Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

[LQ]

What is most remarkable about Gran Torino, though, is that it feels like, even while watching it, not much more (on a scene by scene basis anyway) than a blatant catalogue of cliches. How in the world Eastwood manages to ground all these rote mechanics and give them life is an elusive and wondrous thing. Because he does. It's moving when it means to be and funny (very funny) when it means to be and none of this feels lazy or uninspired

John Cope, you said it perfectly in that quote above. Excellent write-up, your post. The film certainly had its flaws, but it was for all its cliches, a great and...comforting movie. The ending scene was very moving, so moving in fact that I almost didn't sneer at Clint's raspy warbling.

[exte]

Holy shmoly:

Rookie screenwriter finds the right mentor: Clint Eastwood
12:10 PM PT, Nov 26 2008

If it's true that Clint Eastwood is hanging up his acting shoes with "Gran Torino," he couldn't have offered us a nicer swan song. Directing himself, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a crusty retired assembly plant worker who, recently widowed, seems peeved at just about everyone in the world. He's totally exasperated by his family ("There's nothing anyone can do that won't disappoint the old man -- it's inevitable" says one of his sons) and unleashes a fusillade of paint-blistering racial invective on all the Hmong immigrants and people of color who live in his dilapidated neighborhood. I don't want to tell too much about the story, except to say that Eastwood manages to offer us a final reprise of his legendary Dirty Harry character and a heartfelt portrait of human redemption, all in the same film.

The script was so well crafted and understated (and the credits went by so fast) that after seeing the picture, I immediately called Bill Gerber, one of the film's producers, to find out which one of the many A-list screenwriters who must always be knocking down Eastwood's door had penned the story. "Are you sitting down?" Gerber asked. He had quite a surprise. The writer, Nick Schenk, who lives in Minnesota, had never sold a feature script in his life. In fact, the only writing work Schenk had done was for "BoDog Fight," a mixed martial arts TV show, a game show called "Let's Bowl" and some comedy sketches collected in a DVD called "Factory Accident Sex." ("That title doesn't exactly help my career, does it?" Schenk jokes.)

Schenk says he wrote the script, using a pen and a pad of paper, sitting at night in a bar called Grumpy's in northeast Minneapolis. It was a good release for Schenk, who was holding down a series of day jobs, driving a fruit truck and doing construction work. "I just scribbled away every night," he told me. "The bartender there is a friend, so sometimes I'd ask him questions about where I was going with the story as I was writing. When it came, the words just came. One night, I knocked off 25 pages right there in the bar."

Schenk shares story credit with Dave Johannson, another Minnesota guy who's a good friend of Schenk's younger brother. When I naively asked if Dave was also a screenwriter, Schenk laughed. "Not exactly," he said. "Dave sells furnaces for the gas company."

Schenk says he was told over and over not to write a script that had an elderly guy as its center. "They said it would never get made, because you're not supposed to write about old people, especially a guy that sounds like a super-racist," he explains. "But I'm not the kind of person that listens to that stuff. I just knew this character well. When I was working construction, I'd meet a lot of guys like Walt Kowalski. Because I liked history, I'd always be the one that the older guys on the site would tell their stories to.

"Walt is like a lot of shop teachers and coaches that you have in school. He's the kind of guy who's just waiting for you to screw up so he can roll his eyes at you. I had no idea that Clint's character in 'Dirty Harry' drove a Gran Torino. I wanted the car to be a Ford, because there was an assembly line near me. It could've been Crown Victoria, but I liked the sound of Gran Torino better."

Still, Schenk barely knew anyone in Hollywood. How did he beat the million-to-one odds of getting his script to Clint Eastwood? And how many words of the script did Eastwood change before he began filming? Keep reading:

Schenk managed to get the script to two younger producers, Jenette Kahn and Adam Richman, who optioned the story with their own money. Schenk says everyone they took the script to passed. They finally got the script to Gerber, a veteran producer and one-time Warner Bros. production chief who had worked on a number of Eastwood films. Gerber gave the script to Eastwood, who read it and simply said, "I'm doing it."

