PRICELESS MILLION DOLLAR BABIES

A reader who wrote earlier that the right-wing media has tried to sabotage "Million Dollar Baby" by giving away the ending sends this message:

I sent a copy of my comments about the Weekly Standard article on "Million Dollar Baby" to a friend whose brother's neck was broken in a classic diving board/swimming pool accident 20 years ago and who is now a quadriplegic. She had seen the movie, and it hit her hard -- she said she sobbed uncontrollably during the latter part. I thought you might be interested in her response to the film as well as to the right-wing attacks on it.

She wrote him that conservative efforts would backfire and actually boost the movie's popularity just as the Catholic Church's banned-book list helped sell books during the '50s and '60s. Further, since "Million Dollar Baby" has already won the Oscar for best picture, conservatives can't hurt it. More important, she added this powerful note:

I love the way people without experience expound on [the immorality of helping someone die]. Though some quadrapalegics may be living satisfying lives, I don't know any of them. My brother tries to keep up a good front, but it takes him five hours to get up, another five to get into bed -- even with range of motion exercises, etc. -- that is, when an aide shows up to help him. That leaves him about three good hours in each day. He often sleeps in his chair if the night aide doesn't show. He has no control over his bowels, so has to have someone help him go to the bathroom once a week and often has accidents (lots of integrity there). After 20 years post-injury, my brother often cannot sleep at night due to his spasms, because he refuses to take the high dose of Valium prescribed to help him sleep. He is petrified to go into a home, as he fears the treatment he would receive. Believe me, it is no way to live.

She also notes defiantly, "If he had had a leg amputated and such terrible bed sores, and began biting his tongue trying to kill himself [as the Maggie does in the movie], I would consider finding a way to help him."

Meantime, shifting gears to "shallow and satirical," Matt Haber of Low Culture has posted details of the sequel "2 Million Dollar Baby." Be prepared to laugh.

March 7, 2005 9:13 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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