Million Dollar Baby

Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood’s latest movie as a director has been getting more and more positive reviews recently and it is even better than Mystic River. At first glance, the film looks like another boxing-movie cliché. However, Eastwood has succeeded in creating a compelling and moving story about the intricate world of human relationships, the price of success and the realization of dreams. The movie explores many different subject matters. Million Dollar Baby is about friendship and respect. It is about love and it is about dreams.

A typical morning for me usually starts with my Apple IPhone going off, telling me to wake up. I get out of my warm bed, chose an outfit from my huge closet of clothes, brush my teeth, walk out of my nice house, get in my 2006 Lincoln LS, and head off to school. Never have I realized that people across the world don’t even know if they will bring money home to feed their children or send them to school. The documentary, Living on One Dollar, showed me the bigger picture of the world. In the movie, Zach Ingrasci, Chris Temple, Ryan Christoffersen, and Sean Leonard traveled to the small, poverty-stricken village of Peña Blanca for a few months. In the movie, the boys picked numbers between zero and nine out of a hat to replicate an unstable income. Whatever number they drew, was the pay the four of them received for the day. Peña Blanca has a population of 300 people. Of the 300, seven out of ten live below the poverty line. The Population of people under the poverty line can improve their quality of life if they worked together as a community instead of individually.

Sylvester Stallone, born to sever poverty, after seeing a heavyweight boxing fight, dreams up the idea for Rocky. The story of an underdog who gets a shot at the title. The conflict not being able to film the story with himself, playing the

I watched the movie seven pounds with Will Smith starring as the main character. The movie presents a phenomenal message and enables the audience to decide what is their purpose in life, and how it could change if their life suddenly changed drastically. In the movie seven pounds Will Smith, the character Ben Thomas was in a tragic accident, he caused while texting and driving that took seven lives, one in particular so happen to be his wife. Furthermore Ben's perspective on life changed. Three ethics portrayed in the movie kindness, justice, and compassion which Ben blessed upon seven people he encountered to overcome his guilt. Although Ben ignored the laws of man, and risked getting into trouble, he realized the lives of others were important and they needed help.

Cinderella Man was an incredibly magnificent and uplifting film that followed the life of the “Bulldog”, later entitled “Cinderella Man”, starring Russell Crowe as James J. Braddock, the American heavyweight boxer. Primarily, Cinderella Man embodies strength and willpower as once-undefeated heavyweight fighter, Braddock’s loses started to rapidly accumulate, so bad that he was released from his boxing contract and was merciless impeded from fighting. Correspondingly, deprived of work the bulldog began to undertake hard labor during the Great Depression to counterbalance myriad bills and overdue payments. Moreover, Braddock and his wife Mae together had three children to nourish. Correspondingly, years later, Joe Gould played by Paul Giamatti, was Braddock’s old boxing manager and contracted him one last concluding fight, which he won. Hence, the Bulldog started to train again and James J. Braddock was reborn after countless winning comebacks. Ultimately, Jimmy undergoes a fairy tale rise from a poor local fighter to the heavyweight-boxing champion of the world.

As a youthful child, I was prone to think that my family had to be the only one with obstacles, although, this changed dramatically after I watched the movie Parenthood. Because they are amazing at withholding his or her family problems, or at least they think they are, people put up a barrier to the outside world trying to show everyone how they are impeccable. The movie Parenthood really opens up our minds and proves to the frauds that faking perfection in life is not necessary. Besides, you cannot pick your family. They are your personal burden, and different personalities handle this responsibility individually.

Individuals often show kindness to shape their destiny, depending on how kindness is directed can change course of ones’ destiny. In the film Million Dollar Baby, director Clint Eastwood uses protectiveness and thoughtfulness to demonstrate ways in which a person uses kindness to determine their destiny. In the film Frankie appears to be a stubborn man, who is very self centered although this is not the case. Throughout the film his attitude begins to become clearer to the viewer and he becomes less skewed. His ultimate decision in the end of the film proves his true identity and shows how protectiveness and thoughtfulness has shaped his destiny. Often individuals use kindness to shape and alter their destiny either for, better or worse.