If the script had been bought by a studio or nearly any other big star, before anyone could blink an eye, the studio would've brought in a veteran writer to do a rewrite or a polish, figuring that a first-time writer couldn't possibly have the craft or sophistication to flesh out a vehicle for a star of Eastwood's stature. But Eastwood operates differently. "He didn't change a single word," said Schenk. "When I met him just before they were going to shoot, I had three tiny changes I wanted to make, but when I mentioned them to Clint, he said, 'I dunno, I kind of like the script just the way it is."

The only thing Eastwood changed was the locale, which moved from Minneapolis to Detroit, largely because by shooting in Michigan, the film -- which cost $35 million -- earned a big tax rebate. Gerber says that Eastwood nearly always goes on his first instinct about a script, recalling that when Eastwood directed "A Perfect World," he used the script by John Lee Hancock, then an unknown writer, without changing a word. Ditto for David Peoples' script for "Unforgiven," which was shot as written.

"There's no doubt that if this had gone through a studio, they would've given it to someone better known to rewrite," Gerber said. "That's why I gave it to Clint directly. No one asked [Warner Bros.] for any notes. We took it to them as a fully set-up package. It was either, you're in or you're out. In my experience, Clint doesn't do much development. When he reads a script, he either wants to do it or he passes."

Eastwood also works incredibly quickly. The movie got a green light in February, shot for 33 days in Michigan during June and July and arrives in theaters next week December 12 (in LA and NYC) going wide in mid-December January. "Who else would possibly shoot a movie that fast?" asked Schenk. "Clint had a break in his schedule over the summer; where most people would go on vacation, Clint shot a movie."

Schenk is trying to take things in stride. He's going to his first big movie premiere on Dec. 9, when he'll hear his words in the hands of one of the most honored actors of our time. It's quite a leap for a guy who not long ago was writing copy for a ring announcer in a mixed martial arts TV show. "I got to sit right next to the ring, which can be pretty exciting, except that you often get sprayed with a lot of blood," he explained. Schenk said he has another script he wrote at Grumpy's that's in the process of being set up. But what kept him going, writing scripts for years without any success?

"I was too stupid to quit," he said. "Writing is just a great thing to do. It's creative, you get to solve problems and it beats doing construction. I don't recommend writing in a bar. It just worked for me. And I don't know what will happen next, but right now, I'm happy. I know that if your script gets made by Clint Eastwood, it couldn't be in better hands."

And:

The Films Are for Him. Got That?
By BRUCE HEADLAM
CARMEL, Calif.

BEING introduced to Clint Eastwood is something like seeing a California redwood for the first time. The difference is that this redwood, even at the age of 78, reaches out to shake yourhand with a firmness that still intimidates no matter how much time you spent preparing your grip (for the record: three days).

He arrived for the interview at the Mission Ranch restaurant here as if he owned the place, and it didn’t make any difference that, in this case, he does. He had his first legal drink in the bar while he was stationed at the nearby Army base in the late 1940s. In 1986 he bought the property and rebuilt it to his taste, with a piano bar, heart-stopping views of the ocean spray on Point Lobos and plenty of meat on the menu. Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia, Mr. Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is. “I never look at the Internet for just that reason,” he said.

It’s been 20 years since Mr. Eastwood was mayor of Carmel, but clearly he’s still the king around here. Unlike the taciturn characters he plays on screen, he’s voluble, chatting and laughing with his staff with a sharpness and enthusiasm that make him seem far younger than his age. After showing me around the property, he insisted I come back that evening for a steak dinner. “We’ve got good chow,” he said. Go on: you tell him you’ve made other plans.

Mr. Eastwood’s on familiar ground in another way. It’s coming up on the Oscars, and he has two films in contention, “Changeling,” with Angelina Jolie, and his newest, “Gran Torino,” which he finished shooting only this summer and which began appearing in theaters on Friday.

In “Gran Torino” Mr. Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran, retired Ford line worker and full-time bigot who stews on his porch in Detroit watching his block being taken over by Hmong immigrants from Southeast Asia. When a gang pressures a teenager living next door (played by Bee Vang) into trying to steal Walt’s vintage Gran Torino, the aging veteran gets pulled reluctantly, then violently, into the lives of his neighbors.

