So last week I taped Million Dollar Baby on HBO. It was on too late to stay up & watch, and it isn’t on our digital cables HBO On-Demand yet.
This afternoon Mrs. Beitz & I curled up on the couch & watched it. We saw the movie until the part where Eastwood tells her that he’s going to honor her request and disconnect her breathing tube and give her a shot.
And then…
D’OH!!!:smack:
I recorded it in SP mode. The movie was longer than 2 hours! The tape had run out!!
My wife is irate at me, and we both want to know what happened!! How did it end?
It’s been a while since I saw it, so I might forget something important or get things slightly out of sequence.
He does it. Before he does, he lets know what the Gaelic nickname he gave her means: “My heart,” or “my blood.” My darling. Things get very blurry and hard to make out after that. (That might have just been me.)
Morgan Freeman’s character concludes the narration in the form of a letter he’s written to Frank’s estranged daughter. “Just thought you’d like to know what kind of a man your father really was,” and all that. He tells her that he’s dropped out of sight and nobody knows where he’s gone. He’ll never train another fighter. During this V.O., we see that he’s gone back to the greasy spoon cafe that attracted his eye earlier – I think the idea is that he bought it and lived quietly, if not happily, ever after. Either that or he just liked the pie.
By the by, the entire ending plot would never have happened. She could have had medical treatment withdrawn at any time. Additionally, her leg would not have been amputated.
Are you sure about that? I thought there were people being kept alive against their will even today. And I thought that Catholic hospitals banned all euthanasia, even that requested by a patient with a hopeless diagnosis (and Hilary Swank’s character wasn’t even terminal). I don’t know whether she was even in a Catholic hospital, but it’s something to consider.
Right. Catholic Hospitals won’t kill you (no legitimate care provider in this country would). However, Catholics are not obligated to extend their lives as long as possible. We don’t have to, for example, take medicine to prolong life just for the sake of prolonging life. What the hospital could not do was refuse care if the patient wanted it, nor could they advocate giving her the adrenaline (deliberately killing her).
Plus, the young dorky doofus, who was beaten senseless earlier by the other boxers, shows back up, and tells Freeman that he still wants to box, and will not quit. Freeman agrees to train him.
Also, while Eastwood is carrying out the euthanasia, there are lingering shots of Swank’s character that highlight the Christian cross pendant laying on her upper chest and forcibly underline the film’s not-very-subtle religious themes.
(Sorry about the snark. The movie has sunk a bit in my estimation after my first viewing.)
No, the kid is mentally incompetant and simply has no place to go. Freeman continues to humour him, like he’d been humoured all along, so he would be sheltered and feel like he belonged somewhere. It’s just, you know, compassion. The asshole who so brutally disillusioned him was now persona non grata.
It would be stupid for firehouses to train young people with severe Down’s syndome to be firefighters, but it’s not uncommon to find such folks hanging about doing “important work,” in uniform and everything.
The part that bothered me most about the movie was the way The Blue Bear fought dirty. Every fight she was so dirty she would have been disqualified and banned from boxing. This was unnecessary. Lucia Rijker could do that to Hilary Swank in real life in a clean fight.
I see. Thanks, Larry. I must have remembered wrong. Actually, I thought Freeman letting him back was pretty forced and ignorant, anyway. I never got that the kid was literally “retarded,” I thought he was just incredibly stupid, and thus found the character unrealistic.
Mo Cuislea, the nickname he gives her, is Irish for “My darling”
We have loads of these here, but we run them all into one word, so “Mo Cuislea” ends up sounding like “m’cushla” which is why I didnt catch what he was calling her all along :smack:
Other examples are “Mo Craicean” or as we say, “M’crakin” which translates as “My skin”, something you would say to a close friend.
And also, although I’ve never heard its proper pronunciation, sometimes people you respect are called “m’hud”, pronounced “Mudd”. See?
