♥♥♥♥♥♥
+ Best Movie of the Year
+ Best American Movie of the Year + Best Car Movie of the Year + Best Crime-Drama of the Year + Best Mega-hit Movie of the Year
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| One of cinema's biggest stars ever looks reprovingly at us with a rifle before his title car on this poster for Clint Eastwood's own Gran Torino |
Walt Kowalski is a Korea War veteran and retired car plant worker in Detroit who has just lost his wife. His sons want to move him to a home for the old. His neighbors are Asians of a culture Kowalski doesn't know. And the local church father wants him to confess his sins.
Gran Torino is written by Nick Schenk (The Judge (2014)), with Dave Johannson contributing story elements, and directed by Californian master filmmaker Clint Eastwood (Play Misty for Me (1971)), whose 29th feature it is.
Eastwood is brilliant and seems to end his on-screen career in the rightest way possible here, - although the movie wasn't his last as an actor. (The legend had a great co-starring performance in Trouble with the Curve (2012)) and a probably last starring turn in the fine The Mule (2018).) His movie star tough guy, super independent vigilante persona, however, comes beautifully full circle in Gran Torino.
Schenk's dialog is ingenious, and Gran Torino is that rare vehicle that is both tremendously funny, entertaining and dramatically charged: It is about important themes: Prejudice, tolerance, knowing right from wrong, taking a stand and standing up straight, but most importantly, it is about what it means to be a real man.
Together with Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road, Gran Torino was my greatest cinema experience in 2008. Both are American masterpieces.
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Letters from Iwo Jima/硫黄島からの手紙 [Öjima Kara no Tegami] (2006) - The Japanese side of Eastwood's remarkable WWII two-parter
Flags of Our Fathers (2006) - Eastwood's Iwo Jima portrayal is captivating and profoundly moving
The Dead Pool (1988) - The highly entertaining last Dirty Harry movie (starring actor)
City Heat (1984) - Eastwood and Reynolds wrestle dispassionately in Benjamin's messy period affair (co-starring actor)
Tightrope (1984) - An undervalued Clint Eastwood sex killer thriller (starring actor)
Any Which Way You Can (1980) or, More Monkey Business! (starring actor)
Escape from Alcatraz (1979) - Siegel, Tuggle and Eastwood's phenomenal prison escape thriller (starring actor)
Every Which Way but Loose (1978) or, Honky Tonk Monkey Business! (starring actor)
The Enforcer (1976) - Eastwood teaches revolutionaries a lesson in third, less punchy Dirty Harry (starring star)
The Eiger Sanction (1975) - Eastwood's mountain climbing dud
The Beguiled (1971) - Intense, erotic Civil War kammerspiel thriller (starring actor)
Dirty Harry (1971) - Eastwood's great, signature renegade cop character comes to life (starring actor)
Coogan's Bluff (1968) or, Dopes and Hippies, Beat It! (starring actor)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) - Leone ends his poncho trilogy with certified classic (starring actor)
For a Few Dollars More/Per Qualche Dollaro in Più (1965) or, Return of the Poncho Killer (co-starring actor)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964) or, Killer in a Poncho (starring actor)
Cost: Estimated 33 mil. $
Box office: 269.9 mil. $
= Mega-hit (returned 8.17 times its cost)
[Gran Torino premiered December 9 (California) and runs 116 minutes. According to Schenk, he had had the basic idea since the early 1990s and wrote the script in a bar in Minneapolis; he says 'not a syllable' was changed in the script, when it was sold. The scene was changed from Minneapolis to Detroit, partly for a newly instated 42 % tax credit there. A large cast of amateur Laos Hmong actors were employed for the film for the first time in mainstream film history. Shooting took place for just 5 weeks in Michigan, including Detroit from July - ? 2008. The film opened #20 for a 271k $ weekend in 6 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #1 and in 3,045 theaters (different weeks), staying another 4 weeks in the top 5 (#2-#2-#3-#5) and grossing 148 mil. $ (54.8 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were France with 27.8 mil. $ (10.3 %) and Spain with 19 mil. $ (7 %). It was Eastwood's highest-grossing film to date, since then surpassed by his American Sniper (2014). The film was nominated for a Golden Globe, won an AFI award, a César award, a David di Donatello award and 3 National Board of Review awards, among other honors, but was missed completely by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Roger Ebert gave it a 3.5/4 star review, translating to a notch harder than this one. Vocal debate flourished among the Hmong minority and other Asian groups following the release with some in favor of the portrayal and some critical. In excess of 4 mil. DVD copies and 332k Blu-rays were sold in the North-American home video market were sold, accruing further 72.4 mil. $. IMDb's users have voted the film in at #176 on the site's Top 250, sitting between Stalker (1979) and The Truman Show (1998). Eastwood returned with Invictus (2009) as director and in Trouble with the Curve (2012) as an actor. Gran Torino is certified fresh at 81 % with a 7.12/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Gran Torino?
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