Coming of age is a popular theme in literature with many authors, directors, and musicians basing their work around it. They create works with the intent to examine our youth from different perspectives. Two great examples of this would be the film The Breakfast Club and novel The Perks of being a wallflower. Both show a realistic and relatable take on the lives of high schoolers, however I’d argue Breakfast Club better accomplishes this goal. The Breakfast Club takes each classic high school stereotype and grants the viewer some understanding as to who they really are beneath their label, compared to The perks of being a wallflower which performs poorly in trying to accurately portray high school life.

Boxing, an official sanctioned sport in the early 20th century, is a sport that is known as one of the most violent and physically demanding sports on the earth. Professional boxers that get paid to fight must be in top shape in order to preform at the highest level. Being a professional boxer is a tough life. Boxers train hard for many months leading up to one fight and either win, lose, knock out the opponent or even get knocked out. The sport has been around for centuries, but has most recently taken off over the last 100 years. It is a multibillion dollar industry with fighters taking home hundreds of thousands of dollars if not even millions of dollars for big matches. In his novel Papa Jack, Roberts tells the story of the famous African American boxer Jack Johnson. He details the boxers rise to fame and fortune and his downward spiral that would soon follow. In Papa Jack, Roberts displays life of a professional boxer through firsthand accounts with events that happened during Johnson’s life and shows how boxing not only influenced his life but also how he influenced the African American community.

Everyone has a dream to become someone significant one day, and would try to work his or her best to achieve that goal. Although the goal can take many years to achieve, but there are some people who are willing to work that hard for it even if it takes them 10,20,30 or 50 years. From the movie 20 Feet From Stardom by Morgan Neville, it shows how the struggles of back up singers. Many listeners have heard of their song thousands of time, they have been played on the radio, malls, and on television, but we never know what their names are, or how they look like. The title of this movie really define how back up singers are only a few feet away from fame, yet it takes them so much longer to be successful, or have other to know their name.

Million Dollar Baby is a film about loss, perseverance, and love. Through the heartbreak and trials of life, the film depicts characters having heart. The characters show heart in the film by rendering motivation, kindness and love. Scrap, Maggie, Frankie, and Danger all different characters are similar in that they have heart. They all show in various ways what it means to have heart and live life.

In the film Babies, 4 infants are being observed for the first two years of their lives. Each babies comes from different culture, which shows how the various customs can impact the child’s development. Ponijao is the youngest one in his family and lives in a village in Opuwo Namibia. Bayar lives in Bayanchandmachi, Mongolia. Mari is the first child of a couple who lives in Tokyo Japan, and Hattie lives in Sans Francisco California. The film shows the babies develop cognitively, physically and socially-emotionally, during the infancy and toddler years. The Infancy and toddlerhood period is from birth to 2 years. “This period brings dramatic changes in the body and brain that support the emergence of a wide array of motor, perceptual, and intellectual capacities” (Berk & Meyers, 2016, p.6).

In the movie Parenthood it is about just what you may think, family. In every one there are complications to maintaining a stable, happy home. There are times where you may think that you have lost control of your relationship and your own life. In this film, that is what it showcases. Reality. Life. Not everything is going to go the way you planned, thus causing you to think your whole world is coming down on you. The main points the director emphasized that caught my attention in this movie were adversity, denial and exhaustion.

She is also never cocky. Athletes, who are very good at their sport, normally become very full of themselves and think that they are superior to everyone else, but not Mary Jean. Even though she is one of the best runners in the United States, she doesn’t gloat about it. She always has a smile on her

For more than fifty years, Clint Eastwood has been actively defining and redefining cinema as an art form. His experiences as an actor on television and in film have greatly influenced his directing style. Across his films, Eastwood incorporates several issues and techniques that help the audience to identify said films with Eastwood's directorial style. Eastwood's aim in his films is to tell stories of the human experience. Francois Truffaut and Andrew Sarris have aimed to define the qualities that make a director an auteur whose works stand out above the rest. The qualities defined by Truffaut and Sarris can be seen in Eastwood films including Unforgiven (1992), Million Dollar Baby (2004), and Changeling (2008) and help to establish Eastwood as an auteur.