Mr. Eastwood has already won the best actor prize for “Gran Torino” from the National Board of Review, and the Oscar talk — he has never won as an actor — is running high. He claims not to care deeply about awards. When asked whom he makes films for, Mr. Eastwood said, “You’re looking at him.” Calculated or not — those films do have a habit of showing up (sometimes unexpectedly) in prime Oscar campaigning season — that stance seems to charm the voters some 300 miles to the south in Los Angeles, who have rewarded his movies richly in the past 15 years, including two best-picture awards. Mr. Eastwood has become the George Washington of the awards season: if called, he will serve. But he doesn’t seem to believe in term limits.

“Gran Torino” is the 29th full-length movie Mr. Eastwood has directed — more than Scorsese, more even than Spielberg — so perhaps it’s an accident of memory that his name first conjures up the impression of the squinty guy on a horse. Starting in the mid-1980s he began to change some minds by pushing the boundaries of his cowboys-and-cops image with films like “Honkytonk Man” and “Tightrope,” but he said about his reputation, “If that’s how people want to pigeonhole me, that’s fine.”

If anything, his directing pace has picked up in the past five years.

The script for “Gran Torino” had been kicking around Hollywood for a while before Mr. Eastwood read it. The writer, Nick Schenk, who worked in a Ford plant years ago, based the character of Walt on the men he met there, many of them Korean War veterans. “I’d talk a lot to these guys, and they’d tell me stuff they wouldn’t tell their wife and kids,” Mr. Schenk said.

Some directors are known as an actor’s best friend. Mr. Eastwood may be the writer’s. “He didn’t change a word,” Mr. Schenk said. “That never happens.”

Mr. Eastwood said he learned his lesson after making extensive revisions on the script for “Unforgiven,” then calling up the writer, David Peoples, and announcing he was returning to the first draft. “I’m emasculating this thing,” he told Mr. Peoples.

There was one major disappointment for Mr. Schenk: the setting of “Gran Torino” was shifted from Minneapolis to Detroit, the original home of Ford and, not coincidentally, the home of 42 percent tax credits for films made there. (That helped make it easy for Warner Brothers to sign off on bankrolling the movie, something that hasn’t always been a given in the studio’s relationship with the director.)

Mr. Eastwood bought the script in February, then shot the movie over the summer at a guerrilla filmmaker’s pace, finishing in 32 days. The fast clip, Mr. Eastwood said, helped him with the Hmong members of the cast, most of whom had never acted and many of whom didn’t speak English. “I’d give them little pointers along the way, Acting 101,” he said. “And I move along at a rate that doesn’t give them too much of a chance to think.”

It also doesn’t give Mr. Eastwood too much time to worry about Hollywood. After shooting, he returned to Carmel, where he lives with his wife, Dina Ruiz, and manages his investments, including an ownership stake in the Pebble Beach golf course company. He set up a bay and worked with his two film editors in an 1862 farmhouse on the Mission property for a week or so. Between sessions he sat at the piano and picked out a score: he has written music, including full scores, for many of his films. He even sings one of his own melodies over the film’s final credits, his voice burned down to a whisper. (Mr. Eastwood himself refuses to call it singing because that conjures up memories of “Paint Your Wagon,” the misbegotten 1969 musical. “I vowed I’d never do that again,” he said.)

Like “Million Dollar Baby” and “Mystic River” before it, “Gran Torino” is a modern story that feels anachronistic. Walt’s neighborhood is every bit as bounded and knowable as the town of Lago in “High Plains Drifter,” and the confrontations with the Hmong gang members build methodically, as if in a town square. But when the film threatens to descend into a vigilante picture — the last guy who actually thought he could solve Detroit’s problems with his fists was Gordie Howe — “Gran Torino” takes some unexpected turns.

Before filming there had been gossip (again, the Internet) that Mr. Eastwood was making another “Dirty Harry” sequel. What “Gran Torino” does share with the “Dirty Harry” movies is the sheer force of its incorrectness. Walt, who stokes his resentment with cigarettes, beef jerky and Pabst Blue Ribbon, expresses his disgust for the Hmong and just about every other racial group in a steady stream of obscenities. Robert Lorenz, Eastwood’s frequent producing partner, said that what he appreciated about Mr. Schenk’s dialogue was that “he didn’t hold back.”

“It was left really raw,” he said. “It sounded like those people you know, or your uncle saying something really bad at a wedding.”

