GRAN TORINO: Reviews and Features in the Media

[KC]

Thanks for posting that, Sylvie! The French certainly love the adjective "crepuscular" (a word the Firefox spell check doesn't even recognize) with regard to Clint's late work.

French speakers (at least those of you who don't yet know all the plot details), be advised: The Le Monde review contains a major spoiler.

[higashimori]

   " People should be able to laugh at jokes about different races, says Clint Eastwood "

        http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1155360/People-able-laugh-jokes-different-races-says-Clint-Eastwood.html?ITO=1490

       

Clint Eastwood says he is sick of political correctness and believes the world would be a better place if people could laugh at  inoffensive jokes about different races once more.
In an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, the 78-year-old said people now lived in constant fear of  being accused of verbally treading on people's toes, adding: ' The people have lost their humour.'
Mr Eastwood, who plays a racist character in his new film, claims that political correctness has gone too far.

He said; 'We, in former times, constantly made jokes about different races.

'You can only tell them today with one hand over your mouth otherwise you will be insulted as a racist.

'I find that ridiculous. In those earlier days every friendly clique had a "Sam the Jew" or "José the Mexican" - but we didn't think anything of it or have a racist thought. 

'It was normal that we made jokes based on our nationality or ethnicity. That was never a problem.

'I don't want to be politically correct. We're all spending too much time and energy trying to be politically correct about everything.'
Mr Eastwood was a child during the Great Depression of the 1930's in America and recalls that it 'didn't do our family any good at all.'
He went on: 'We moved every few months because my father constantly lost his job. We did not have much and learned to get along with little.

'If we didn't have a toy we played with bits of wood or old cigar boxes we found somewhere. You had to develop ideas in order to survive.

'People then took fate more into their own hands; today we expect the state to take care of everything.
'I find it really presumptuous that some people compare this crisis with the depression of the 30's. I'm no expert, but that was much more dramatic.'
Mr Eastwood says he is not as euphoric as some of his countrymen about President Obama and believes that the high hopes people have invested in him may prove impossible to realise.

When asked if he is overrated, Mr Eastwood replied: 'Time will tell.'

The screen veteran's latest movie is Gran Torino, in which he plays an embittered Korean War veteran taking on gangs destroying his neighbourhood.

His next project is to make the movie of the Graham Greene classic The Human Factor.

 

[KC]

On Wednesday, Clint made the front page of all three French dailies that I can still buy in New York: Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro.

The Le Monde link was already posted. Here are the others:

"La guerre des Hmong" (Bruno Icher in Libération): Link

"Gran Torino, dernière épreuve de force" (Anthony Palou in Le Figaro): Link

[KC]

The German newsweekly Der Spiegel just ran quite a long interview with Eastwood. There's a quotation from it in a story in the Daily Mail that Higashimori quotes above (and Right Turn Clyde called to our attention in the "Minor Mentions" thread).

For those who read German, the full interview is here:

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,609021,00.html

And here's another quote (my translation):

SPIEGEL: Will the role of Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino be your last performance as an actor?

Eastwood: Ah, I said that after Million Dollar Baby. Perhaps it really was my last role. I'll let myself be surprised. There aren't so incredibly many exciting roles for old men. Sure, I could probably play a butler somewhere or other, but I'm only interested in roles where the character undegoes a transformation. If I come across another one like that, I'll be happy to stand before the camera again. Otherwise, I'm very content to remain behind it.

[KC]

  " People should be able to laugh at jokes about different races, says Clint Eastwood "

        http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1155360/People-able-laugh-jokes-different-races-says-Clint-Eastwood.html?ITO=1490

Higashimori, the text you find when you click the link seems to have been edited since you posted. Your quote is quite a bit longer than the text that's there now, though the English has been improved. Here's all there is there now (I've only removed some of the paragraph breaks):

Clint Eastwood believes the rise of political correctness is no laughing matter. He says the world would be a better place if we could still laugh at inoffensive jokes about different races. The Hollywood actor and director, 78, said we live in constant fear of being labelled racist for simply laughing about national stereotypes.

