I watched "Gran Torino" and had a good deal on it. The new cinema is built in a funky new building called Iluma. What I like about that building is the funky exterior which is a permanent light show (and hence the name). It's also got funky big glass doors. The big solid American type that I saw in uh America. Of course American stuff is usually big and impressive and somehow always breaks down in the end. But you never know.
So the good deal - all the tickets were going at $6. There aren't that many good shows these days. I've been watching quite a few Clint Eastwood pictures lately. Somehow there are a few directors out there who work until past 80. Like Akira Kurosawa directing "Ran". Or Antonioni (but maybe they started late.) So Clint Eastwood is enjoying a late career renaissance, that's good. I suppose he has always been making solid films that have somehow escaped the attention of the critics who automatically equated being macho with shallowness during the 70s and 80s. In 1992, he made a picture "The Unforgiven", and it got a very good critical reception. In the last few years, he has a solid record: "Mystic River", "Million Dollar Baby", "Changeling", "Letters from Iwo Jima" and "Flag of our Fathers".
I feel that his late flowering reflects his self knowledge that he's almost alone in his own genre of making macho but thoughtful films. Manhood isn't really what it used to be, for better or worse. These days, action heroes are more the geeks who are equally good at embracing technology, typified by Ethan Hunt. Brilliant, resourceful, but a user of brainwork as much as muscle work. Even Daniel Craig as James Bond looks like he gets his muscles from the gym rather than from manual labour. Then you have a whole plethora of cartoon characters which take the seriousness out of beating the shit out of another guy.
I feel that old school macho attitudes are more a matter of strength of character. Yes, we can admire the modern action heroes because they are excellent problem solvers, engineers, witty, nimble, graceful. But Clint Eastwood harks back to a more old school form of grit. His characters do not lounge around at stylish bars and sip fancy cocktails. They don't run around with the latest laptops and technology. They don't promote a millennial, consumerist lifestyle, or wear the latest fashion. This is not to denigrate the new generation, because the new generation have a different, equally challenging set of demands placed upon them, but people like Clint Eastwood don't really exist any more.
The Clint Eastwood cities are not the ultra modern, stylish and futuristic cities that you see in James Bond / Vin Diesel movies. You don't have MI 3 in Shanghai or Rome, Casino Royale in Venice and some funky Monte Carlo swanky place. It's not some old communist capital which has been taken over by swanky sleek capitalism designer stuff.
His proper place is the decaying urban metropolitan. His vision of America is still stuck in the 70s and the 80s, where America is questioning and lamenting its declining place in the world, when it was paling next to newly confident places like Germany, Japan and the Asian Tigers. Its the urban ghetto, which has always existed, and gang wars co-exist with entire communities and families bringing up children.
If Gran Torino is a moral tale, it involves the struggle for the soul of a community. Maybe a fight between good and evil, even though it is more true to say that all sides have different degrees of shadiness.
Spoilers from now on.
I was fucking stupid. I bought tickets, and thinking I had 2 hours to burn, walked over to a bar and had a beer. Then I took too long for dinner. By the time I realised it was too late, I missed 10 minutes of the film. I had to rely on movie reviews and youtube to keep me updated on what I had missed. Luckily this film is not "Crimson Gold" where all the excitement takes place in the first 10 minutes.
This has enough action to satisfy Eastwood aficionados. But Eastwood movies are also about character. They are a lot like classic samurai films, where the character knows that there is a duel tomorrow, there's going to be a fight and then they're doing a lot of thinking, weighing up all their moral choices. You could take the whole Gran Torino movie, remake it into a Samurai film, and it would be exactly the same thing.
The difference between the western cowboy films and samurai films is not very great. Maybe people were surprised when Clint Eastwood did 2 Iwo Jima films from both the USA and the Japanese perspectives. They shouldn't be surprised. First, Iwo Jima is one of the last wild west adventures. The West was not truly won when the Americans took California. It was won 100 years later, only when the Americans took Japan. Japan is the final frontier. (Actually the final frontier is space, so Japan is the second last frontier.)
Consider that "Yojimbo" was the inspiration for "A Fistful of Dollars", a Clint Eastwood film. That "The Magnificent Seven" is really Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", and that "Star Wars" is Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress".
