My Turn as a Movie Critic

Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education with the much-acclaimed Mexican actor, Gael Garcia Bernal, didn't catch my attention like his previous works (2002's Talk to Her, 1999's All About My Mother, 1990's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, etc.), nor like Bernal's previous works (which include 2004's Motorcycle Diaries - which I haven't seen yet but anticipate viewing very soon, 2002's The Crime of Father Amaro, 2001's Y Tu Mama Tambien, and 2000's Amores Perros). A very human element seemed to be missing, which is always so captivating in Almodovar's films. Even while he is directing a piece that is so twisted and out of the ordinary scope of your everyday person, he manages to keep their humanity intact.

In Bad Education, Bernal plays a character for whom the audience doesn't develop a very close relationship by the end. When the movie starts out and he is appealing to an old childhood friend for an acting gig in the friend's next movie production, you want to believe in his earnestness, in his desire to do well, and in his acting ability. However, when you finally realize who he really is and what he has done to get to this point in his life, the only faith you have left is in his acting ability. This is a movie about the very baseness of the human condition, the dark side of the soul that you take pains not to examine.

You continuously want to believe the people on the screen are basically good people, people who are well-intentioned despite things ending badly. However, Almodovar paints just the opposite picture: people are destined to be bad, with intentions or possibilities that look good from the outset but aren't really. People just aren't what they seem.

Somehow I think I managed the most amount of sympathy for the child-molesting priest and Bernal's childhood friend, the Director, which is a kind of tongue-in-cheek when you think about the moral depravity normally associated with child molestors and Hollywood types.

What I enjoyed most about this movie was Bernal's acting. He is simply an amazing actor, with a barely concealed sexuality about him and a penchant for taking on provacative roles. I haven't seen him play a character yet that doesn't truly enthrall the viewer, whether for good, bad, or ugly.

Then I saw Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which has Clint up for for a Best Actor and Achievement in Directing Academy Award, Morgan Freeman up for a Best Supporting Actor, Hillary Swank up for a Best Actress, Joel Cox up for Achievement in Film Editing, and itself up for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Motion Picture.

First of all, my opinion of the Academy Awards is very low, if not nearly nonexistant, but somehow every year my dislike of the Academy becomes murkily entangled with my love of movies and I spend four or five hours watching some of the worst programming on television, only to see the truly deserving nominees lose and the Academy finally give credit where credit is due, only for a completely sub-par role or sub-par movie. It's tradition.

And it will be no different this year. While I agree that Freeman, Eastwood and Swank are all gifted actors, I didn't fully revel in this movie. Granted, Vandra sobbed uncontrollably from about midway through the movie all the way until fifteen minutes past the ending, constantly penetrating the silence of the audience with a good nose-blowing that could wake an entire fraternity at 6AM on a Saturday morning...BUT I thought that the movie was missing some key dialogue in the first half to keep it totally on an Academy Award level.

From the previews, we all know the plot: Clint Eastwood plays an aging trainer who has a terrible, if not nonexistant, relationship with his own daughter and Hillary Swank is looking for a trainer. After some initial difficulties (i.e. "I don't train girls," and "Girly, tough ain't enough"), Eastwood finally agrees to take on Swank and she goes on to enjoy some success in the boxing ring. We all know this relationship somehow turns into a substitute father/daughter relationship that both characters need, but we are not prepared for the twist at the height of Swank's career.

I think what I felt through the first half of the movie was that I was being led somewhere all too familiar, with the underdog, I-don't-get-enough-love-at-home-and-I've-adopted-you-as-my-new-daddy-you-don't-have-no-one-to-love-anyway kind of a story. Morgan Freeman only helped emphasize that by playing a retired boxer who keeps up Eastwood's gym and serves as the mediator between Swank's character and Eastwood's character, before they finally start training together, and also as the narrator. Freeman, and especially Swank, are so g0sh-darn loveable, with nary a character flaw, that I find them both fairly flat and difficult to digest (the critic that I am) all throughout the first half of the film.

Then there's Eastwood's character. He's supposed to undergo some sort of major character transformation by the end, finally allowing himself to love someone like family, but I just don't buy into it. I think a lot of my reserve here has to do with the fact that the film keeps intimating that something terrible happened between him and his daughter that forever altered his life (i.e. "A man doesn't go to church everyday for 20 years if he hasn't done something wrong"), but the film never lets on what that is.

The turning point occurs at the height of Swank's career, as I said before, and this is where the movie actually starts to get interesting, and the characters formulate some depth. It is here where the actual movie lies. Up to this point, if I were to give it a rating of 1 to 5 stars (with 1 being "I hate it," 2 being "I didn't like it," 3 being "I liked it," 4 being "I really liked it," and 5 being "I loved it"), the film would get a lukewarm 3 (really, who doesn't like an underdog??!). Yet once we reach the turning point, where things don't go as the Director seems to be leading you to believe they will go, this is where my "Ah-ha!" factor goes up.

I now understand the Academy nods. It isn't your typical sports movie. The underdog doesn't always go on to overcome all the tragedies in his/her life and, just like in real life, movies don't always have to have happy endings. I think this is what I am starting to treasure the most in movies - that is to say, the movie that adheres to real life, real conclusions, real sorrows and real happiness. Sometimes the biggest heroes in life are just the ones who triumph in the face of adversity. Life isn't all saccharine sweet. And neither is this movie.