Clint Eastwood says euthanasia plot twist was 'big mistake'

I'm kidding; actually, he's gone on the attack against his critics. The title of this post is an example of the bait-and-switch Eastwood did on moviegoers in Million Dollar Baby. People were lured in with the promise of a boxing movie; what they got was a sympathetic portrayal of the killing of an individual who had some disabilities that were not life threatening.

IMDB reports on how Eastwood is taking the controversy:

Clint Eastwood has acknowledged that a plot twist in Million Dollar Baby that raises the issue of euthanasia "does hit you with sort of a left hook," and that when he attempted to raise money to produce the film "nobody seemed enthralled with that." In an interview appearing in the current issue of Time magazine, Eastwood suggested that he was able to keep the plot twist secret because the movie was made "under the radar. Nobody knew we were making it, and nobody gave a damn that we were making it." Eastwood said that he was surprised that it took so long for the matter to become the subject of controversy. Asked about the fact that the attack on the film comes from his "constituency," Eastwood, generally regarded as a Republican conservative, responded, "Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right, you meet the same idiots coming around from the left."

Eastwood was expecting the controversy, and when the inevitable came, he casually brushed off the objections as 'extremism'. Despite the media stereotype of Eastwood as a "Republican conservative", he is really more of a Republican libertarian. He has never been an ally of traditional-values conservatives, whence comes the majority of the criticism.

Eastwood -- and Michael Schiavo, for that matter -- see nothing wrong with the premeditated killing of someone who is not in a life-threatening circumstance, but it is those who object to this who are the extremists.