Brian Grazer, a producer of “Changeling,” sees this kind of directness as a strength. “What most interested me about Clint Eastwood as a director is the honesty and intensity he injects into the movies that he directs,” he said. “He is so confident as a director that he will allow the sometimes ugliness of life to live inside the scenes of his movies.”

For Mr. Eastwood the raw language is central to Walt’s story. “If he comes in and just befriends these people and doesn’t have any hurdles — any personal hurdles to overcome — that doesn’t make for a very interesting character,” he said. But Mr. Eastwood, who last spring had a verbal run-in with Spike Lee over the lack of black soldiers in the Eastwood film “Flags of Our Fathers,” also confesses to some sympathy for Walt’s choice of words in a way sure to irk the Hollywood types who have finally embraced him despite his libertarian politics.

“A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness,” he said. “You’re showing a guy from a different generation. Show the way he talks. The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so” — here he paused and narrowed his eyes, like Dirty Harry drawing a bead on a perp — “sensitive.”

What we admire about heroes (and villains) like the ones Mr. Eastwood used to play isn’t their sensitivity, it’s their single-mindedness: they say what they’re going to do, then do it. Whether in Spain or in San Francisco, Mr. Eastwood’s heroes were never given the “kill one to save a thousand” liberal trapdoor of other Hollywood films. The violence of the “Dirty Harry” movies seems almost quaint now, but what Harry says — “Ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?” — still has the power to shock.

But if Mr. Eastwood shoulders some blame for every “Rambo” and “Die Hard” that followed, he should be given credit for looking at a more complicated transaction in the films he directs, one where people’s actions are at odds with their beliefs. What helps sell the contradiction in “Gran Torino” is Mr. Eastwood’s own physical presence. More so than any other leading man, he has been willing to play his real age. At 78 he is perhaps thinner than he once was, but in that sinewy way that reveals strength as much as diminishes it. After Walt beats up one gang member — hey, he’s still Clint Eastwood — the next scene shows him out of breath, struggling to open his front door.

To Mr. Eastwood being able to play 78 is just one of the benefits of a long career. “It’s ridiculous when you won’t play your own age,” he said. “You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.”

The other benefit is that, even after a great career in the movies, you can fashion another. “After ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ I walk down the street and everybody would whistle out” — here he sang the movie’s famous theme. “Then it became ‘Do I feel lucky?’ and ‘Make my day.’ But it’s progressed along. Whether it’s taken this turn on purpose, I can’t say.”

Walt Kowalski has a catchphrase too in “Gran Torino.” “This is what I do,” he tells the Hmong teenager before the film’s final act. “I finish things.” So does Mr. Eastwood, just not in the way anybody would have expected.

And he may not be done. There were reports — again on the Internet — that this would be his last role, a rumor he helped fuel but now says is not necessarily true.

“Somebody asked what I’d do next, and I said I didn’t know how many roles there are for 78-year-old guys,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with coming in to play the butler. But unless there’s a hurdle to get over, I’d rather just stay behind the camera.”

[chaddoli]

I'd like to join the chorus of admiration for this film. It really is wonderful.

Spoiler

There's a very compelling scene toward the end of the film after Sue has been brutalized (raped?) and Father Janovich confronts Walt. They speak about violence and what they want to do, and the priest, who had been very "PC" and naively sensitive before, essentially eggs Walt on to take action. In the next scene, the father has gone back on his stance, worried about what Walt might do. But it is a powerful moment when the father and Walt come to respect and understand one another, and the different lives they've chosen - the tragedy brought them together. This film really does advocate vigilante justice though - there are no cops in this film.

[exte]

The film's good shit. A lot of laughs. Eastwood's very enjoyable, a great star still. I'd hate to see him stop acting. Also, as a director I think he's ballsy. Basically, the guy goes on first drafts, doesn't change a word. I heard there were 50 drafts for The Wrestler, and that Fincher works his writers to death on each project. It makes you wonder all about that auteur theory... at the very least, Eastwood's an addendum.

More on the screenwriter:

Screenwriter floors it with 'Gran Torino'
By JEFF BAENEN, Associated Press Writer Jeff Baenen, Associated Press Writer 1 hr 10 mins ago

MINNEAPOLIS – Working at a liquor store or a construction site, Nick Schenk developed an ear for realistic dialogue. Eventually he wrote a script on scrap paper while sitting at a blue-collar bar in northeast Minneapolis.

