I don’t very often pay attention to movie trailers these days. Most movies are tripe and if I see three or four a year, then I consider it a good movie year. I also hate overt “message” movies, which helps explain why the last movies I saw were the latest Mummy flick, Transformers, Prince Caspian, and Cloverfield. However, Clint Eastwood’s acting swan-song, Gran Torino has been intriguing me. I have been, for a good part of my life, a huge Clint Eastwood fan. I loved his Dirty Harry movies (even the otherwise godawful The Dead Pool with its remote-controlled car bomb and a young Jim Carrey lip-syncing to Welcome to the Jungle) and his westerns are above reproach.
But Clint had lost me with a string of movies that I am pretty much genetically-programmed to hate, starting with Unforgiven and continuing with a string of movies where it seemed to me that he was apologizing for spending so many years playing an ultra-Alpha Male.
Gran Torino looks like a reverse of all that, like Clint had hauled out Harry Callahan one last time. That would be very good indeed.
I’m even more interested after reading the reviews from Randy Barnett and Ann Althouse. Clint is reprising Harry Callahan and, unlike his past half dozen movies, what preachiness there is comes as in the natural flow of the story, revealed in the main character’s person and interaction with other characters. Like it should be.
I especially liked Ann’s list of “the various lessons” that she put in her comment section.
1. A man should get a real job, a man’s job — build things, use tools.
2. Violence is terrible. It’s not some game.
3. A man should be close to his sons.
4. Even a bad man can get the best woman in the world to marry him if he works at it hard enough, and even if he hates just about everything else, he can see the real value of that.
5. A young man should perceive when a girl likes him and he needs to ask her out to dinner and a movie before somebody else does.
6. A boy needs a man to teach him how to be a man.
7. Don’t smoke.
8. Kids should show respect.
9. You should take care of your property — your house and lawn.
10. You should collect a full set of tools, and hang them up on the wall in good order. And teach your sons how to use them.
11. There’s phony, candyass religion that soothes some women, but there’s serious religion too, the kind that suits a man.
12. Get a nice car and take care of it and some day you will own a “vintage” car.
That’s a good set of lessons and they make me want to see Gran Torino all the more.
(both links via Glenn Reynolds)
Tags: Clint Eastwood, Hollywood, Movies