Anyway, this time, there is a heavy weariness about "Gran Torino". If "The Unforgiven" is really about a cowboy growing old, "Gran Torino" is about the cowboy nearing the end of his life. It is really about continuity, and a dying way of life. Who are the new cowboys? The Gran Torino is the symbol of continuity.
This movie is really about the passing of the torch. I at first thought it was a nice charming tale of a crusty old man, and a hot chick reminding him that life is worth living again. But the movie is not about Sue, but rather about her brother, Thao. OK, maybe the actor playing Thao isn't very compelling, and he's shy and the spotlight doesn't shine on him.
I've heard Asian Americans complain that there are not that many movie roles tailored for them, and that it's some form of discrimination. Let's be fair. Actors are characters. Roles exist only because characters exist. You have to ask yourself: where are the characters? What are your icons? You had your Bruce Lees and Jackie Chans, they were the martial arts experts. So what's going on here? Asians are introverts, self-effacing people who do not draw attention to themselves. Unless you beat the shit out of people, fly through a bamboo forest, chut some funny pattern you spent 10 years in a cave trying to master, it's unlikely that you will get angmohs to notice you. You need to grow monkey hair, walk around with a pig head, or set up a bandit fortress in the mountains in order to get noticed.
So I think the problem of the Asian American actor is not that they are discriminated against. Its because they are up against loud and abrasive cowboys, or loud and abrasive gangstas. Asian cinema makes its mark on Hollywood, to be sure. How? Hollywood screen writers have shit for brains. OK, this is strictly untrue. But there are eras in history where there are plenty of great stories to be told, and eras where there are none. Ever noticed that people of your parent's generation had better stories to tell? My parents can always tell me of the first time they wrung a chicken's neck. They tell me stories where you have stories of 3 adult debt collectors versus my father at a ripe old age of 19 and his merry band of 4 younger siblings. Ever noticed that the 19th century is always a high watermark in the development of the Western novel?
Well I feel that in the 20th century, western countries have lives that are too good and too uneventful. There has always been a little more chaos in Asian countries. Cinema is new in Asian countries, so you always have the pioneers coming in with the great ideas. Hollywood is bereft of ideas because the moneybags and the accountants control everything. Therefore you have to rip off the Kurosawa samurai movies. Rip off the Ring, Dark Water and Ju-On. Then rip off "My Sassy Girl". Next up, horror of all horrors, it's time to rip off "Tampopo". But soon, the US will run out of plot ideas to rip off. It will be interesting to see what they can come up with next.
The other great export is Kung fu. The greatest kung fu film of recent times is actually "The Matrix", if you think about it.
Why are plots and kung fu so important? Because Asians just aren't very interesting people to look at. Asians are interesting from the inside but not the outside.
OK, end of diversion 1.
Diversion 2: why don't Americans have good plot ideas?
First, the idea of community in America is dead. Plot is all about how different members of a community interact with each other. In fact the very definition of a community is that a group of people who interact meaningfully with each other. So when community breaks down in the USA, there are no more plots. In "Gran Torino", there are actually 2 communities. Actually 1 community and 1 person who realises that his old community is dying or dead.
Second, America is a more individualistic society than most other great centres of film making. Individualism is conducive towards cinema because it's always easier to film individuals, it's always easier to centre a narrative around a main character and everybody else's place in the movie takes its reference to him. But in societies which are less individualistic, where people have a more complex relationship with society, there are more interesting stories. Thus, "Tampopo" is interesting because it has a whole ensemble of quirky characters. (How a convincing story of a white girl going around learning how to make ramen can be made is an entirely different matter.) "Shall We Dance" is very Japanese because there's the tension between a person living his life as a proper salaryman and his need for artistic expression. "My Sassy Girl" is interesting because of the tension between a crusty young chick's awakening love for a new boyfriend and her inability to let go of a previous old relationship.
Back to Gran Torino.
The movie is all about the ideas and values that a Hmong immigrant is going to imbibe. He can join a gang, and become a grunt for the rest of his life. Or he can try to assimilate and become an American, the Clint Eastwood sort of American. Instead of a car thief, he can become a construction worker. Instead of being a shy guy who loses the girl, he can learn how to become a man. Very conveniently, Thao doesn't have a father figure, and Clint Eastwood provides it for him.
