Clint Eastwood is a genius

Rating: 9/10 (23 March 2009)

I'm not sure I will be able to write anything that is either new or indeed especially interesting, what I can tell you is that Gran Torino the film, is as beautiful as the car which sits in Walt Kowalski's garage.
To see such a brilliant movie made in America, with such a huge name and yet, achieve nothing in the Oscars is such a shame for both the Oscars and indeed the general public who make think this is simply a 78 year old playing a character that should be played by a guy 50 years younger.
Unfortunately, when I saw the trailer, that was exactly what I thought, but then I should have known much better. This decade has been a real high point in the movie-making and acting life of Eastwood and this film underlines his position at the very top of the movie profession.
Gran Torino is quite simply a laugh-out very loud, poignant and dramatic film that is so normally absent in American movie-making. It also has a legend, quite prepared to take the mickey out of himself, indeed even to the point of poking fun at the parent-child relationship, in this case his own real-life one.
It's not perfect, some of the relationships are a bit heavy-handed but then for me that was part of the deal in the film, even this aspect for me makes the film much more charming than if 10 stars were paid $80million to say the same lines slightly better.
The only drawback is to see Thao smile at the end, after all his sister did suffer, badly, but perhaps the end was simply a metaphor of escaping the ghetto life he'd led in the past.