I remember dragging Jon to see Sudden Impact. I think it offended every bone in his body–but we had a good time, in the bad ol' days of Eastwood's career.

I remember dragging Jon to see Sudden Impact. I think it offended every bone in his body–but we had a good time, in the bad ol' days of Eastwood's career.

I remember dragging Jon to see Sudden Impact. I think it offended every bone in his body–but we had a good time, in the bad ol' days of Eastwood's career.

To me, Gran Torino was a recitation of the themes of this essay, splayed out over two often-excruciating hours–like Clint's career, it starts out lean and (for me, overly) mean, before taking a sudden turn and barrelling headlong toward a too-obvious redemption. The difference, of course, is in the quality of the product–Clint's early career, which you love a lot more than I do, at least involved vision and myth and iconography, while the opening half of Gran Torino is about as hackneyed a portrait of supposedly excusable old-school racism as I've ever seen.

For the life of me, I can't figure out the grousing about Clint being denied an Oscar nomination. For half the movie I thought I was watching a rejected Sling Blade audition (and the similarities between the two films don't end with the inexplicable grunting). Even when he's using actual words, the script is a burlap sack that even a professional actor (much less the amateurs) couldn't act his way out of. Clint, legendary for creating characters of few words who express all they need to with…well…squints, talks to himself more than any ostensibly sane person I've ever seen in the movies.

One thing, though, Bob–get off The Reader. It's a fine film, and Hannah Schmitz is now and forever my all-time favorite NILF. If loving her is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

You never quite know what you're going to get with an Eastwood movie, even if they follow a formula seen a thousand times. Unforgiven is one of my favorite movies, not because it's a new twist on the Clint formula but because of how earnest it is. I also like Gran Torino a lot, despite the numerous scripting and acting issues.

I think his recent “two movies a year” mantra has demonstrated what I'm saying. Flags and Changeling weren't very well received, while the movies he made almost as an afterthought (Letters and Gran Torino) were greeted with warmth. It's because his better films are the ones in which you don't quite know what to expect.