The Hmongs are still a close knit community even though there aren't that many of them left in America. It seems that the only meaningful communities left in America are either immigrants or minorities. In a lot of Hollywood pictures, you don't see a lot of people who are friends or kin. At the most, they are allies. Like your Mission Impossible action films, all the good guys are colleagues, a team convened for the sole purpose of accomplishing the mission, and then broken up afterwards. Ties are not deep.
Clint Eastwood does not have a deep relationship with his family. Now we as Asians are probably going to be quite quick to condemn Westerners for being heartless to their aging parents. But you only have to spend some time with Clint Eastwood to realise that he's a very unpleasant guy when he's old. It's not that simple to say that his children are the bad guys. In general, parents who are great company and easy to get along with are rarely left on their own.
This movie has been accused of being racist. It is racist like "'allo 'allo", where all races are mocked. Whites are white trash. Latinos are gangstas. Hmongs are gooks. And aspiring gangstas. OK, the attitudes towards Hmongs are rather paternal, as though they were the innocent, pure Rousseau- esque noble savages who need to be educated, but once they are, have the potential to be real Americans.
But that's what happens when you forget that the relationship is quite unequal. Clint Eastwood may be Clint Eastwood, but he's also a helpless old man. He may be strong and wise but that's relative. First, he's a strong and wise asshole, and second, he's only strong and wise relative to a helpless old man. He sees his way of life disappearing, and he knows that he can't pass it along to his children. At the same time there are these fresh off the boat jungle people who are groping blindly in the dark. They represent the most realistic chance of his passing down his values, if you can overcome the racism.
The other thing about Clint Eastwood is this: the Asian Americans who accuse Gran Torino of being racist don't really appreciate this, but he made sure that the main white characters in the movie are Polish and Italian immigrants. Not the WASPs who have been in the US for generations, but they are themselves 2nd or 3rd generation Americans. Unless you appreciate that the Clint Eastwood character himself is an immigrant, a lot of the meaning in this picture will be lost.
So firstly he talks about what racism really means. The end of racism doesn't mean you stop calling people gook or nigger. But it means that you reach out to them and welcome them, even if you do it grudgingly.
Second, it raises the question of what it means to be an American. Is it the frontier spirit of Clint Eastwood and his merry band of Hmongs, or is it his children who drive Toyota land cruisers? That is a difficult question. Definitely Clint Eastwood is more like the Hmongs. But is he really a mainstream American, or is he always an outsider, passing his outsider values on to another bunch of outsiders? Why does he have more in common with the Hmongs? Because he’s a pioneer. He’s had the immigrant experience of forming a large community and trying to fit in. He’s had that choice of deciding between the straight and narrow, or a life of joining a gang.
But somehow I feel that, much as you want to draw parallels between the Poles, Italians and Jews of 100 years ago, to Asian Americans today, I don't think that the parallels are perfect. Yes, Thao has the legacy of that Gran Torino. But what is that gook going to do with your Gran Torino? Poles / Italians are still European. When you go further away from Europe, the whole mindset changes. If Asian Americans were to forge a real identity in the country, what would it be? Yes, this is a continuation of the frontier spirit. But it would be morphed into something quite unrecognisable.
So the good deal - all the tickets were going at $6. There aren't that many good shows these days. I've been watching quite a few Clint Eastwood pictures lately. Somehow there are a few directors out there who work until past 80. Like Akira Kurosawa directing "Ran". Or Antonioni (but maybe they started late.) So Clint Eastwood is enjoying a late career renaissance, that's good. I suppose he has always been making solid films that have somehow escaped the attention of the critics who automatically equated being macho with shallowness during the 70s and 80s. In 1992, he made a picture "The Unforgiven", and it got a very good critical reception. In the last few years, he has a solid record: "Mystic River", "Million Dollar Baby", "Changeling", "Letters from Iwo Jima" and "Flag of our Fathers".
