Hacker Cinema
Gran Torino
2008 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Disgruntled Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski sets out to reform his neighbor, Thao Lor, a Hmong teenager who tried to steal Kowalski's prized possession: a 1972 Gran Torino.
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18 comments on Hacker News
I'd actually put one in for Clint Eastwood.
Although most popular knowledge about him revolves around his earlier acting career (Westerns, Dirty Harry), you'll notice a distinct change in many of his films once he started directing.
* Play Misty for Me
* Breezy
* Unforgiven
* A Perfect World
* The Bridges of Madison County
* Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
* Mystic River
* Million Dollar Baby
* Changeling
* Gran Torino
* American Sniper
* Sully
* The Mule
You're looking for story-driven movies and setting the bar at Shawshank, which is IMDB's all-time most popular movie, so that's kind of a tall order.
You're also rattling off three movies that have almost nothing to do with each other. Banshees of Inisherin in particular isn't a crowd-pleasing movie. To stick with Martin McDonagh, check out In Bruges or Three Billboards. I didn't like American Sniper either (it's Temu Hurt Locker), but sticking with Clint Eastwood, check out Gran Torino.
For a funny take on this, see the movie "Gran Torino", where two people excoriate each other viciously, until we the audience discover that they are actually two close friends.
Sadly, in our modern world people are not only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.
Kubrick’s results were all over the map. He made maybe three great films:
Dr. Strangelove
Full Metal Jacket
A Clockwork Orange
A bunch of not bad films:
2001
Lolita
Barry Lyndon
The Shining
Spartacus
One real turd of a film:
Eyes Wide Shut
And a bunch of forgettable filler:
All the other films he made.
Compare this to the Anti-Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, who made:
Unforgiven
Mystic River
Million Dollar Baby
Letters From Iwo Jima
Gran Torino
And a bunch of okay films:
Pretty much everything else
And it’s pretty obvious that you don’t need to be an abusive taskmaster like Kubrick to make great art.
The movie Gran Torino came out when I was twenty, and in seeing it, I heard many racial slurs uttered in context for the first time. I was, of course, familiar with the "main" ones, but the one in particular that I remember was "spook". I remember it vividly because, upon hearing it, I had an immediate realization that I had heard it before when it was said near the end of Back To The Future (the scene where Marvin Berry and the Starlighters chase off Biff's gang).
In my youthful innocence I had assumed the characters in the movie were trading silly, made-up names (e.g. "Who are you calling "sparky", Popeye?"), not racial epithets.
The fact that this list needs to exist makes me sad, but I am glad technology can assist on some level with the issue.
It’s banter in the style of the barbershop scene from the 2008 film ‘Gran Torino’:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=74I7Nl1mKig
May I interest you in seeing the movie "Gran Torino"? Granted, it is a movie, but it wouldn't be funny if there wasn't truth to it.
Is that with or without a carbine? (a-la movie: Gran Torino)
I was just thinking that they recently got some good content added.
These were all added this month: Batman Begins, Clerks, Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, No Reservations, Stripes, The Aviator, and The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire Comedians in Cars series is a lot of fun. Heat, The Godfather, Gangs of New York, Casino, and Seven.
Maybe you're bored of all that, but it's not like the films on Netflix are universally terrible.
The Shootist was one, if not the, first John Wayne movies I can remember watching as a kid. At the time I took the movie at face value wanting to be like Gillom learning to shoot. As an adult watching it I can see the truth of the story: the pain of an old man wanting to leave life in a manner of his choosing, and being disappointed that in the end he could not control it.
Sure, most of his characters were macho, misogynistic, and perhaps a touch racist, but was that his portrayal of the character drawn from his knowledge of what got him jobs, the writers, or perhaps both? Maybe he was simply the victim of type-casting. We see type-casting a lot these days: Keira Knightley seems stuck with period-piece roles, Jim Carrey is one of the go-to guys in the comedy realm, Jennifer Aniston is perpetually the ditsy girl, and it just goes on from there. Certain actors and actresses seem destined to play only a single type of role because of their looks. It's as true then as it is now. You could argue that these people accept the roles so they're as much to blame as the casting agents, but if the only roles they're offered are these type-casted ones who's really to blame? Sorry, I digress.
To me the story of Gran Torino is very similiar to that of The Shootist. It's been updated for the times, but at its core it's still about an old man tutoring a young boy and choosing how he'll die. Is the Clint Eastwood story better? I think that depends on who you ask. Is the character of Walt Kowalski better than J.B. Books? That depends on your definition of better. I believe there are things to learn from both characters and both stories. And while these things may not always be good, they are still important to know.
