maxlebow

This is a great film to see once. Acting by cast is always in the moment. Feelings evoked are operatic in scale, and humanely humble. Narration is authoritative, precise, and penetrating. The stories, by F.X. Toole, on which the film is based, richly reveal the true grit of human nature. The boxing is as good as that in Cinderella Man. That is good.

There three major characters in this film. Freeman, as Scrap, doubles as the narrator. Whenever he narrates, his voice brings authority, precision, and penetration to each and every word.

Eastwood, as Frankie, doubles as director, and writes much of the haunting score.

Swank, as Maggie, has to deal with a character not quite as finely-drawn as the heroine of Girl Fight, but she, like Eastwood, brings pathos to many scenes that require "doing nothing, very well." She reaches peaks of performance she aimed for in Boys Don't Cry. She brings authenticity to the role of Maggie, the poor girl struggling hard to overcome poverty.

They all earned Oscars for their work.

Some of the dialog in Million Dollar Baby is terse, telling, and subtly beautiful. For example, Scrap tells Frankie that people die every day thinking they never got their shot. It is a short speech, but worthy of the line of poetry about people leading lives of quiet desperation. It should remain in the living language for quite some time.

The film may suffer, however, from the rash decision by director Clint Eastwood, to shoot from what was essentially screen writer Paul Haggis' rough draft. On repeat viewing, some of the longer scenes that evoke true empathy the first time seem to drag. The whole work then becomes clunky and manipulative.

On the DVD, the bonus features are great!

Carl Reiner, as the interviewer, sets the scene, saying, "A plane landed at Idlewild." So, the sound track was probably taken from the recording released in 1961. JFK was still alive; his family were not naming things after him yet. So, the airport was still Idlewild, not Kennedy.

According to sources who have asked to remain nameless, citing their need to keep their real ages a secret, Mel Brooks, the 2000 Year Old Man himself, and Carl Reiner performed this little interview throughout the 1950s, but never recorded it.

I seem to remember reading somewhere, perhaps in The New Yorker Magazine, that the first recording took place at Reiner's home, sometime in the late 1950s. After dinner, Reiner turned on the tape recorder, walked the microphone over to Brooks – a dear friend and guest – and set the scene. Then he asked the first question...

I had the impression that the challenge was a new one for Brooks, but if my sources are correct, and they did predict that there would be no weapons of mass destruction, Brooks and Reiner had been through the routine many times before that fateful night.

Now, I have to ask, was that tape transcribed onto the record, or did the duo do it again for vinyl? I suspect they recorded it a few times. The reason is in a detail. In the review that appeared in The New York Times in 1975, when the animation on this video was first broadcast on the CBS television network, there is a quote: "I have 25,000 children...and not one of them ever writes!" In the video the quote is "I have 42,000 children ... and does even one of them ever come over to visit?" So, perhaps by the time Media Home Entertainment picked up the animation and marketed the version I have, in 1984, something changed. Who knows? Both versions of the joke are funny, unless you are sitting at home, in the dark, waiting for your kids to call or come over, in which case neither version is funny.

But seriously, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you don't look where you are going, fall in a hole, and die." Now, that's funny.

Although he was well-known in the recording industry, Tom Dowd's obituary rated only 712 words in The New York Times, and not much more than that in Rolling Stone Magazine, although Rolling Stone published a picture with it.

Few people outside the recording industry know much about what is shown in this documentary. However, Dowd's impact on the industry affected millions of fans of Eric Clapton, The Allman Brothers, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Tito Puente, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, and Phil Ramone. All of those artists appear in this documentary.

Dowd also recorded a host of others. The discography on the documentary's website, www.thelanguageofmusic.com, is huge.

In February, 2002, Dowd received a Grammy for his services to the recording industry. Eric Clapton said Dowd had encouraged him to realize "what my skills were." This documentary is supposed to fix the problem of Dowd's relative obscurity. Everyone who worked on it had the best of intentions. Dowd's smiling face and buoyant disposition are amiably represented. But in the end, the documentary leaves out a lot of interesting stuff, in order to keep the audience from getting bored. Also, the rhythm is off. Time and place seem to shift out from under the viewer.

Don't get me wrong, this is a documentary well worth watching. The music is GREAT! Just be prepared, after it's over, to want more.