I feel that his late flowering reflects his self knowledge that he's almost alone in his own genre of making macho but thoughtful films. Manhood isn't really what it used to be, for better or worse. These days, action heroes are more the geeks who are equally good at embracing technology, typified by Ethan Hunt. Brilliant, resourceful, but a user of brainwork as much as muscle work. Even Daniel Craig as James Bond looks like he gets his muscles from the gym rather than from manual labour. Then you have a whole plethora of cartoon characters which take the seriousness out of beating the shit out of another guy.
I feel that old school macho attitudes are more a matter of strength of character. Yes, we can admire the modern action heroes because they are excellent problem solvers, engineers, witty, nimble, graceful. But Clint Eastwood harks back to a more old school form of grit. His characters do not lounge around at stylish bars and sip fancy cocktails. They don't run around with the latest laptops and technology. They don't promote a millennial, consumerist lifestyle, or wear the latest fashion. This is not to denigrate the new generation, because the new generation have a different, equally challenging set of demands placed upon them, but people like Clint Eastwood don't really exist any more.
The Clint Eastwood cities are not the ultra modern, stylish and futuristic cities that you see in James Bond / Vin Diesel movies. You don't have MI 3 in Shanghai or Rome, Casino Royale in Venice and some funky Monte Carlo swanky place. It's not some old communist capital which has been taken over by swanky sleek capitalism designer stuff.
His proper place is the decaying urban metropolitan. His vision of America is still stuck in the 70s and the 80s, where America is questioning and lamenting its declining place in the world, when it was paling next to newly confident places like Germany, Japan and the Asian Tigers. Its the urban ghetto, which has always existed, and gang wars co-exist with entire communities and families bringing up children.
If Gran Torino is a moral tale, it involves the struggle for the soul of a community. Maybe a fight between good and evil, even though it is more true to say that all sides have different degrees of shadiness.
Spoilers from now on.
I was fucking stupid. I bought tickets, and thinking I had 2 hours to burn, walked over to a bar and had a beer. Then I took too long for dinner. By the time I realised it was too late, I missed 10 minutes of the film. I had to rely on movie reviews and youtube to keep me updated on what I had missed. Luckily this film is not "Crimson Gold" where all the excitement takes place in the first 10 minutes.
This has enough action to satisfy Eastwood aficionados. But Eastwood movies are also about character. They are a lot like classic samurai films, where the character knows that there is a duel tomorrow, there's going to be a fight and then they're doing a lot of thinking, weighing up all their moral choices. You could take the whole Gran Torino movie, remake it into a Samurai film, and it would be exactly the same thing.
The difference between the western cowboy films and samurai films is not very great. Maybe people were surprised when Clint Eastwood did 2 Iwo Jima films from both the USA and the Japanese perspectives. They shouldn't be surprised. First, Iwo Jima is one of the last wild west adventures. The West was not truly won when the Americans took California. It was won 100 years later, only when the Americans took Japan. Japan is the final frontier. (Actually the final frontier is space, so Japan is the second last frontier.)
Consider that "Yojimbo" was the inspiration for "A Fistful of Dollars", a Clint Eastwood film. That "The Magnificent Seven" is really Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", and that "Star Wars" is Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress".
Anyway, this time, there is a heavy weariness about "Gran Torino". If "The Unforgiven" is really about a cowboy growing old, "Gran Torino" is about the cowboy nearing the end of his life. It is really about continuity, and a dying way of life. Who are the new cowboys? The Gran Torino is the symbol of continuity.
This movie is really about the passing of the torch. I at first thought it was a nice charming tale of a crusty old man, and a hot chick reminding him that life is worth living again. But the movie is not about Sue, but rather about her brother, Thao. OK, maybe the actor playing Thao isn't very compelling, and he's shy and the spotlight doesn't shine on him.
I've heard Asian Americans complain that there are not that many movie roles tailored for them, and that it's some form of discrimination. Let's be fair. Actors are characters. Roles exist only because characters exist. You have to ask yourself: where are the characters? What are your icons? You had your Bruce Lees and Jackie Chans, they were the martial arts experts. So what's going on here? Asians are introverts, self-effacing people who do not draw attention to themselves. Unless you beat the shit out of people, fly through a bamboo forest, chut some funny pattern you spent 10 years in a cave trying to master, it's unlikely that you will get angmohs to notice you. You need to grow monkey hair, walk around with a pig head, or set up a bandit fortress in the mountains in order to get noticed.
