Just watched it and searched for a thread… I did notice that it’s been referred to as “Grand Torino” (grrr!) but I don’t think there’s been a thread on it.
Holy shit, Eastwood was awesome. Dude is almost 80 and acted his ass off. Dirty Harry still has it.
I thought the movie was really well cast. I think the priest was good, and Thao and Sue were excellent. I did think it was good how they showed Walt taking a shine to Sue almost immediately but taking much longer with Thao.
The run-ins Walt has with the thugs - the Hmong gang, the Black dudes - wow. Knowing the IQ of most street thugs though, I was a little surprised that he was able to get away with popping off to them without getting his skull split. Sue’s “boyfriend” who got chased off by the Black thug dudes and then berated by Walt is actually Eastwood’s son. He was hilariously bad trying to front like he was down. (By that I mean he played his small role well.)
As for the plot/storyline, there were no real surprises. I think it was clear pretty much from the onset what was going to happen, though the trailers for the film are very careful not to suggest that it’s more complicated than Eastwood vs. Hmong. I also thought that Thao was going to be somehow “left out” and Walt was going to figure out a way to sacrifice himself for Thao and Sue, but I have to admit the way that he did it was a surprise. (Personally I thought he wired himself up like a suicide bomber, but then there would be no reason for him to get a suit made…
Anyway, was wondering what the collective thought was re: this film. I think it deserved a Best Actor nod at the Oscars for Eastwood, at the very least!
I just re-watched the film, actually. I had seen it when it first came out, and I watched it again. The first time I saw it, I didn’t really like it because I found it depressing. I have people in my own family who still live in old neighborhoods in New York that are undergoing a shift in demographics from white ethnic Europeans to Asians, Arabs and Africans, and there is a definite sense of sadness about them as they see their old friends either moving away or dying off, and lamenting how the neighborhood has changed. I thought that Gran Torino’s message was, “white people in inner cities should accept their role as dinosaurs, and allow themselves to be killed in acts of martyrdom.”
Seeing it now after a long period of time has allowed me to evaluate it better and I think the movie has grown on me a little. I think Eastwood’s acting is very impressive. I also like the fact that the film is un-PC and it does not pull any punches in depicting ghetto thugs as they actually are, instead of in some idealized fairytale world like “8 Mile.”
Other Nominees:
Frost/Nixon (2008) - Frank Langella
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) - Brad Pitt
The Visitor (2007/I) - Richard Jenkins
The Wrestler (2008) - Mickey Rourke
I think maybe Brad Pitt was the one who took Eastwood’s place. They never release the voting results for nominations or wins, but I’ll bet it was really, really close.
Thanks Equipose. No idea why it didn’t surface before when I searched… somebody posted to it as recent as two weeks ago.
[If a mod wants to merge this, feel free.]
In the other thread, there are lots of complaints about the acting… I found the gangbangers and Sue to be very compelling. Having known a lot of Southeast Asian gangbanger types, I can verify that’s how they roll. They sound stereotypical because they adopt these tropes and personas from movies, etc.
Thao was mostly very good but I can agree that there were some cringeworthy scenes, like when he exhorts Walt to saddle up so they can “tear some ass.” His move from picked-on kid to hardass was a little too swift.
I think Walt’s “transformation” was explainable: despite his hard exterior, he really wanted to connect to someone in the twilight of his life. His kids and grandkids pretty much excommunicated themselves at the funeral, and Sue demonstrates the toughness that he respected that his own kids didn’t show: the weaselly way they introduced the idea of an assisted living facility, for instance.
Just watched it and felt it was a little heavy handed. I felt that as a viewer I was not left to figure out what was happening but was hammered over the head with it. I thought Eastwoods “growl and scowl” was over the top and overused. I did not like the scene where he took Thao to the barbershop at all. I don’t mind the non-PC aspect, just thought it unrealistic and I grew up with some pretty non-PC type people.
I am an Eastwood fan but felt this was not his best as actor or director.
Yes, excellently cast. It was worth it just to hear Dirty Harry say, “Get off my lawn.”
It’s not about intelligence, they were afraid of him. They were a bunch of pussies who banded together and hid behind guns. They were not prepared for an old man who had experience killing, wasn’t afraid to die and had a shotgun. The thing about groups like that is that sure they might be brave in some circumstances but no one wants to be the first to rush him because that’s the first person to get blasted.
Yeah, the ending was very poignant. I loved it. It was great and very poetic. He had nothing to live for anymore, he was just waiting to die so he chose a meaningful death rather than just wasting away.
This one is easy. There was no swift transformation. He went from picked-on kid to irrationally angry swiftly. He was never a hardass in the entire movie.
I saw no transformation in that scene. I saw it as the boy finally getting to know Walt and learning how he would respond to certain situations.
Pushing the freezer up the stairs shows this better. Thao puts his foot down and Walt falls in line. Possibly showing Walt that he’s doing a good job teaching him how to “be a man” and take charge.