That script was turned into "Gran Torino," a new movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. The film went into wide release Friday after getting critical raves and National Board of Review awards for Schenk for original script and Eastwood for best actor.

Heady stuff for a former fruit truck driver.

"It's the jackpot," the 43-year-old Schenk says about the first movie ever made of one of his screenplays.

In "Gran Torino," the 78-year-old Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a racist, retired Ford worker and Korean War vet living in a decaying Detroit neighborhood. A Hmong family moves next door, and their teenage son tries to steal Kowalski's vintage 1972 Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. Gruff and snarling at first, Kowalski mellows as he gets to know the family and defends the teenager, Thao, and his sister, Sue, against the gang.

Schenk's father, Marv, was in Korea, but Schenk says Kowalski is a composite of other guys. He compares the character to your gym teacher, coach, shop teacher or "dad when you're putting your bike back together wrong and he's waiting for you to screw up so he can roll his eyes. We all know who that is."

Schenk, who grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of Fridley, already had experience as a writer and producer for "Let's Bowl" on Comedy Central and on a mixed martial arts TV show. He had co-written another screenplay that was sold but never produced. That only "whetted my beak to never quit," said Schenk, who moved to Los Angeles in June.

A military history buff, Schenk talked with a friend about the Korean War, often called "The Forgotten War." That morphed into the story of a Korean War vet. The two outlined the story, and Schenk — who did not own a laptop — would write the script with pen and paper at Grumpy's, a neighborhood bar.

Schenk wrote "98 percent of the first draft, and he's fast," says Dave Johannson, 39, who shares story credit on "Gran Torino." It took about three months for Schenk to write the screenplay, which he and Johannson then honed.

Eventually Schenk got the screenplay to executive producers Jenette Kahn and Adam Richman, who shopped it to actor after actor until Eastwood said yes.

"He didn't change a word," Schenk said.

Schenk intended "Gran Torino" to be set in St. Paul, which has a Ford plant as well as a large population of Hmong, the hill people who emigrated from Southeast Asia after fighting for the U.S. in a CIA-backed campaign during the Vietnam War. But he says Minnesota couldn't compete with Michigan's 42 percent film rebate.

Schenk had worked with Hmong families in a factory job and visited a Hmong cultural center in St. Paul. He also got authenticity from the veterans he ran into on the job.

"I had guys tell me their stories, their war stories, because they could trust me or I was sympathetic and respectful. So they would tell me stuff that they could not tell their wives and would not tell their kids."

Grumpy's owner Pat Dwyer, a friend, calls Schenk "a solid, blue-collar, hardworking guy" who's also erudite — someone "you can sit and talk about ice fishing or the Vikings (with) or you can talk about art and literature."

And success has not changed Schenk, Dwyer said. "I know he's justly proud and really happy but he's not putting on airs or anything," he said. "He's still Nick."

[Joe Buck]

I saw it yesterday. Love it. Laughed alot, cried alot. God bless Clint.

[karmajuice]

I never expected to laugh so much at this movie. It's really funny, and for the most part effortlessly so (a few scenes strain themselves), yet the serious scenes feel truly sinister or tragic. There's a great dynamic between the two (the humor and the pathos), where they support each other by displaying opposite poles of the same subject. For example:

Spoiler

Consider the scene where Walt calls his son, when he has the hospital forms. Genuinely affecting, at least to me. The potency behind this scene is really established by the persistent crotchety old man jokes running through the film, so we know Walt is a lonely old man but only from that humorous perspective: the old man cliches, his wife's farce of a funeral, his sneering indignation at the condescension toward his age. In this one scene all of that turns on its head, so all at once those things we laughed at before become very desperate and we see Walt's loneliness (and probably feel that much worse for having laughed before).

On the same note:

Spoiler

The casual and hilarious use of racism, racial tension, and all other modes of xenophobia lend support to Walt's threats in a very striking way. It's all a part of his grumpy old man persona, kinda cute and fun, and suddenly he points his gun at a man and talks about piling bodies in Korea (the most thrilling and frightening moment in the movie). It forges this wonderful ambiguity (is he really racist? How much, if that sort of thing is even quantifiable?), and the two manage to contrast and support each other (in addition to establishing the serious scenes, the humor also tempers them afterward, to relieve the tension and bring us back into humor mode).