So I think the problem of the Asian American actor is not that they are discriminated against. Its because they are up against loud and abrasive cowboys, or loud and abrasive gangstas. Asian cinema makes its mark on Hollywood, to be sure. How? Hollywood screen writers have shit for brains. OK, this is strictly untrue. But there are eras in history where there are plenty of great stories to be told, and eras where there are none. Ever noticed that people of your parent's generation had better stories to tell? My parents can always tell me of the first time they wrung a chicken's neck. They tell me stories where you have stories of 3 adult debt collectors versus my father at a ripe old age of 19 and his merry band of 4 younger siblings. Ever noticed that the 19th century is always a high watermark in the development of the Western novel?
Well I feel that in the 20th century, western countries have lives that are too good and too uneventful. There has always been a little more chaos in Asian countries. Cinema is new in Asian countries, so you always have the pioneers coming in with the great ideas. Hollywood is bereft of ideas because the moneybags and the accountants control everything. Therefore you have to rip off the Kurosawa samurai movies. Rip off the Ring, Dark Water and Ju-On. Then rip off "My Sassy Girl". Next up, horror of all horrors, it's time to rip off "Tampopo". But soon, the US will run out of plot ideas to rip off. It will be interesting to see what they can come up with next.
The other great export is Kung fu. The greatest kung fu film of recent times is actually "The Matrix", if you think about it.
Why are plots and kung fu so important? Because Asians just aren't very interesting people to look at. Asians are interesting from the inside but not the outside.
OK, end of diversion 1.
Diversion 2: why don't Americans have good plot ideas?
First, the idea of community in America is dead. Plot is all about how different members of a community interact with each other. In fact the very definition of a community is that a group of people who interact meaningfully with each other. So when community breaks down in the USA, there are no more plots. In "Gran Torino", there are actually 2 communities. Actually 1 community and 1 person who realises that his old community is dying or dead.
Second, America is a more individualistic society than most other great centres of film making. Individualism is conducive towards cinema because it's always easier to film individuals, it's always easier to centre a narrative around a main character and everybody else's place in the movie takes its reference to him. But in societies which are less individualistic, where people have a more complex relationship with society, there are more interesting stories. Thus, "Tampopo" is interesting because it has a whole ensemble of quirky characters. (How a convincing story of a white girl going around learning how to make ramen can be made is an entirely different matter.) "Shall We Dance" is very Japanese because there's the tension between a person living his life as a proper salaryman and his need for artistic expression. "My Sassy Girl" is interesting because of the tension between a crusty young chick's awakening love for a new boyfriend and her inability to let go of a previous old relationship.
Back to Gran Torino.
The movie is all about the ideas and values that a Hmong immigrant is going to imbibe. He can join a gang, and become a grunt for the rest of his life. Or he can try to assimilate and become an American, the Clint Eastwood sort of American. Instead of a car thief, he can become a construction worker. Instead of being a shy guy who loses the girl, he can learn how to become a man. Very conveniently, Thao doesn't have a father figure, and Clint Eastwood provides it for him.
The Hmongs are still a close knit community even though there aren't that many of them left in America. It seems that the only meaningful communities left in America are either immigrants or minorities. In a lot of Hollywood pictures, you don't see a lot of people who are friends or kin. At the most, they are allies. Like your Mission Impossible action films, all the good guys are colleagues, a team convened for the sole purpose of accomplishing the mission, and then broken up afterwards. Ties are not deep.
Clint Eastwood does not have a deep relationship with his family. Now we as Asians are probably going to be quite quick to condemn Westerners for being heartless to their aging parents. But you only have to spend some time with Clint Eastwood to realise that he's a very unpleasant guy when he's old. It's not that simple to say that his children are the bad guys. In general, parents who are great company and easy to get along with are rarely left on their own.
This movie has been accused of being racist. It is racist like "'allo 'allo", where all races are mocked. Whites are white trash. Latinos are gangstas. Hmongs are gooks. And aspiring gangstas. OK, the attitudes towards Hmongs are rather paternal, as though they were the innocent, pure Rousseau- esque noble savages who need to be educated, but once they are, have the potential to be real Americans.
