(Clint Eastwood intimidates his neighbors from making any more cracks about his waistline)Gran Torino (2008)
All I knew about Gran Torino going into tonight's screening was that it has: a Gran Tourino car in it, Asian actors that aren't very good at their acting, and a racist Clint Eastwood who pretends to pull a gun out of his jacket and then it turns out that its not a gun, its just his hand held in a gun-like fashion. Also, I knew that this gun-hand trick thing happened more than once. (at least 3 times judging by the trailers)
Having seen the 116 minute movie, I am happy to report that the movie doesn't really have anything else in it. It's a pretty bad movie. Eastwood is sort of awesome in it, and the racism was fun in a way that made me feel strange inside, but the movie and the characters in it are a bit hard to care about. Having said this, I am gonna put it out there that I don't consider myself a racist guy, and if there was something positive I took from the movie, its that the film made me think about how much I do appreciate the spices of life that come from interacting with people of all races. Just earlier today I watched my dad interact with some gentlemen at Frye's Electronics who were of differing races, and now I am using a laptop that has 2 extra GB of RAM memory that was bought from these gentlemen. Do you think I would be using this RAM if I were racist? Email me the answer once you've really thought about it.
So anyways.
The movie revolves around an asian gang, who all live together and spend their days driving around in their car trying to get their silent, boring cousin to join their gang. I'm not sure why they want him in the gang. He is boring and has one of those mustaches that middle school hispanic boys have. You want him to shave. I wish he HAD joined the gang and learned that being a man came from working hard, and not from facial hair. One of the gang-members is named Spider, and he has a Spider tattoo, which I thought made sense. But then Spider and the gang won't leave this boy Thao alone, again i'm not sure why, and to initiate him they want him to steal an old white man's car, but he fails and then they keep coming around and then they try to get him to come with them but they break Eastwood's lawn gnome in the process which makes Clint mad so he pulls a gun out and they leave, and then the asians in the neighborhood love the old crazy racist and they start calling him Wally instead of Walt or Mr. Kowalski (he is a dumb Polack, we learn). The gang comes and goes, sometimes they rape their cousins, sometimes they do drive-bys where they just drive by and make mean faces and other times they drive-by and actually commit to the basic structure of a drive-by (bullets, etc.).
Eastwood hates his own family, his wife is dead, his dog is kind of boring (I thought so anyways) so of course he gets a soft spot for the next-door Hmong family and takes on a role sort of as their protector. He calls Thao "Toad" and the young boy doesn't seem to mind too much. I guess encouraged by this, Clint then makes jokes about the family eating dog and they start to really like him. He calls them nips and zips and zipperheads and they like him even more! By the end of the movie, the asian people literally don't even bat an eye as old Wally calls them horrible racist things. I think the justification is that he doesn't really mean it, which I got because he likes the neighbors more than his own family, but the coldness in his speech is somehow connected to that one summer when he killed all these people in the Korean War, and this apparentlyleft him with a salty side, but it's a sad saltyness, sort of like tears.
I've noticed that in Eastwood movies, he makes things simple by having a protagonist's family be comprised of a bunch of dumb assholes. Like Hillary Swank's family in Million Dollar Baby, Walt's is a bunch of simpleton creeps. One of the best parts of the movie is when they try to convince him to move to a retirement home. ON HIS BIRTHDAY! All Clint has to do is make a pickled face and we know that the family ain't getting any of that birthday cake.
And they don't!
Anyways, some bullshit happens, and then when Eastwood martyrs himself, he has his character lie down with his arms sprawled out like Jesus Christ.
There is also a priest who says "Jesus Christ!" and drinks beers. So what?
i give this movie 2 out of 6 stars, or 1 out of 3 stars.
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