The ending, of course,

Spoiler

is a great inversion/reconsideration of the Dirty Harry style of character so firmly established by Clint and so often associated with him. The hand-pointing gun, the sacrifice, the fact that he doesn't kill anyone, pulling out his lighter. I wonder if it's a sort of cinematic apology by Clint, for the aimless violence in some of his early roles, those being represented through Walt's time in Korea.

This is a wordy damn post considering I just meant to say, "Good movie."

[Antoine Doinel]

After members of my family saw it and loved it I finally caved and saw this tonight. Although I was one of the early dissenters of what looked like, on the face of it, a racist-guy-learns-to-love film, Gran Torino is both a bit more simplistic and more complicated than that. It's more simple, in that Clint's character is less of a racist than an all around equal opportunity asshole, and even as he befriends his neighbors he doesn't suddenly stop using racial slurs or really change much of his attitude. They earn his respect and in turn, he earns theirs. It's also more complicated in that the film very carefully navigates some pretty difficult racial and political territory without ever going to pulpit, and the script earns its emotional punch.

I enjoyed the film and in particular, Eastwood himself. I think his on screen charisma is really taken for granted, because he effectively carries this entire movie playing, as many critics have pointed out, on his own mythological on screen stature. Overall though, it is B-level material for Eastwood (it's essentially a smarter than usual vengeance pic) that is at times, and unfortunately, hampered by some really bad acting by the supporting cast, particularly the kid playing Thao.

But I would urge anyone who thought this film would be something very predictable and routine, to give it a whirl.

[dx23]

After members of my family saw it and loved it I finally caved and saw this tonight. Although I was one of the early dissenters of what looked like, on the face of it, a racist-guy-learns-to-love film, Gran Torino is both a bit more simplistic and more complicated than that. It's more simple, in that Clint's character is less of a racist than an all around equal opportunity asshole, and even as he befriends his neighbors he doesn't suddenly stop using racial slurs or really change much of his attitude. They earn his respect and in turn, he earns theirs. It's also more complicated in that the film very carefully navigates some pretty difficult racial and political territory without ever going to pulpit, and the script earns its emotional punch.

I enjoyed the film and in particular, Eastwood himself. I think his on screen charisma is really taken for granted, because he effectively carries this entire movie playing, as many critics have pointed out, on his own mythological on screen stature. Overall though, it is B-level material for Eastwood (it's essentially a smarter than usual vengeance pic) that is at times, and unfortunately, hampered by some really bad acting by the supporting cast, particularly the kid playing Thao.

But I would urge anyone who thought this film would be something very predictable and routine, to give it a whirl.

You wrote my same exact thoughts on the film. The only negative that my wife and I saw on this film was the bad acting from Thao and Sue.

[franco]

I can hardly understand how anyone can deem Sue's acting "bad." She's the second best part of the film, portraying exactly how 80% of North American Asian girls talk like.

[Svevan]

I can't speak to how "realistic" Sue's performance was, but her, plus Thao, plus the kid-priest, all had some utterly wretched line-readings. The pacing of the film is thrown off by the terrible perfs, with actors talking over one another and standing around like wooden posts. Add terribly written dialogue ("I have more in common with these gooks than I do with my own family") and you've got a stinker. The premise was fine, but the execution was so poor I'm surprised I made it through the whole thing. Thao attempting to emote while locked up was high-school drama class bad. Blech.

[Barmy]

I enjoyed this much more than I expected. Definitely way more laughs than I thought there would be. A good film to see with a racist audience, so I chose Kips Bay.

Sue and Toad's acting was indeed horrible during the few scenes where they had to get emotional. Just terrible. But otherwise they were fine and you would lose more than you would gain if they were pros.

The family and priest characters, and the actors who played them, could have used more spice.

Perhaps for the first time ever, I slept through the first 10 minutes of the film.

Minor Clint, but much of Clint is minor, and that is part of his charm. =D>

[Fiery Angel]

A good film to see with a racist audience, so I chose Kips Bay.

And how did these 2nd Avenue racists react? We want details, man!

[Barmy]

It was a lot of bridge and tunnel spooks and gooks, mostly. They chatted a lot during the film, as those people tend to do.

