Million Dollar Baby (DVD)

Academy Award-winning drama directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), a down-on-his-luck former boxing manager, runs a small gym in downtown Los Angeles. One day, Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) enters Frankie's gym and announces she needs a trainer. Frankie doesn't think much of women boxing and Maggie lacks experience and has no technique. However, she sees boxing as her one chance at a better life and won't give up easily|Clint Eastwood's 25th film as a director, Million Dollar Baby stands proudly with Unforgiven and Mystic River as the masterwork of a great American filmmaker. In an age of bloated spectacle and computer-generated effects extravaganzas, Eastwood turns an elegant screenplay by Paul Haggis (adapted from the book Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner by F.X. Toole, a pseudonym for veteran boxing manager Jerry Boyd) into a simple, humanitarian example of classical filmmaking, as deeply felt in its heart-wrenching emotions as it is streamlined in its character-driven storytelling. In the course of developing powerful bonds between "white-trash" Missouri waitress and aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), her grizzled, reluctant trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), and Frankie's best friend and training-gym partner Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman), 74-year-old Eastwood mines gold from each and every character, resulting in stellar work from his well-chosen cast.