'People have lost their sense of humour,' he told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine. 'In former times we constantly made jokes about different races. You can only tell them today with one hand over your mouth otherwise you will be insulted as a racist. I find that ridiculous. In those earlier days every friendly clique had a "Sam the Jew" or "Jose the Mexican" - but we didn't think anything of it or have a racist thought. It was normal that we made jokes based on our nationality or ethnicity. That was never a problem.

''I don't want to be politically correct. We're all spending too much time and energy trying to be politically correct about everything.'

His comments come in a week in which BT suspended 30 call centre staff after they had circulated an Irish joke by email. BT, however, insists other serious matters were involved and that a joke was not the sole reason for the suspensions.

EDIT: I just noticed the final paragraph of the original story, as Higashimori quotes it above ... no wonder they eliminated that one.

His next project is to make the movie of the Graham Greene classic The Human Factor.

Oooops ...  wrong "Human Factor"! (By the way, in the Spiegel interview, Eastwood is quoted as saying that production on The Human Factor will start in two weeks.)

[right turn clyde]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-clint-eastwood-shows-how-america-is-changing-1633327.html

[KC]

I moved Right Turn Clyde's post, above, here from the "Minor Mentions" thread (just as a reminder, that thread is basically for items that mention Clint incidentally but are not entirely about him).

It's one of the stupidest, most ill-informed articles I've ever read about Eastwood and his films. The guy seems never to have seen an Eastwood film before Unforgiven; it's his notion that Eastwood spent the first four decades of his film career doing nothing but "cursing liberals, shooting down suspects, and slaying Injuns on screen." He describes his Westerns in the following terms:

Eastwood strutted into the American consciousness in the 1950s in the TV series Rawhide and a string of big-screen Westerns. He caught the tail-end of the uncomplicated Us vs Them cowboy flicks where the Indians were evil, scalping savages who had to be destroyed by the white heroes. The films were gorgeous, romantic accounts of a genocide, told adoringly from the perspective of the genocidaires. The attitude of the genre was typified by John Wayne's jeer: "I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them... the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

Does this sound like any Eastwood film YOU'VE ever seen?

[Lucky Punk]

I moved Right Turn Clyde's post, above, here from the "Minor Mentions" thread (just as a reminder, that thread is basically for items that mention Clint incidentally but are not entirely about him).

It's one of the stupidest, most ill-informed articles I've ever read about Eastwood and his films. The guy seems never to have seen an Eastwood film before Unforgiven; it's his notion that Eastwood spent the first four decades of his film career doing nothing but "cursing liberals, shooting down suspects, and slaying Injuns on screen." He describes his Westerns in the following terms:

Does this sound like any Eastwood film YOU'VE ever seen?

Sadly KC this is standard lazy journalism in the UK. He probably read more Pauline Kael than was good for him. I doubt he ever watched an Eastwood film pre Unforgiven. The standard of middle class "liberal" film critics in the UK is woeful at times. They spend so much of the time reinforcing their own prejudices and agendas that they often neglect to review the movie.

[Gant]

Yeah.. what an @#!hole !

I couldn't believe that article when I read it.. from a paper I usually enjoy...

The journalist.. (loosly put) puts his e-mail address at the bottom of the article.

j.hari@independant.co.uk

I think one of our highly informed members needs to have a word with this guy..

[KC]

You can post comments on the article on the site (you do have to register first). A lot of people have, and several of them are good. The question is whether Mr. Hari will ever see them, or pay any attention to what they have to say if he does. Frankly, I think in this case, a public apology would be in order.

Say, I have an idea ... let's pool our resources and send him a brand-new DVD of The Outlaw Josey Wales ... maybe THAT would do some good.

[Doug]

Wow, what a thing to write an article with absolutely no regard for your facts or reality.  "Go ahead, punk.  Make my day."

