Falling asleep on the couch at 9:00 PM on a Friday night is a curse. I'm typically a weekend night owl and I live on six hours of sleep, a gift given to me by Still A Dad. I love waking up early even on weekends as it's prime computer time....quiet.....peaceful......relaxing. Well, you do the math - if you fall asleep at 9 and live on little sleep - yep, I woke up at 4 AM on Saturday morning. I tried to go back to sleep but my brain and body were ready to roll, heck I got an extra hour in. The heat didn't kick back on yet and the house was a nice comfy 60 degrees. Now, how was I going to spend these bonus hours? It hit me that a friend at work gave me a copy of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino to check out. It wasn't filmed in the theater with a handheld, it was a copy that a radio station had "or something". I didn't care about "or something", I just wanted to see the movie. All I can say is "Wow". The commercials made it seem like Clint was just going to walk around blowing people away - like Josey Wales. I don't want to give any of the movie plot away so I'll try to remain vague in my review if I can. The movie works on so many different levels it's a tribute to the story and script. Religion plays a huge part in the movie. Sacrifice and confession are the themes and atheism is also discussed. Racism is also a huge part of the movie.The movie whacks you over the head with how easy it is to be racist from afar, but how hard it is to be up close. If the movie didn't have enough themes going on, it also dives head on into relationships between fathers and sons. Clint's character is so "standoff-ish" that his sons don't even know how to talk to him. He definitely was one of the "old school" dads that just barked orders and everyone followed them. There are several phone calls between him and his sons that last a total of 30 seconds. I have trouble relating to that because Still A Dad and I can burn up a phone line for 30-45 minutes at a time talking like two old blue-haired ladies. As the movie progresses though, you start to see that almost every interaction between him and his kids is because they want something from him. Even his granddaughter takes part in the wanting. It becomes more obvious that his family doesn't really know him because they never really tried to know him. When somebody does try to get to know him in the movie, they succeed. It's hard to describe without mentioning spoilers, but if you can overlook the sometimes poor acting by some of the foreign cast and the young priest, I think you'll really enjoy the movies. The religious parallels that you are forced to draw at the end of the movie are worth the price of admission....well, unless you watched a pirated copy.
1 comment:
Yeah, what I loved about the movie is that it's simple enough to follow, but if you want to discuss in depth, you can go nuts as it has tons of fodder for that. I just loathed the ending...it was a little too "neat."
But overall, compared to all the other stuff that Hollywood churns out, great stuff.
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