But that's what happens when you forget that the relationship is quite unequal. Clint Eastwood may be Clint Eastwood, but he's also a helpless old man. He may be strong and wise but that's relative. First, he's a strong and wise asshole, and second, he's only strong and wise relative to a helpless old man. He sees his way of life disappearing, and he knows that he can't pass it along to his children. At the same time there are these fresh off the boat jungle people who are groping blindly in the dark. They represent the most realistic chance of his passing down his values, if you can overcome the racism.
The other thing about Clint Eastwood is this: the Asian Americans who accuse Gran Torino of being racist don't really appreciate this, but he made sure that the main white characters in the movie are Polish and Italian immigrants. Not the WASPs who have been in the US for generations, but they are themselves 2nd or 3rd generation Americans. Unless you appreciate that the Clint Eastwood character himself is an immigrant, a lot of the meaning in this picture will be lost.
So firstly he talks about what racism really means. The end of racism doesn't mean you stop calling people gook or nigger. But it means that you reach out to them and welcome them, even if you do it grudgingly.
Second, it raises the question of what it means to be an American. Is it the frontier spirit of Clint Eastwood and his merry band of Hmongs, or is it his children who drive Toyota land cruisers? That is a difficult question. Definitely Clint Eastwood is more like the Hmongs. But is he really a mainstream American, or is he always an outsider, passing his outsider values on to another bunch of outsiders? Why does he have more in common with the Hmongs? Because he’s a pioneer. He’s had the immigrant experience of forming a large community and trying to fit in. He’s had that choice of deciding between the straight and narrow, or a life of joining a gang.
But somehow I feel that, much as you want to draw parallels between the Poles, Italians and Jews of 100 years ago, to Asian Americans today, I don't think that the parallels are perfect. Yes, Thao has the legacy of that Gran Torino. But what is that gook going to do with your Gran Torino? Poles / Italians are still European. When you go further away from Europe, the whole mindset changes. If Asian Americans were to forge a real identity in the country, what would it be? Yes, this is a continuation of the frontier spirit. But it would be morphed into something quite unrecognisable.
That's the part of the movie that makes me a little uneasy. The parallel is a little bit too slick. It's like you're inseminating a Hmong receptacle with your American virtues and hope that he will survive. Sure it's a good deed, but Hmongs are not merely passive receptacles, even though the movie has a Hmong culture 101 segment in it.
I looked at the wiki entry for the movie. Remember the chicken shit angmoh boyfriend who was dating Sue when they were laid upon by 2 black thugs? The actor playing that chicken shit angmoh is Clint Eastwood’s son. Looks like being a tough guy is not hereditary.
In the end, I think that Clint Eastwood got a fair deal for himself. He died, but that death is no big sacrifice. It was going to be a matter of time anyway. What really matters is he educated and taught a youngster, no matter how superficially. Thao will never be like Clint Eastwood, but at least he will try. He traded in his life, and he defeated the Hmong gangs, and he made sure that something of himself survives. It's not a bad deal.
Naturally when I thought about this movie, I thought about my sister who I'm not sure is Singaporean or Asian American. If this is a torch that is to be passed on to her. And I was practically an Asian American for 4 years of my life so I do have something to think about.
I looked at the wiki entry for the movie. Remember the chicken shit angmoh boyfriend who was dating Sue when they were laid upon by 2 black thugs? The actor playing that chicken shit angmoh is Clint Eastwood’s son. Looks like being a tough guy is not hereditary.
In the end, I think that Clint Eastwood got a fair deal for himself. He died, but that death is no big sacrifice. It was going to be a matter of time anyway. What really matters is he educated and taught a youngster, no matter how superficially. Thao will never be like Clint Eastwood, but at least he will try. He traded in his life, and he defeated the Hmong gangs, and he made sure that something of himself survives. It's not a bad deal.
Naturally when I thought about this movie, I thought about my sister who I'm not sure is Singaporean or Asian American. If this is a torch that is to be passed on to her. And I was practically an Asian American for 4 years of my life so I do have something to think about.
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