We try to watch most of Clint Eastwood’s movies, although sometimes it takes us a while to get around to them. For instance, we just watched GRAN TORINO. I like Eastwood’s films because most of them have actual characters and not just an abundance of special effects. GRAN TORINO certainly falls into that category.I’m sure most of you have seen this one by now. For those of you who haven’t, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a widowed, retired auto worker in Detroit who stubbornly stays in his old neighborhood despite the fact that all his neighbors are now Hmong immigrants. Walt is a tough, profane, hard-to-like old codger who uses a lot of racist language, but over the course of the movie, if we judge by his actions, we learn that he’s not a racist at all. He just doesn’t like or respect anybody who hasn’t earned it. He befriends the young man next door, who’s in trouble with the local Hmong gang, and you just know that’s going to lead to a confrontation sooner or later.
For a movie with a ton of bad language and more than a little violence, there are an awful lot of funny, touching moments in GRAN TORINO as well. Eastwood is wonderful as usual as Walt, although I’m a little surprised critics haven’t started leveling the same sort of charges against him that they did against John Wayne: “He’s just Clint Eastwood playing Clint Eastwood.” Maybe so, but does anybody do it better? (Anyway, I don’t think that’s true of either Eastwood or Wayne.) The young Hmong actors who lead the supporting cast are fine, too.
Overall, this is an excellent film, and if you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.
8 comments:
I'm a big Eastwood fan but this isn't screaming out for me to watch for some reason. Glad to see you give it thumbs up though.
This is the only movie that I went to the movie theater to see this year. Good story, well directed, and for Eastwood's last (he said)acting performance - totally marvelous.
He is still THE MAN and I'll miss him not acting on the big screen, but he'll continue to direct and we'll always have those past performances on DVDs.
Murdock.
I thought this was very fine movie. He should have won some awards for it. It's going to have more staying power than a lot of the ones that won.
Lana and I both enjoyed this one very much.
I caught this on video a couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed it. My one complaint? the Hmong communities are in Minneapolis/ St. Paul not Detroit-- I know this because I lived in the Twin Cities and grew up and live once again in the Detroit Metro area. It is really a minor quibble, and in no way derails this film from being a fitting last stand for Eastwood the actor.
That's true, Eric and it bothered me at first. But then I thought, the sentiment works. The downtrodden are the downtrodden.
Odd that such a fine film was pretty much ignored by Oscar. I wonder if the Academy voters were uneasy with the realistic way race relations were portrayed. Much of the dialogue was, to say the least, politically incorrect.
Most folks I know who've seen it confirm the impression that this is Dirty Harry in Late Life much as UNFORGIVEN was the nameless gunfighter of the Leone westerns in Late Life. I suspect I'll get around to it shortly...
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