I think if that man has rights, then the law's crazy.   

[KC]

^

[Gant]

Send him to the tower....

[Richard Earl]

Say, I have an idea ... let's pool our resources and send him a brand-new DVD of The Outlaw Josey Wales ... maybe THAT would do some good.

That is a good idea KC. Let's show him how Lone Watie was everything that he described in his article.

[Conan]

" People should be able to laugh at jokes about different races, says Clint Eastwood "

  I agree 100 percent.  This is one of the few things I don't miss about living in the U.S..  The political correctness started to get ridiculous around the mid-90s sometime, and it pollutes discussions even beyond race.  I have to sit there and think "ok its not secretary, now its admin assistant".  Its not "trailer" its "mobile home"...etc.

  Its context that really matters.  I can have frank and interesting discussions about race or joke around with friends of different races/backgrounds where I live now, and its great.  Whenever I end up back in the U.S. I'll have to put that damn PC filter back in my head, at least for the office anyway.

 

[Dan Dassow]

Time on Line link

From The TimesFebruary 28, 2009

How Clint Eastwood became a New Man

At 78, Clint Eastwood still likes to play the tough guy but he is also a doting father and a champion of great female roles have a theory about Clint Eastwood, but that's no big deal: everyone has. Even The New Yorker's legendary film critic Pauline Kael - a legend among film critics, if not among real legends like Eastwood - had a theory, and she passionately hated his work. Having once described his Dirty Harry movies as “medieval fascism”, she later wrote that there was no reason to feel embarrassed by anything Eastwood did: “He's so hollow you don't have to feel a thing.” Eastwood's imagination was violent and heartless. Even his Oscar-winning 1992 western, Unforgiven, read by many as a brilliantly subversive adieu to the genre that made his name, had “hornswoggled” the critics. “It was,” she said, “another western in which you were a pacifist until it's necessary for you to start shooting.”

Kael rarely wrote a stupid word but I hope, had she lived, that she might, in the past five years, have eaten some of the above. In his eighth decade his work has matured beyond measure: Million Dollar Baby, an apparently formulaic movie about a female boxer, veers into the dark territory of euthanasia (it won best picture Oscar, and, for Eastwood, best director); his compassionate diptych on the war in the Pacific, Flags of Our Fathers and, from the Japanese side, Letters from Iwo Jima, drains all the colour from heroism; last year's Changeling, for which Angelina Jolie has just missed out on an Oscar, was a Kafkaesque missing-child drama in which the unflinching protagonist was a woman.

Now comes Gran Torino. I won't give away its ending, and it is not a western, but Kael's line about being a pacifist until it's necessary to start shooting is precisely reversed in Gran Torino. In it, Eastwood, who directs himself, plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet whose neighbourhood goes to hell - in his embarrassing opinion - with the arrival of Hmong immigrants. Eventually, Walt discovers that his Asian neighbours make a much better family than his own. ...

His tanned face is 15 years younger than it looks on screen. That cyst above his mouth which can look tuberous enlarged on the screen, is barely visible. Eastwood is not only ageing well, but obviously good at ageing up. The question is whether Eastwood has wised up, caught up with the critical re-evaluations of his “meaning”. His education, fractured by his family moves round California in search of work during the Depression, may have left him with a fear of intellectuals, but for a long time now, Eastwood, who now has five Oscars that bear his name, has attracted the attention not only of the Academy but the “academy”.

Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art who has written books on Eastwood and Sergio Leone, the director of his early spaghetti westerns, sees Gran Torino as an “interrogation” of the revenge ethic of the Dirty Harry movie. Eastwood, he thinks, made Gran Torino in the spirit John Wayne made The Shootist, a film in which the fantasy shootouts of his career were trumped by the reality of the protagonist's terminal cancer. The theory has much going for it. Walt too, we may note, coughs up blood. Another critic identified Walt Kowalski as “Dirty Harry gone mangy, even rabid.” The trouble is Eastwood denies that Kowalski is even a distant relative of Dirty Harry Callahan and gives every impression that he has not seen The Shootist for a very long time.