[HerrSchreck]

You gotta warn me when you do that... when the air busts outa me off a laugh like that, I hafta get my spit outa the line of fire so it don't get dragged back down into my lungs when I pull the air back in!

**DAILY NEWS**
Barmed Man Drowns On Own Saliva

Bridge and tunnel spooks and gooks reported today
that a young man "hwark!"ed a large quantity of
saliva into his bronchial...

[dx23]

Coming to DVD and Blu-ray on June 9th. Not too many extras for this release.

[FerdinandGriffon]

Broad strokes, broad strokes.

[flyonthewall2983]

The thing I found to be a revelation while watching it is that Clint is, in essence, playing someone who would likely be a big fan of his movies. I can't add much more to that since the praise that's been heaped already to it mirrors my own. It's a fantastic film.

[puxzkkx]

Really disliked this film. Even at its best it never gets beyond a rather shallow reflection of Clint's own star persona. Although it is pretty obvious that it was intended as a satire of/homage to (?!) Clint himself, it is very poorly structured and the entire thing sort of loses control - as a result I ended up laughing at things that were obviously unintentionally funny and being left cold at the intended 'funny bits'.

Apart from a few laughs, this really was a hackneyed little bore for me... and I was annoyed by the passive racism (even as the film is apparently anti-racism... there's always this underlying tone of Our White Hero And 'The Others' even when Thao and Sue are in the scene [but especially when their family are being portrayed], and the entire thing with the racial slurs in the will was just as insidiously racist). I'm really freaked out by how such a clumsily executed film generates so much love amongst hardcore cinephiles... I guess it must have to do more with Clint and the evolution of his persona. I've only looked through his works retrospectively - wasn't alive when he was in his heyday - and i've never been a sucker for 'star persona = great acting' so there's probably a reason this didn't click for me.

For me, Clint's two '08 films were the lowlights of a directing career that is hardly as distinguished, imo, as most people think. A conservative heart behind a liberal facade - that's Clint for you, and it makes the heavy-handed, but half-realized, political messages in his films kind of embarrassing for me.

[jbeall]

Has Clint ever had a "liberal facade"? I'm quite liberal, but it's not hard to imagine a conservative argument for racial tolerance. Specifically, "I'll accept you as long as you don't force me to change." Or better yet, "I'll accept you if you adopt my cultural values as your own." If anything, the kid has assimilated to American-male culture: he's learned to talk shop in rather blue terms, and although he attends Walt's funeral in Hmong clothing, in the film's last shot he's driving Walt's car into the proverbial sunset. If anything, the film wears its conservative bona-fides on its sleeve.

We'll have to agree to disagree over whether or not this is a good film--I liked it very much--but I also wanted to quibble with your claim that Gran Torino boils down to "star persona=great acting." While Clint's earlier work indeed traded on his star power, in his own directorial career he's constantly put "star power" under the microscope, and all of his work, from Unforgiven onward, is an examination of a masculinity that's increasingly tortured. Walt is obviously a satire of Dirty Harry in many ways (loved it when he tripped and fell while disrupting the burglary). In GT, Clint's "star power" is clearly played for laughs. The film may trade on his star power, but it also holds it up as an object of ridicule, too.

[rohmerin]

I re-watched last night, and I found it more scary than in 2008, not funny as some of you have described, but remember, I'm not American.

As the film describes, none walks in the States, but if you do, you will meet bad hombres because all are involved in dangerous gangs, they rape and commit crimes. Public transportation is for losers and immigrants. You must drive, after your cock, nothing is more important than your car. Our beautiful cities have collapsed such as our industries because foreigners. Scary Detroit.

Real men can spit, dress badly, they smoke, they drink beer. Cocktails? Too Fag. They swear, if you are insulted, insult back, and they are good with bricolage, not with feelings and of course can't cook. Hipster beards? That's dirty. Cupcakes? For sissies. Gluten free? What's that for? for having a shit better? You have to drive and buy American. No matter if you are Irish or Pole trash, you are white, and that's what matter. Even dagos are white enough (hairdresser, played by a non Italian-American).

Scary.

How much important is Religion in day-a-day life for Americans? Is realistic that James Cagney type priest who involves in everything? I'm surprised. Here, there's another "reception". Can you eat all you want? is that proper? who pays that? the family?