Million dollar bubkis*

I'm not crazy about James Bowman as a film critic. For starters, I like movies a lot more than he seems to and hence cut them a lot more slack. I often get the sense that he misses, in movies that don't meet his standards, some of the legitimate creative energies or even artistic struggle that went into them. He doesn't seem to have that middle category, the "it wasn't great, but I liked it, it had some spirit" range that gets me, at least, not just through the great middleness of moviedom, but the great middleness of life in general.

Here, though, he delves into the politics that inhere in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which I haven't yet seen. And if there's anything that warms me up it's a slap-down of Frank Rich, the former New York Times drama critic turned political writer:

AND YET HERE IS Frank Rich, also writing in the New York Times: "What really makes these critics" -- by which he means Michael Medved and others -- "hate Million Dollar Baby is not its supposedly radical politics, which are nonexistent, but its lack of sentimentality." I confess that when I read these words, I was gobsmacked. Sure Frank Rich is an unreflecting, knee-jerk leftie, but he's not insane, is he? Of course we can understand why the politics hardly count as radical anymore to him. They've been around so long and are so much taken for granted in the circles he moves in that they don't even look like politics anymore, just common sense to all but the fanatics, as he sees them, of the right. But "lack of sentimentality" is so obviously, so overwhelmingly false that there must be something else going on here. Rich is himself a critic, and for him to say there's no sentimentality in Million Dollar Baby is equivalent to his saying there's no sentimentality in -- oh, I don't know, Forrest Gump. It suggests he doesn't know his business.

* I encourage comments that offer a more standard spelling of "bubkis." Mrs. McP suggested the way I'm spelling it now, but I used to think that "bupkis," with a "p" as the third letter was the good spelling. Needless to say this is something that I've refused to google.