During the 20 seasons of the show, Aniston and her female co-stars each earned $1 million per episode, making them the highest-paid TV actresses of all time. She won an Emmy in 2002 and a Golden Globe in 2003. Toole Producers: Albert S.From 1994 to 2004, she starred as Rachel Green on the long-running sitcom Friends, a role that turned Jennifer Aniston into a household name (and the basis of a popular haircut). Pictures presents in association with Lakeshore EntertainmentA Malpaso/Ruddy Morgan production Credits: Director-music: Clint Eastwood Screenwriter: Paul Haggis Based on Rope Burns by: F.X. Tom Stern's cinematography is straightforward in muted colors as the film plays nicely with light and shadows. Similarly, Eastwood's music (orchestrated by Lennie Niehaus) is paired down, often to a lonesome guitar that reflects the characters' melancholy. Once he gets the emotional impact he's after, he cuts and moves quickly on. Director Eastwood keeps individual scenes simple and quick, like Maggie's fights.
The film is told in a voice-over narration by Scrap in which the poetry and homilies are a bit self-conscious. When he finally does agree to a title fight, his worst fears are confirmed. Thus, he never puts his boxers into title fights, which drives them to managers who will. He tells all his fighters to protect themselves, but what he really wants to protect is himself. What happened to Scrap has made Frankie overly cautious. Frankie can never forgive himself for not finding a way to stop the brutal bout, and Scrap knows how quickly Frankie would fall apart were he to ever leave. Frankie was cutman on Scrap's last fight, where he lost an eye. Similarly, Frankie and Scrap bicker like an old married couple, yet beneath the surface is a compelling symbiosis. Clearly, Maggie becomes the daughter Frankie lacks, but theirs is a combative relationship in which they are never on the same page until the end. Otherwise, Million Dollar Baby is a three-character drama.
Maggie's trailer-trash family threatens to overwhelm the movie with cliches. Jay Baruchel stands out as a mentally challenged man with delusions of becoming a boxer. Here the story takes an abrupt turn into tragedy that forces the two to confront the true meaning of love and the strange way fate can deliver redemption. The rocky road taken by fighter and trainer leads to a championship match. When Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank), an emotionally scared hillbilly, asks him to train her, his answer is curt: At 31, she is too old, and he doesn't train "girlies." Nonetheless, she works out at his gym for a year, getting occasional tips from Scrap, before wearing Frankie down to where he grudgingly takes her on. He attends Mass nearly every day but does so mostly to argue with the exasperated priest (Brian O'Byrne). Frankie is not on good terms with God, either. gym, surrounded by fighters and Scap (Freeman), an ex-boxer who runs the place. Estranged from his only daughter - the movie never gets to the bottom of how he earned her scorn - he holes up in his downtown L.A. Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) is an emotionally closed, sour individual.
It is the force of the personality Eastwood, Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman bring to these gym rats that causes them to emerge as convincing archetypes in a story of almost mystical heroism. What one must get used to is a writing style that favors stereotypes and familiar plots. Paul Haggis' screenplay is drawn from a story in "Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner," a collection of short stories based on the experiences of longtime cutman and fight manager Jerry Boyd, writing at age 70 under the pen name of F.X. While the film should achieve above-average results in urban markets, critical reaction and possible Oscar nominations may add substantially to the boxoffice. The film lacks the propulsive energy of Mystic River, which, after all, was a crime tale, and the story rarely leaves the gym or boxing ring. Million Dollar Baby may appeal to a narrower range of moviegoers than the usual Eastwood film. Under Eastwood's painstakingly stripped-down direction - his filmmaking has become the cinematic equivalent of Hemingway's spare though precise prose - the story emerges as that rarest of birds, an uplifting tragedy.
On the surface, the film is a simple boxing story about a hellcat from the Ozarks and the grizzled Irish Catholic trainer who takes her on. Encouraged by the positive reaction to Mystic River, Clint Eastwood continues his exploration of the tragic side of human existence in Million Dollar Baby, a film that enters a murky area of the soul where a man can hide out from his God even as he seeks His mercy.