Viscerally, I really liked the movie. Intellectually, I feel they made Clint to be too much of a Hollywood Hero by the end. We are supposed to overlook his racism because of his relationship with Thao and Sue, and we are supposed to take his side in his dispute with his family. It definitely can be argued whether Clint’s level of racism in racial slurs towards people he cares about, but I felt the movie argued too hard that the level of racism is negligible. I think it was too transparent that the barber scenes were included solely to show that Clint slurs his friends too.
Edit to add: I thought about this movie a lot after I saw it, so I categorize it as a good movie, I just have qualms with some of the conclusions the movie seems to want you to make.
Indeed I am mistaken. Only seen the movie once and in my haste to reply, got some stuff mixed up.
A good scene. Shows things are happening in their minds actually and not just going through the motions of being friendly to each other. Shows they are becoming actual friends, of sorts.
Taber I think you are making a mistake that is common in today’s day and age thinking that everything has to be a sociopolitical moral message. The story wasn’t even about racism, and it wasn’t about redeeming the main character, it was about the relationship between the man and his neighborhood. If you are looking to forgive the character for his racism you’re missing the point, not to mention thinking too highly of your own opinion and it’s value. The story was a character driven plot. It was a story about human beings, and did a pretty good job of portraying them realistically. Walt was a racist just because he was a crotchety old fuck from that generation. The racism was more a function of the setting than a function of the character, and that’s ultimately the point of the movie. The story is a story of redemption, but Walt isn’t being redeemed from his racism, he is being redeemed from a sense of pointlessness that he could have fallen into in his twilight years. His relationship to Thao gave him a new lease on life, and he sacrificed himself for his love of Thao and the rest of the Hmong in his neighborhood. The point of the story was that his racism wasn’t that deeply ingrained in his heart, it was just a superficial characteristic that went unquestioned because he never had to question it. When it came time to set it aside, he did so, and easily.
Also I don’t agree with the current line of thinking which insists that racism, of any kind, is THE ABSOLUTE WORST thing EVER and that even the slightest bit of prejudice immediately invalidates anything good or decent about a person. Guess what - nobody’s perfect! Someone who’s a racist might also be a great husband and a hard worker or a great artist. Someone who fights for civil rights might also abuse his wife or fuck little boys. We shouldn’t be so wrapped up in whether or not someone is racist that we ignore other things about them.
And it’s possible for people to change, also. Someone might grudgingly grow to accept and even pro-actively like people of other races, even if he didn’t at first.
And also - amazingly - it’s possible to make racial jokes and not automatically be a Nazi.
I guess I fall somewhere in the middle. It was easier to accept Walt’s racist behavior because I knew he was Clint Eastwood playing a role. If I encountered Walt IRL, and he wasn’t CLINT EASTWOOD! I suspect we’d have an okay type of interaction. I’m not a street thug picking on a woman. I don’t think he’d call me out of my name, and because I’m a generally respectful person, I don’t think he would take notice of me at all. It’s not like in the post office we’re going to have a discussion about Skip Gates’ arrest or anything like that.
Walt seems to operate on the assumption that all people outside of his tribe are suspicious - but he makes “exceptions” to individuals based on behavior. That, to me, is racist. The Hmong folks he meets - Sue and Thao - have to “prove” themselves to him. But truthfully, it seems like everybody in his world has to prove themselves. So he’s kind of a jerk to White folks in general, too.
Conversely, he is willing to retract respect from folks in his own tribe - the way he dismisses his kids and politicians (on his rant about how people that glamorize war don’t understand the horror of killing a man). Not to mention “Trey” (actually his son IRL when he failed to stand up for Sue in the confrontation with the Black street thugs.
There was this thread of humanity, though. Thao showed he was decent in Walt’s eyes when he helped the lady after she dropped her groceries (and the neighborhood kids mocked her and walked by).
We get a glimpse into his mind opening with the Hmong people - and in truth, he didn’t really seem to be closed minded at all. How many racists would wade into a room full of “those people” and stay, and seem somewhat at ease? And he didn’t just socialize with doting old ladies - he talked with a shaman and some teenagers as well.
Walt confuses me a little because I don’t think that’s how someone who is truly xenophobic and racist would act.
My Dad was like that in some ways. He was racist in the abstract, and prone to making racist pronouncements and racist assumptions, but he always seemed to make exceptions when it came down to individuals. And he was always ready to socialize with anybody.
The vast majority of non-whites, in my experience, are that way. Asians especially. They’ll be nice as hell to you in person, very polite and easy to get along with; and it’s not an act or anything, it’s real - but when talking amongst themselves they’ll make broad generalizations, usually negative but rarely virulent, about white Americans. Not anything viciously hateful, just stuff like “they don’t know how to run a business like we do” or whatever. It shouldn’t surprise anyone - people generally stick to their own kind and are more trusting of their own kind, especially a minority like Filipinos in a huge place like the US.