> His characters were always divorced ( and possibly misogynist ) , lousy fathers and frankly, assholes. I think that's the charm - the character could say what's on his mind. Embittered, more or less tired of life. Somebody who'd paid the price for all that violence and hubris. This was pretty outrageous at the time.
That's part of the reason I love old-man Clint Eastwood movies - Gran Torino and Heartbreak Ridge, especially.
Also, I think The Shootist is the best John Wayne exemplar of this. And one of the best John Wayne movies, period.
> You wouldn't catch many 20 and 30 years old dead in something like Comic-Con 30 years ago.
BayCon has been around for 30 years. Before that, the niche interests just change -- my dad and his friends have been dressing up in 20s garb and driving 20s cars to period events since the 60s. There are Civil War re-enactments and sex clubs and costume parties and all sorts of things.
And anyway, making those things into an indictment of society at large is silly, especially when there are so many trivially easy indictments of society (like the way everyone always thinks this generation is worse than the ones before it).
> Something like "The Searchers" is an order of magnitude more poignant and challenging than Iron Man or Avengers.
Are you being disingenuous, or did you not realize you're cherry-picking here? Spaghetti Westerns and shoot-em-ups and grindhouse films and silent comedies have all occupied a place as entertainment alongside more serious films, and "serious" films, if that's what you're into, are still alive and well.
Try comparing Laurel and Hardy's "A Perfect Day" to The Avengers while comparing The Searchers to, I dunno, Gran Torino or Million Dollar Baby or Interstellar or whatever your poison.
> Just that those kind of movies (and even more naive "action" movies) are prevalent today with the 20-40 demographic, something which wasn't the case in decades past.
And my point is that he's wrong, and history proves it.
This is just a classic rose-colored glasses problem, that's all. People are imagining history as they prefer to imagine it, not as it was.
This page has a picture of the nonexistent 20-40 year olds turning out to see Stan Laurel in 1947: http://www.nwemail.co.uk/memories/stan-at-queen-s-first-royal-variety-show-1.1015949
"When one goes, as I did recently, to a city like Chicago and finds on the South Side, a district equivalent to New York’s Harlem, a two-million-dollar building of a magnificence housing nothing but photoplays, and sees over four thousand people packed in, watching and listening and obviously amused and thrilled, he asks what all this means, and admits, unless he is a Dumbkopf, the coming in of a new order. Particularly is he amazed and bewildered when, in the same city, he witnesses a brilliant spoken farce-comedy, deftly played by distinguished actors, given before half-empty benches – yet in the very heart of the town. What is one to say in the light of such over-whelming evidence? Simply that something has entered the world, suddenly, which grips the people, appeals to them, rivets their attention, and drives them out of the old established theatres."
That was written in 1921.
Context at https://nenaghsilentfilmfestival.wordpress.com/category/friday-facts/
A few of my personal favorites:
Joint Security Area and Old Boy - two movies of totally different style from brilliant Korean director Park Chan-wook
A Separation - an excellent Iranian family drama, great actors, a surprising script, my personal favorite from the last few years
Reservoir Dogs - and almost all Tarantino movies
Gran Torino - Clint's beautiful farewell
The Celebration - Dark comedy/drama, the highpoint of Danish Dogme 95 movement for me
Actually...You should care...Americans are fucking racist, but they think being racists with asians it's not trully racism. ( just look at movies like gran torino )
Thousands overall maybe, but the number of mass market films is in the hundreds.
I, personally, have a familiar definition of "mass market film". I grew up in a small town with about nine total screens, usually one movie per screen and one screen per movie. Figure they turn over 4 screens per week for new releases. That's 208 movies per year. You'd need 3-4 more doublings to get it over 1000, so it's pretty clear that "hundreds" is the better order of magnitude.
I picked a year at random: 2008. The following movies were all released in 2008: The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, In Bruges, Kung Fu Panda, Gran Torino, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and Quantum of Solace. Your average moviegoer will easily remember more than "one or two" of those (though not necessarily the same ones).
So the proportion goes from two in a thousand to maybe five in 250, or from 1 in 500 to 1 in 50.
"So what have they done lately?"
Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:
Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
It depends on where you live. Some people can pay a few bucks a month for netflix and put an AppleTV in every room giving them access to a tremendous amount of content without having to deal with physical media.
You mostly only pay for what you use and the clients (AppleTV's or other media players) are rarely much over $100 each.
Storage is incredibly cheap for the things you have yourself.
It's much like the movie Gran Torino where Walt has a garage filled with tools. He aquired them over time. That is the way I have aquired media that now resides on my server.
"He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40."
This phrase comes from watching too much Eastwood (Gran Torino ~ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1205489/) The idea behind it is you can jury-rig/fix almost anything with WD40 & duct tape alone without the need for fancy expensive tools.