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Racist old man sits on porch, scowls at children

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Nodaisho:

--- Quote from: Inlander on 27 Jan 2009, 05:17 ---Just saw this tonight. I really liked it, and I'm a bit amazed (though perhaps not surprised) by some of the reactions in this thread. Perhaps it's because I'm a bit older than a lot of the people here, but I find films about "badass killing-machine one-man-armies" in which the bad guys "get what's coming to them" at the end of the film to be pretty much utterly reprehensible.

--- End quote ---
Why, if you don't mind me asking? And your link is already dead, goes to the page, but there is nothing where the story should be. Did have a bit on how some dumbass that got put in charge decided to ban a poster for WANTED because it "glamourized gun violence".

Inlander:
It's the Guardian, so the link's not dead, it's just borked. They'll fix it up eventually. They always do. Their website is pretty amazingly comprehensive - you can still read articles from the 90s there, for gods' sake!

As for the other bit, I just find the whole culture of violence in which it's assumed that because someone's the bad guy their life is disposable to be absolutely disgusting. It's the kind of thing we see over and over again in Hollywood - see Die Hard, for instance, or that horrible end to Bad Boys where they try to have their cake and eat it too ("You can't kill the bad guy! That's wrong! LOOK OUT, HE'S GOT A GUN! BLAM! Phew, that was close." A nice counterpoint to this was Hot Fuzz, which was incredibly violent without ever becoming vengeful. So I really appreciated the fact that Gran Torino managed to resolve itself in a different way - and in fact the whole point of the movie seemed to be that there is a different way to resolve things other than going on a killing spree - even if it was rather melodramatic.

satsugaikaze:
I liked the "get off my lawn" line.

ALMOST as good as Harrison Ford in Air Force One, although "GET OFF MY PLANE" still sounds more hardcore.

TheFuriousWombat:
Oh come on, that Ford line is much better! Every grumpy old man grumbles and/or yells "Get off my lawn" at least a few times a month. How many people ever yell "Get off my plane"? I'll tell you: only one. And it was Harrison Ford.

Alex C:
Yeah, Eastwood's been meditating on vengeance and the glorification of violence for a while now. I loved how deftly he subverted many of the tropes that were present in his earlier films in Unforgiven; the general plotline of that movie could easily have been played "straight"* and worked as a standard western but it's such an ugly li'l film that the cumulative effect is completely different.

*Frankly, I would rather say that Eastwood is the one who played it straight and it was just those other dopes that used to glorify characters who mostly shot eachother for no god damn reason, but then again, I figure that'd be rather disingenuous.

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