Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Gran Torino

  Good enough movie with a few plot gaps.  Nice Garand handling by Clint.  The Redhead and I went to see it after lunch with a loose audience of old white people.  Worth seeing.  Plot gaps are the distances between Walt and his sons and family.  His wife would have never permitted that, no matter what Walt was like.  And of course you have to have a couple of deaths to move any plot along, which seems a little tiresome.  The death toll in movies is about 10X what it is in normal life.
  Redhead gives it two thumbs up.  She said she was crying at the end.  I must have been watching the credits and the crowd.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure how you can call the distance in the family a "plot gap".

You never meet the woman, how can you evaluate the influence (or lack thereof) she may have had on Mr. Kowalski's relationship with his children?

My father worked in a factory (Mr. Kowalski work at a Ford plant). He valued overtime and worked 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Needless to say, we didn't have much of a relationship with him. Granted, not as distant as the one depicted in this movie, but I could easily see how it could happen.

I thought it was an excellent movie (although it didn't quite end the way I expected...which isn't necessarily a bad thing) and I don't think the depicted distance between Mr. Kowalski and his kids stretched credibility in the least.

Just my Humble Opinion

Robert Langham said...

Could be. Walt said his wife was the most wonderful thing in the world. Didn't sound like he abused her emotionally or otherwise. I don't think she would allow distance between her and grandchildren. And I think maybe Walt would be a pushover for grandchildren, though I can see him being disapproving of their parents.
But that's the way they wrote it. Could be. Humans nuts enough to do anything. He warmed up to the neighbors enough.

Anonymous said...

Warning: Potential spoilers below if you haven't yet seen the movie!

Rigid, stern, disciplined men (like those that grew up in My father and Mr. Kowalski's generation), often have little patience for those whom they perceive to be lazy, shiftless, undisciplined.

An overworked father who is not around as much as he should be combined with a relatively permissive, albeit "wonderful" mother can result in kids that the father cannot relate to and finds himself distant from.

Even if the father wishes he was closer to his children/grandchildren, they often simply don't know how to accomplish it. They were not raised to be all "mushy" and emotional and simply don't know how to break down those barriers.

As much as they love their kids and grandkids, they see them as spoiled and unappreciative of their hard work and effort that enabled the kids to be spoiled...and simply have trouble relating to them.

Much of my family is/was very similar to what was depicted in the movie (even if not quite to that extreme).

I think that's partly why I enjoyed the movie so much...I could really relate to it based upon my own family experiences.

Getting back to the movie, he originally assumed about the neighborhood families that they were lazy too (probably mainly because they didn't properly care for their homes). He eventually figured out that that was a cultural thing, not laziness. Did you catch the part when the kid was dumbfounded about Mr. Kowalski's tools? It was obvious that having and using tools was not the norm in the immigrant neighbor's culture.

The neighbor kid earned Mr. Kowalski's respect by his work ethic, motivation and appreciation for opportunities...the very traits that Mr. Kowalski failed to see in his own children and grandchildren.

As he gained respect for the kid and his sister, he also began to gain some respect (grudgingly and without really understanding it) for their culture as well.

Because "Real" men respect you for what you are and what you do...not for silly things like the color of your skin, the slant of your eyes or the customs of where you were born.

Which was a major point of the movie; again, in my humble opinion.

Sorry for the dissertation. I just really enjoyed the movie...which is relatively unusual for me regarding the industrial output of Hollywood.

noor said...



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