Gran Torino

Impressions before seeing it
Heard it was good, and that some people found the violence controversial or something when it was released. Which doesn't bother me, it only makes me curious.

How was it?
Much of Gran Torino is Clint Eastwood doing what he does best: being a hard, angry badass. So if you're an Eastwood fan, you might enjoy it just for that. For everyone else, I will attempt to explain the appeal. Walt (Eastwood's character) is kind of like a scarier and angrier version of Carl Fredricksen from Pixar's Up. Having just lost his wife, who he deeply loved, he retreats into misanthropy, racism, and horrible memories of his time in the Vietnam War. And like Carl (yes, I'm still going with this comparison), Walt slowly begins to come out of his shell and enjoy people again when he befriends the Hmong brother and sister who live next door. But of course it's not a cuddly friendship movie like Up. The Hmongs are regularly harassed by gangs and thugs, and that's where Walt steps in to defend them using his geriatric Dirty Harry-ness.

Walt's character could have easily been unlikable, what with his grumpy, blunt manner, but he wasn't because I felt that a lot of his contempt was justified. I especially understood the disdain he felt for his own family, as they never seemed to care for him or know anything about him, and were always trying to get something from him, acting like he was the rude one when he refused. The people he thought to be scumbags and morons were scumbags and morons, and that makes us like Walt more.

This paragraph is about to spoil the ending, so skip it if you haven't seen the movie.
I don't know what the specific complaints were regarding the violence, but Gran Torino is really not that graphic. In fact a lot of it is just a looming threat of violence rather than actual bloodshed. Even the ending appears to be setting us up for a massacre (both because the story led us there and because it's Clint Eastwood seeking revenge), but it twists in another direction. In writing, they say the ending should be inevitable but not predictable, and that's what it accomplished. Walt's sins have weighed down on him his whole life, and he made the decision to deliver justice without sinning further. He confesses to a priest and then, perhaps for his own principles since he is not religious, absolves himself completely by giving his life for the same race of people he brutally slaughtered in the war, conveniently landing in the classic Jesus Christ pose as he is gunned down. I don't know if people thought of this as a cop out, as they were probably waiting the entire movie to see Clint Eastwood shoot someone, but that was, depressingly enough, the happiest possible ending to this story. I think Gran Torino is a movie about not always taking the easy way out or the easy choice, because sometimes you have to take the hard choice when it's the right choice.

Recommendation
I really enjoyed it. It has the look and feel of Eastwood's other recent directorial efforts, and there is no gratuitous violence like I somehow thought there would be. Not sure what else to say and this post is getting long. It was just good.