“I don't know about that,” he drawls. “I know everyone is trying to make it analogous to something. I have played guys who are hard-ass characters before - but what I liked about the character of Walt is that he had somewhere to go, to change. And I also like the comments about the young generations trying to get the old people into assisted living schemes so they can put them out of the way.” ...

“Every one of these films seems to have elements of family or searching for family,” Eastwood agrees. “Even as far back as The Outlaw Josey Wales [in 1976] there was a man building a family around him and in Bronco Billy [1980] I was building a family out of an obsolete Wild West show. There is a family element that takes place in all these pictures and I guess if I was writing about myself I would point out that was an ongoing thing.”

He pauses, just as it is getting interesting. “But I don't write about myself and I try not to think too much about myself either.”

The reason that may be is that it would be too painful. Only his children can say how good a father he was, but he failed most of them in the crucial respect of remaining faithful to their mothers. The exception is Dina, his current wife and mother to his 11-year-old daughter, who married him knowing he already had six children by four women. His unauthorised biographer, Patrick McGilligan, calls this a “conservative estimate”. After all, Eastwood's oldest daughter Kimber - born to an extra on his Sixties TV horse opera Rawhide while he was married to his first wife, Maggie Johnson - was publicly acknowledged as his only in 1989. His personal life may be stable now, and he credits Dina for weaving his children into an extended family, but for decades it was chaos.

A critic, I remind him, called Million Dollar Baby “close to a confession from a man who doubts if he has been an ideal father”. He looks me in the eye, but not as if he is about to take aim. “I don't know about the parenting not being ideal. Every family has its problems and some people are better at it than others, but no one is an expert. There are people who are very good at it but there is no book on how to be really good. It is trial and error. Everybody has things they would do differently if they could get to redo it.”

Is he a strict father? “I don't have to be because my wife is so strict. Consequently my youngest daughter is always saying, ‘Daddy is the only one who understands me'. So we laugh about that a lot, my wife and I.” ...

His recollection picture recalls Changeling, the Twenties-set film based on the true story of a boy abducted after being left alone by his working mother, Christine Collins. Was Ruth Eastwood at all like her, dignified, elegant, but determined? “Yes, pretty much. She didn't look like Angelina Jolie. My mother was attractive and the real Christine Collins was not unattractive - but she was not like Angelina Jolie either.”

Few women are, we agree. In fact, Jolie's casting is exceptional for an Eastwood movie. Although Eastwood has often had affairs with members of his cast - leading ladies have included his long-term lovers, Sondra Locke and Frances Fisher - he has repeatedly hired actresses who are not, by Hollywood standards, glamorous. The unconventional looks of Ahney Her, the Asian teenager in Gran Torino, follow Hilary Swank's in Million Dollar Baby, Kay Lenz's in Breezy and Jessica Walter's in his directorial debut, Play Misty for Me. He says “picking a babe” would have sent Gran Torino in a different direction.  ...

And my theory? It is that, whatever Pauline Kael believed, there has been more thought and care and cunning in Clint Eastwood's films than there has been in his life. Originally, the movies took his fantasies for a canter, now they rein them in. Art, as we know, is there to re-order life until it makes sense; in his case there was much to re-order. But that's just my theory. As I now accept, The Man with No Name remains The Man with No Theory.

Gran Torino is out now on general release.

 

[KC]

That's a very good interview. I recommend clicking the link and reading the whole thing. Thanks, Dan!

