Million Dollar Misdirection

The furor over a controversial plot twist in Clint Eastwood’s new film, Million Dollar Baby, is just the latest example of shrill right-wing protestors trying to impose their own values system on everyone else, says Frank Rich. But who would ever have thought that Eastwood – a man’s man if ever Hollywood had one – would find himself targeted in such a manner? “What really makes these critics hate Million Dollar Baby is not its supposedly radical politics – which are nonexistent – but its lack of sentimentality. It is, indeed, no Rocky, and in our America that departure from the norm is itself a form of cultural radicalism. Always a sentimental country, we’re now living fulltime in the bathosphere.”