Gran Torino

What hath Clint wrought? Gran Torino wants to be taken seriously only this is B-grade exploitation performed as a black comedy posing as Oscar bait. And who better than to conduct a B-movie campaign than Clint Eastwood? Gran Torino is more Play Misty for Me than Million Dollar Baby. Gran Torino uses conventions more familiar to Dirty Harry than to Pink Cadillac. In other words Gran Torino plays best as an occasionally hilarious parody of revenge films. To take Gran Torino too highly with expectations of high platitudes is to be overloaded on hot air.
Warner Brothers carefully released Gran Torino slowly over the period of a month, building word of mouth and then going wide January 9 with top results. But the marketability of a film bears little resemblance to its substance. Eastwood goes around grunting, muttering and squinting like a senior citizen version of Harry Callahan, Clint's fascist cop franchise from the 70s. Playing Walt Kowalski a retired Detroit auto worker, Eastwood builds on cliche after cliche: his children want to put him in an old folks home, the family next door hates him as much for his racism as the fact that Walt's just a kind of asshole in general, Walt takes the next door neighbor's punk kid, Thao (not always convincing newcomer Bee Vang) under his wing, Walt takes on the Asian thugs who taunt Thao and his family. One's ability to engage in the screen's antics depends on how much you want to roll with Clint's lazy mise en scene. Clint is definitely in his comfort zone, this is not a difficult role for him to play or direct.
We first meet Walt squinting and fuming at the church service for his wife's funeral. Walt appears to hate everyone around him from the priest to his granddaughter. Eventually Gran Torino will be a home drinking game. You take a shot every time Walt says chink or gook or zipper head when describing his neighbors. There are some truly uproarious sequences, most having Walt in a showdown with area blacks, asians, and the priest (Father Janovich a not always convincing Christopher Carley). Although the funniest scene takes place at the barber shop.
Barber Martin (John Carroll Lynch) and Walt share salty dialogue in an earlier scene and later on Walt decides to man-up Thao by showing him how men talk. Clint the actor is filming himself as Clint the director as he tells Thao "Now go back out and come in and talk like a real man." Clint the director goes beyond breaking down any fourth wall as the whole sequence has a improvisational, practically jazzy, feel.
Gran Torino constantly escalates in terms of violence until a not quite predictable ending that still qualifies as cliche Hollywood storytelling. Gran Torino is really good at cliche.

The Unborn

Somewhere between Nazi twin experiments and the ten-strong-circle Kabbalah influenced exorcism The Unborn hooked me. That's not good or bad, it's just weird. Waltzing a thin line between the PG-13 and R rated gulf this evil twin dybbuk monster movie starts to pay off around the time Gary Oldman, playing the world's easiest going rabbi, shows off, er up to help young adult hottie Casey (Odette Yustman).
As written and directed by David Goyer it feels like the movie he got to helm as pay off for his work on The Dark Knight (story credit). Like TDK The Unborn takes place in Chicago and features Oldman. Other established thesps pop up like Jane Alexander and James Remar, and Carla Gugino to balance the now factor of Yustman and her BFF Meagan Good. The woman next to me screamed twice but those were the easy scares that Goyer gets by quick cuts to a freaky deaky kid with strange eyes hopping out of a mirror. More subtle is the creepy atmosphere that surrounds the translation of a really old book in Hebrew that provides a recipe to banish the dybbuk demon.
So do the dogs with upside down heads and mirror reflections seem unrealistic? Not really, they exist in the supernatural world Casey has been allowed to see. What got me was how easy Casey was able to walk the ancient, large and obviously rare exorcism text out of a library by merely putting it under her arm and strolling out.

Sunset Boulevard

From Paramount’s Centennial Collection a 2 DVD set of Sunset Boulevard covers every bit of minutia surrounding what is hands down one of the best films ever made and certainly the sharpest skewering of Hollywood in a movie. The fact the film was directed by Billy Wilder in 1950 only attests to its longevity and classic status.
It’s a win-win situation whether you’ve seen it or not. If you haven’t you’re guaranteed an eye-full. A down on his luck young writer Joe Gillis (Bill Holden) moves in with an aging starlet Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) to help her finish her rediscovery script. “I’m big, it’s the pictures that got small,” Desmond laments.
If you’ve seen Sunset Boulevard there’s a second DVD that has a short or documentary on every possible aspect of the film. The best for buff are outtakes of the original opening, which was cut after a disastrous preview. These clips (m.o.s.) show a corpse being wheeled into a morgue and then the dead bodies have a conversation discussing how they all got killed.