[higashimori]

   " Gran Torino Becomes Clint Eastwood's Grandest Three-Day Weekend in the UK and Ireland "

        http://www.itnews.it/news/2009/0302195601582/gran-torino-becomes-clint-eastwood-s-grandest-three-day-weekend-in-the-uk-and-ireland.html

         

LONDON, March 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Gran Torino, which has attained the highest gross at the U.S. box office of any film in legendary actor/director Clint Eastwood's filmography, is also a career best in the UK with the biggest three-day opening of his career. Gran Torino made GBP1,351,278 in the UK this weekend. In Ireland, where after its second weekend the film remains at the top of the box office, Gran Torino has accrued GBP729,768, losing only 14% box office share week on week.
Gran Torino has scored $138 million at the U.S. box office and is still growing. The film is directed by Eastwood, who stars as an iron-willed Korean War veteran who is forced by his immigrant neighbors to confront his own long-held prejudices.
The film's U.S. gross tops the list of pictures directed by and/or starring Eastwood, including In the Line of Fire ($102m), the Oscar-winning Unforgiven ($101m) and Million Dollar Baby ($100m), Space Cowboys ($90m), Every Which Way But Loose ($85m), Mystic River ($90m) and The Bridges of Madison County ($71.5m).
In the U.S., Gran Torino opened for a three-week limited run, during which it landed on a number of year-end ten best lists, with Eastwood's performance and the film's screenplay winning awards from the National Board of review, among other accolades. The film expanded to general release on January 9 and raced to the top of the weekend box office, earning a record-breaking $29.5m and becoming the biggest-ever opening for an Eastwood film as well as the biggest-ever 3-day January opening.
Warner Bros. Pictures presents, in association with Village Roadshow Pictures, a Double Nickel Entertainment, a Malpaso Production, Gran Torino. The film is directed by Clint Eastwood from a screenplay by Nick Schenk, story by Dave Johannson & Nick Schenk. Eastwood, Robert Lorenz and Bill Gerber are the producers, with Jenette Kahn, Adam Richman, Tim Moore and Bruce Berman serving as executive producers. The film stars Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her, Christopher Carley, John Carroll Lynch, Brian Haley, Geraldine Hughes, Brian Howe and William Hill.
The creative behind-the-scenes team is led by Eastwood's longtime collaborators: director of photography Tom Stern, production designer James J. Murakami, editors Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, and costume designer Deborah Hopper. The music is by Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens, orchestrated and conducted by Lennie Niehaus. The title song for "Gran Torino" is performed by British jazz singer/pianist Jamie Cullum and Don Runner. It was co-written by Eastwood; Cullum; the director's son, Kyle Eastwood; and Kyle's writing partner, Michael Stevens.
Gran Torino is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, and in select territories by Village Roadshow Pictures. http://www.grantorinomovie.co.uk

 

[Christopher]

$138 million in the U.S. now! Pretty good. I hadn't checked in a while.

[higashimori]

   " Dirty Harry goes out with a blast "

        http://www.theherald.co.uk/goingout/films/display.var.2491735.0.Dirty_Harry_goes_out_with_a_blast.php

       

At the age of 78, Clinton Eastwood Jr, plain Clint to his generations of fans, is still young enough for a run at the US presidency. Instead, that stint as mayor of Carmel aside, the four-time Oscar winner is content to leave politics to the suits and go on making films, Gran Torino being his latest.

Yet this is part of the charm of Gran Torino. Eastwood is a straight- shooter among filmmakers. That's not to say he can't weave a complex story or handle difficult ideas.

You only need to watch his majestic Second World War dramas, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, to see he can match any young filmmaker for depth and creative vision.

Gran Torino is hand-crafted, traditionally fashioned filmmaking, as opposed to the flashy, machine-tooled fare on offer elsewhere.

Respectful of its audience and its actors, it doesn't take the viewer anywhere awe-inspiring, but you are glad to have come along on such a smooth ride.

Eastwood admirers will have noticed a Gran Torino-shaped hole in the Oscars this year, with not a single nomination for the movie.

For now, his filmmaking style is out of fashion, with Academy voters preferring the flash of Slumdog Millionaire or the pomposity of The Reader. In America, however, Gran Torino has given Eastwood his biggest box office hit to date.

British audiences, feeling lucky because it's Clint, will follow.