Gran Torino (2008) - Clint Eastwood
Beautiful poster!
A great movie with an outstanding performance by Clint Eastwood – basically its Grumpy Old Men meets Heartbreak Ridge, or an un-official sequel to Heartbreak Ridge.
Gran Torino IMDB
Lot’s of snarling in this picture with a great look from Tom Stern (a skip-bleach, light blue tint). This movie is cheap, cheap, cheap I tell yah, literally one location. And, besides Clint, we have a lot of first time actors here, or bad actors, vice-versa I guess (natural actors maybe).
The story of a retired veteran who becomes a widower, who is an outright racist, and lives next to Hmong family in the ghetto (which was probably an all-white neighborhood in Detroit way back in the fifties). Clint’s boys are users, his Priest is like 12 years old, and his prize possession, his Gran Torino automobile. The neighbor’s kid tries to steal the car to impress a Hmong gang and the relationship begins.
This movie is all Eastwood. He commands every scene and in the end, is all we really care about, and of course who we paid to see anyway. There are real poignant moments in this film. When Clint teaches the Hmong boy how to become a man is absolutely classic. A great touching film, and I would be shocked if Clint doesn’t get an Oscar nomination for which could be his LAST performance, ever…
I worked for the production company that made this film back during the writers strike. From what I learned later, after I left, the film saved their careers. The producer literally took the script to Clint during the Changeling shoot, Clint read it, and he was in.
The more I hear stories about how movies are made the more I realize how special movies are because this movie should’ve NEVER had this fortune; a script that was turned down by every studio. It was a decent script, tenacity, fear of unemployment and LUCK that made this picture. We really take movies like this for granted.
We should stop!
