Posted on 01/31/2009 7:09:46 AM PST by this is my country
What are we to make of a movie that is named after a car? If it's The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or The Love Bug (both of 1968), Cadillac Man (1990) or, simply Cars (2006), we can expect comedy or romance or kiddie fantasy but nothing of serious purport. Back in 1989 Clint Eastwood starred in Pink Cadillac, supposedly a screwball comedy though I wouldn't know. Like an overwhelming majority of movie-goers, I didn't see it. Now Mr. Eastwood is back, this time as director as well as star, and he's got a much bigger success with Gran Torino. But even though there are lots of jokes in it -- most of them racial slurs transformed into comedy by passing through the gums of the lovable but now very old Clint Eastwood -- it's not supposed to be a funny movie. If only it were! Instead, like most of the later Eastwood -- since, say, Pink Cadillac -- it sinks under the weight of its own moral portentousness. Perhaps the centrality of the car has something to do with the animistic religion practiced by the Hmong neighbors of Clint's character, a curmudgeonly widower and retired Ford worker named Walt Kowalski, in his run-down neighborhood of Detroit. As in Million Dollar Baby there is a Roman Catholic priest (Christopher Carley) meant to serve as Mr. Eastwood's foil who, though the latter describes him as an "overeducated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life," gets off a lot easier than the priest in the earlier movie. Like him, however, he stands for the director's disgust with conventional Western religion. By contrast, a Laotian shaman who tells his fortune is treated with respect, as are
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
sorry about the double post, have to figure out how that happened...
Idiot.
$118 Million, and counting. And this from a late release, not pushed, and overlooked by the Oscar Committee, self financed “project”.
BTW, Mr. Eastwood owns the movie. Now, tell us again, who’s the loser?
My big regret is that “The Dark Knight Returns” graphic novel was not made into a movie with Clint as the aging Batman. He would have been great in it.
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