in her best
performance since "Boys Don't Cry"), a waitress who shows up at his gym and
won't take no for an answer. Frankie insists that he doesn't train girls,
and since Maggie is already 30, she's too old to have much chance for glory
in any case. But her combination of eagerness and discipline (and Scrap's
quiet expertise at manipulating his buddy's few remaining heartstrings) wear
down Frankie's resistance, and he and Maggie are soon embarked on a classic
underdog's journey toward triumph.

Or so we are led to believe. Midway through the movie, after Frankie and
Maggie have had a frustrating visit with her unpleasant family back home in
Missouri, Mr. Eastwood ends a calm, relatively unimportant scene by fading
to black - a subtle, simple and chilling harbinger of the greater darkness
to come.

Mr. Eastwood's universe is, as ever, a violent and unforgiving place, in
which the only protections against nihilism are the professional regulation
of brutality (in this case by the sweet science of boxing) and the mutual
obligations of friendship. Mr. Eastwood is unusual among American filmmakers
not only for his pessimism, but also for his disinclination to use romantic
love as either a dramatic motive or as a source of easy comfort. The
question of sex never arises between Frankie and Maggie, and while there is
abundant love in "Million Dollar Baby," it is entirely paternal, filial and
brotherly. It is also severely tested by circumstances and proves to be at
once a meager and a necessary compensation for the cruel operations of fate.

It seems fortuitous that Frankie is an admirer of William Butler Yeats, who
in his later years developed a style of unadorned, disillusioned eloquence
and produced some of his greatest poems: lyrics that are simple, forceful
and not afraid of risking cliché. Late in the film, in his darkest hour,
Frankie reads from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," the younger Yeats's
pastoral dream of flight and transformation, a choice that makes sense in
context.

Mr. Eastwood himself, though, is closer to the sensibility of a late poem
like "The Circus Animals' Desertion," whose famous image of "the foul
rag-and-bone shop of the heart" might describe Frankie's gym. Or there is
this stanza, from one of Yeats's "Last Poems," called "The Apparitions,"
which seems to me to capture the paradoxical spirit, at once generous and
mournful, of this old master, Mr. Eastwood, and his new masterpiece:


As reviewed by Mick LaSalle writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

"Million Dollar Baby," the latest from Clint Eastwood, is about an old
trainer who takes on a female boxer. Just saying that, of course, conjures
up a host of images, most of them cliches, from every boxing movie ever
made. But "Million Dollar Baby" is not a conventional boxing movie or even a
conventional sports movie. Its concerns and ambitions are in a completely
different direction.

Part of what makes this film different is the story, which can't be talked
about in detail without damaging the first experience of it. Other elements
can be discussed -- for one thing, the movie's fablelike quality, which
fully emerges only days after seeing it. "Million Dollar Baby" ages well in
memory because it gradually seems to mean more. Its meaning can't be summed
up in a sentence, but it has to do with a view of life as inexpressibly sad
and yet always right.

This is an old man's view, and it reminded me, not of anything from another
movie, but of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, the part in which Lincoln, looking
back on the bloodbath of the Civil War and anticipating more carnage to
come, quoted Psalms: "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous
altogether." Lincoln wasn't an old man, just an old soul, but the trainer is
an old man, and so is Eastwood. The weight of years is in "Million Dollar
Baby, " technically, artistically and philosophically. It has the gloom and
transcendence of an old man's wisdom.


As reviewed by Jon Niccum, Entertainment Editor for the Lawrence (KS)
Journal-World

"It's the latest freak show out there," explains Frankie Dunn (Clint
Eastwood), for why he refuses to train a female boxer and why she shouldn't
have any trouble finding someone else who will.

The fact that he believes the 31-year-old Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank)
is too old for the sport doesn't help matters. But the moonlighting waitress
won't take no for an answer.

Repeatedly working into the wee hours at Frankie's Hit Pit Gym gains Maggie
an ally: Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman), a former contender who
now manages the place. Under Eddie's prodding, Frankie caves and decides to
help sculpt this new fighter into a champion.

"Million Dollar Baby" is a movie fully removed from the trite trappings of
the sports genre. This film is a dramatic powerhouse, thanks to a jarring
third act that explores themes far darker than "overcoming adversity" or
"going the distance."

Four-time Oscar nominee Eastwood gives one of his finest performances. The
74-year-old legend (who also directs) is more craggy voiced and
confrontational than ever. Some of his choicest moments are the smaller
ones, whether he's engaging in antagonistic conversations about religion
with his long-suffering priest (Brian O'Byrne) or scolding the hazy-eyed
Eddie about the holes in his socks.

Fellow Oscar veteran Swank is restrained in a role that could be played as
flashy. She renders Maggie as a person who is -- outside of boxing -- fairly
unexceptional. Her very averageness grants the heroine credibility.
Moreover, the actress really looks comfortable (and formidable), whether
pummeling a heavy bag or decking an opponent.

No body doubles needed here.

As with Eastwood's been-through-it-all-before character, there's a lived-in
feel to the movie. Every locale has a slightly dilapidated quality, and the
picture's somber colors conjure the gritty feel of '70s indie cinema. But
Eastwood also revels in light and dark extremes. There are enough shots of
people half-obscured in shadows to fill a film noir from the '40s.

In the early narration, Freeman intones, "Boxing is an unnatural sport.
Everything about it is backward. Sometimes the best way to deliver a punch
is to step back."

That certainly applies to the subtle "Million Dollar Baby." Sometimes the
best way to deliver a cinematic punch is to step back.


Film reviews researched and edited by Peter A. Haggart
* * *

Kenworthy Film Society Passes on sale

Kenworthy Film Society pass prices will increase on July 1 to $30 for a
10-punch card and $75 for a $30-punch card.
That's still only $3.00 and $2.50 per movie, respectively -- the best deal
on movies in Moscow.

Why are prices increasing?  Specifically, because the cost of film shipping
has increased. 
Generally, because the cost of doing business has increased.

Passes can be purchased at the current prices through June 30, 2005, so get
yours now.
Passes are available at BookPeople and at the Kenworthy box office during
regular showtimes.

Thanks for your continued support of independent and foreign films on the
Palouse!
* * *
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org

To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
http://www.kenworthy.org


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/thisweek/attachments/20050525/d451f86c/attachment.htm