Movie-Gran Torino

There was huge critical praise for this movie and Clint Eastwood when Gran Torino
(2008) came out, but I just don't get it.

The ending was somewhat moving, I'll give it that. But the movie directed by and starring Eastwood was over-acted, unrealistic and somewhat shallow. If I would title it, it would be "Gran Torino: Dirty Harry, Septuagenarian."

Eastwood is an old man named Walt Kowalski, who has just lost his wife. He is a mean SOB, even his kids don't like him. He growls at people, demeans them, bullies them, and uses racial epitaphs like they are common conjunctions. He is racist, biased and just frakin' mean. All of this because of his stint in the army fighting in Korea.

So he has to make do alone. And his neighborhood, once solidly white, is now a hothouse of Hmong immigrants. As you can imagine, Dirty Harry, I mean Walt, does not like this much, and pulls out guns to defend his property.

But he starts grudgingly accepting his next door neighbors and by the end of the movie, they become closer to him than his family.

What crap! Look, if a man is a bigoted, hateful racist for the first 73 years of his life...he will not change in a month or two, just because his neighbors are somehow noble. People do not change that much and that quickly unless really compelled to. This just seemed SO unbelievable that it made Eastwood's overwrought acting more disconcerting.

And his use of racial epitaphs is also not quite right. He uses them in everyday talk, as part of his language. Really, there are very few who just use the words like that anymore. Almost everyone knows that those words are not OK, and if they use them, they do it with a small knot of closely-knit friends who feel the same way about other races. They just don't walk on the street spouting this language.

Gran Torino was a nice try, but for me, it really misses. I don't buy Harry's character (sorry---it's Walt) and I don't buy the plot of his transformation.