If the point of reading reviews is to decide whether or not one wants to see a given movie, then I guess I am not very up with them - although if every single review is negative (and not in a "good" bad way), then the movie probably really is awful; however, this theory doesn't work well in reverse, because some mediocre movies get universally glowing reviews, and turn out to be total stinking turkostat time and money-wasters - even from people who've done great films in the past (i.e. No Country for Old Men). Oh, thanks for wasting my $20 and 2 1/2 hours, and don't bother to let the door slam your misguided butts on the way out.
However, Clint Eastwood has never, ever, been one of those people, either as an actor or as a filmmaker, and in Gran Torino, he's both. I liked Gran Torino, and if you're a normal Clint Eastwood fan, you'll like it too. There's something fable-ey about Gran Torino, and it weirdly reminded me of another movie that was sweet, corny and crazy that I liked last year - Be Kind, Rewind, which had Jack Black in it, but which was NOT a "Jack Black" movie. Now, there's just a sort of "we can be family even if we are not family" feeling - and that's really the only thing in common between the two films. Be Kind is much more cartoony than Gran Torino. In order to fully-appreciate Gran Torino, it helps to be able to actually appreciate the car. It makes Walt's loathesome granddaughter just that much worse, and his two stuck-up, asinine sons and their horrible wives just that much more hateful. Therefore, when Clint-as-Walt realizes that he has much more in common with his Hmong ("zipperhead") neighbors than he does with his own family, it really will make sense. Because if you know how valuable that Gran Torino really is, and what an amazing tool collection Walt has in his garage, and what it means that he mows his lawn like clockwork with a push-mower, then you're in Walt's corner even if he does know every racial slur known to man - more than me, as a matter of fact. Zipperhead was a new one to me. However, "Still cheating customers, you dago wop son of a bitch?" made sense to me. When the black youth were menacing the young girl Sue, I nearly fell out of my seat laughing when Walt got out of his 1975 Ford F-150 and asked in that Clint Eastwood growl, "What do you spooks think you're doing?"
The entire plot of Philip Roth's book The Human Stain revolved around the black main character, who had all of his life "passed" as a Jew, getting in trouble with his cushy Jew Columbia intellectual professor job because he called two students who had stopped attending class "spooks." (horrible book, made into worse movie).
So there's that ball-free, pussy, pansy world, and then there's Walt and of course he's a walking encyclopedia of racial slurs and if that bothers anyone's sensibilities, then they shouldn't go see Gran Torino.
And a different recent movie that also calls upon days of the past is Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as Col. Claus Von Stauffenberg, the leader of the final plot near the end of WWII to assassinate Adolf Hitler and assume control of the German government while some sort of surrender terms might still be possible with the Allied forces. The most amazing thing about Valkyrie is the very close resemblance between most of the actors and the real-life historical characters they portray. Tom Cruise actually resembles the real Col. Stauffenberg, of whom there were enough pictures to really see there was a resemblance. Even the other characters that were not so well known were cast and played by actors who resembled the men who undertook these heroic (and not-so-heroic - because the movie Goebbels looks exactly like that perverted, toxic weasel). The movie seems to go to great lengths to mirror the real historic events. I think in America, outside of WWII documentaries, the full extent of the plot was presented for the first time by this movie. I know that my previous education consisted of "a guy put a briefcase with a bomb in it right next to Hitler, it went off, but Hitler miraculously survived."
How brave that man was, and how principled, was definitely not included in ordinary education.
There's one thing about the experience of the ordinary German people during WWII, and in this, I'll also include regular army, Luftwaffe and navy - that I do know, that many Americans may not have direct access to. I truly believe that the majority of average German people had no idea of the extent of the horror of the death camps. Ordinary people were told that the Jews and others who were taken away were taken to "work camps" that were portrayed like farms or at least a place where they had lodging, food and were kept reasonably comfortable. People did not have access to independent news - they had at most one or two newspapers available and these had been created and promoted by the Nazis since the 1930's. Radio broadcasts were strictly controlled, and people had very little to go on in order to figure out what was really going on in any regard. To blame average German people, who by 1944 were truly starving and suffering themselves, for knowing about and supporting the Holocaust is wrong. And from what I understand, the motivation of the Valkyrie plotters was to try to erase the shame upon the German people of Hitler's brutal Holocaust and insane, murderous actions.
Just as it is unlikely that a Hitler-like figure would ever arise in America, take the type of control Hitler did in Germany, and carry out such sweeping, insanely destructive and murderous plans, it might be well to reflect that, while this is true here - would we also here have the type of heroes that arose during the Valkyrie plot? Stauffenberg and the others faced their deaths bravely and they knew going in that there was a good chance that their plot would fail, and they would at best have a firing squad to face, and at worst - one of Hitler's two favorite deaths for his enemies after torture - a slow hanging by a narrow wire, or beheading - which apparently Hitler considered somehow shameful.
For this reason alone, Valkyrie is an important movie because it shows that Hitler was a terrible tragedy that Germany and all of Europe and the world suffered - he wasn't the spirit of Germany at all. I'd much rather think that the Valkyrie plotters and the regular German people and the great composers, writers, poets and artists are the spirit of Germany than the affliction on the 20th Century known as Hitler.
But I'm far from an historian. I try to teach my students historical context - of course, not history. So, in Gran Torino, Walt's horrible grandchildren are messing about in his Korea trunk in his basement and fooling with his Silver Star and one says, "What's Korea?" Yeah - "What's Hitler?" "What's Korea?" Yes, it casts all the sacrifices made in a much different light. How lazy, self-centered and selfish can some people be? If guys like the fictional Walt hadn't fought for our freedom in Korea, it would be a different world today. And if the free world and the decent men and women in Germany and across Europe hadn't stood up to Hitler, it would be different, too and I don't mean "different" in the Philip K. Dick sense. But then some people, like Walt said, are just worthless pansies.
