Gran Torino Trailer Fixes Everything

I normally don’t like to do two trailer reviews back to back… however, I don’t normally get emailed the greatest trailer of all time.

I’m not kidding.

This trailer was built from everything I’ve ever loved, cared about, or been interested in. They apparently used some advanced brain-reading technology to drain the information from my head while I was sleeping and mold it into the shape of a trailer.

I’ve gushed over trailers before. After awhile they all blend in, the same sights, sounds and general mayhem. Then a trailer comes along that features CLINT FUCKING EASTWOOD TAKING ON AN ASIAN MOB. The pleasure center of my brain has just grown five sizes too big and shattered the device used to measure it much like what happened to the Grinch and his super-sized heart. That center then expended its entire contents leaving me numb, empty and unable to taste food. Does this brain-metaphor conflict with the one from the paragraph above? No, that's how great this trailer is.

Which Clint Eastwood, you ask? (Let’s pretend that you don’t know the answer due to being alive and having a rough idea of Clint’s age. Let’s pretend that this conversation takes place in a world outside of time and human history. A place in the clouds filled with grim-looking beings in robes weighing the relative worth of Earthlings based on randomly selected objects created by us. Got it? Cool.) A GRIZZLED AND WORLD WEARY CLINT ON THE WRONG SIDE OF SEVENTY.



My life should be divided into two parts. Pre-that trailer, and post- that trailer. I honestly had goose bumps after watching it.

I now have a handy way of summing up who and what I am. I meet a new person who asks what movies I like, I show him that trailer.

Meet a new person who asks what kind of stuff I like, I show him that trailer.

Someone asks me what kinds of food I like, what my favorite color is, what my feelings on the environment are, I show them that trailer.

Some highlights –

- The slow build. They know what we’re waiting for, (Clint punching/shooting something while spitting out a gravelly voiced one-liner) and they make us wait… then deliver the goods like nobody’s business. He’s like William Munny brought into the modern world. Like Newman’s "Nobody’s Fool" character with a gun, like a meaner Dirty Harry.

- The nod to The Outlaw Josey Wales, with the Clint spitting followed by an old woman spitting a tobacco-filled swallow onto the ground. Kinda wish that dog from Josey Wales was around to take the shot.

- Another bonus is that I was reasonably sure Eastwood had put this kind of role behind him. I know he’s sworn off westerns, and I just assumed a more action-type guy even in a more character-type story would be asking too much. Happy to be wrong.

- Military medals in the display box sort of mirrors the moment in Pale Rider when he takes off his priest’s collar, puts it into a box, then takes his guns out of the same box.

- He may have made giving someone the “finger gun” cool again with one fell swoop.


I'm already anxious for the sequel. Every movie should feature him beating up a different ethnicity, culminating in him eventually punching out an alien from Mars.




TheCoolerKIng's column appears each Sunday at SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for further reading. He's also doing this: HowToBeatUpAnything

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