Gran Torino

Walt Kawalski (Clint Eastwood) is a war-hardened, bitter old man living in an old Detroit suburb, which is slowly being overrun by a variety of immigrants. The majority of those immigrants are Hmong, an ethnicity that encompasses certain Chinese, Vietnamese, and Laotian peoples. Walt is a veteran of the Korean War, rendering his previous interactions with Asians not exactly positive. Walt’s wife has passed away at the beginning of the film and his children and their families arrive to mourn with him. Walt is extremely disappointed in everything he sees of his family, often grunting in displeasure to himself. Father Janovich, Mrs. Kawalski’s priest, approaches Walt after the proceedings, informing him that she made the Reverend promise to get Walt into Confession. Walt, uninterested in the church, tells him that he knows nothing about life and death, and sends him away.

One of Walt’s Hmong young neighbors, Thao, is being viciously bullied by a racist Asian gang in the neighborhood, and they convince him to join their ranks. His initiation is to steal Walt’s beloved 1972 Ford Gran Torino (the film’s namesake), something Walt doesn’t take to kindly to. He prevents the theft, and sends Thao packing. The gang returns to harass Thao at home, but Walt comes by with his M1 Garand, uttering “Get off my lawn”, and the gang hightails it out of there. Walt is seen as the hero of the neighborhood, and the Hmong people begin showering him with food and foliage, another thing Walt doesn’t appreciate. Soon though, Walt starts to warm up to his neighbors, and begins protecting them from various groups of less than savory people.


I went into this movie very excited. I had the highest expectations for it. Everything I heard from other reviews, from the trailer, from people I knew told me that this movie would be a cut above the rest. And I wasn’t disappointed.

This American drama rocks in all aspects. Clint Eastwood plays the part of the most badass 72 year old action hero in cinema, and Eastwood’s writing and directing are superb.

The tone in the first two acts of the film is largely comedic. There’s just something about watching an old crotchety white man refer to varying ethnic groups by some of the worse names imaginable that’s incredibly funny. And the name calling isn’t reserved for the Asians. Being an Italian, I can inform you that Walt refers to his barber as an “old Italian prick” and a “cheap doo-wop dago.”. His bartender returns in kind with “pollock sonova bitch” in some good friendly ribbing.

The final act, and the foreshadowing that leads to it, is phenomenal. I can’t really tell you everything that was good about the end without giving it up. Suffice it to say that it was powerful, and one of the most meaningful movies I have seen in a while.

Final verdict? See it in the theatre very soon. These kinds of movie don’t impact you the same way on DVD, I’ve noticed. It’s touching, it’s funny, it’s emotional, I even nearly cried at one point. If there was a star rating system here at Hindsight Alloys, and it was out of five stars, I’d do something ridiculous and give it five and a half stars.

Punisher War Zone

My friend is a huge fan of the Max Punisher series written by Garth Ennis. He loves the ultraviolence, and he loves the horribly black humor. He is disappointed, though, by the attempts to put Punisher on the big screen, especially the recent adaptation with Thomas Jane and John Travolta in it. So when the first screens and trailers started popping up for Punisher War Zone, in which our gun-happy Frank Castle is played by an older-looking man named Ray Stevenson, he got pretty excited.

From the trailers, it looked like it was trash, just a lot of blood and gore and bad music. So of course, being a fan of such things, I went along with him to see it.

There's not much plot to speak of. There never was much in the comics. Frank Castle's family was killed in the crossfire of a gang shooting going on in the park, and Frank lost his mind, picked up some guns, donned a black shirt with a skull on the front, and started killing every single criminal he came across while avoiding being arrested. Character development? What's that? Sure, we see Frank get all pissed and brooding when he accidently shoots down an undercover FBI agent, and we get to see his softer side when he's around the aforementioned dead FBI guy's wife and daughter, but that's about it. I know my friend does not read the comics for some kind of Shakespearian, life-changing experience. He just wants the blood and violence, and so did I.

That said, this movie is VERY violent, with lots of hilariously gory deaths. I can't decide which I enjoyed more, the guy getting a chair leg shoved through his face early in the movie (it shows the clip in the red band trailer if you look it up) or the guy somersaulting through the air getting blown to pieces by a rocket while his two buddies look on in horror. Both kills seem to defy the laws of physics (as do many of the deaths in this film), but I don't care. There's more to pick from, as the movie has a high bodycount. It's great, and it's entertaining for sick people like myself.

The soundtrack is terrible. There was a particular, childish thing that would play in almost every scene with the little girl, and I wanted to stab my eardrums with something every time I heard it. The heavy metal bits they picked for the soundtrack too are quite terrible. But it's made tolerable by all the gunshots and screaming.

I think Ray Stevenson is the best Punisher role I've encountered. No, I never saw the other two movies (and people forget the 80's Dolph Lundgren movie even happened), but Ray is how I always thought Frank Castle should be: quiet, calculating, swift and to-the-point in his kills, an older man with a sly jet-black sense of humor, and decked out in body armor and guns. Well, okay, the hanging upside-down from a spinning chandelier shooting up mobsters bit in the beginning was a bit too much, but everything else he does, he gets right. The fact that he's a bit older-looking is great, too. And did I mention I like the body armor?

The main villain in this one is Jigsaw, a gangster who got his face ripped to shreds after Frank dropped him into a big...glass recycling machine...thing, and turned it on. Hoo boy was that painful to look at. What exactly it is he's doing isn't clear, something about a new crazy drug and a deal with the Russians, but mostly he's out to get revenge on Punisher for fucking his face up, and he wants to kill the wife and daughter of dead FBI man, thinking they have money that he's missing. Or something. Plot? What's that? That said, the guy who plays Jigsaw puts on a show. He hams it up and, like his fellow gangsters, speaks in the worst clichéd Bronx accent known to man. His brother "Loony Bin Jim" isn't much better, but they're both kind of entertaining. It's just...I was expecting someone more threatening, more vile, someone who actually posed more of a threat to Frank. But then we wouldn't have gotten that wonderful scene of Jigsaw delivering a motivational "let's team up and kill the Punisher" speech to a gang of black thugs while a screen with a billowing American flag plays in the background, and that for me was a highlight of the movie.

All that said, Punisher Warzone is precisely what I was expecting (and hoping for): Ultraviolent, trashy cinema with a lot of dark laughs. It isn't the greatest movie ever, it will not win any awards, unless someone out there offers an award for the greatest amount of terrible neon lighting ever used in a film, which there are copious amounts of.

So it depends on your tastes, but really, you could do a whole lot worse. You could go see Twilight or some shit.

[Brett]