Gran Torino

IMDb - Gran Torino (2008)

After watching this movie in a theater with my wife I didn't think I could watch this movie ever again. I just knew too many men growing up almost exactly like the part Clint Eastwood plays in this movie. The movie just reminded me almost exactly of my father and grandfather and 100 other men I knew while I was growing up. I greatly miss this kind of "never say die" kind of person which was very common up until the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S.

Luckily, when I walked into the room my wife had been watching most of it on cable TV and I walked in about the time of the girl being raped by a gang. It was about all I could stand watching. So, I could keep my distance from all the friends and relatives now long gone who were actually like the charactor that Clint Eastwood plays in real life all the time. When Clint Eastwood in his part stood up to the gang I remember the outcome and I missed people like this still being around these days. The world has changed but without these "modern day cowboys"in cities and hamlets around the U.S. we have lost something irreplaceable. Without them the U.S. will surely suffer in the days and years to come.

I think my cousin and I can be as harsh as our grandfather and my father were but we prefer not to be that way. The world we grew up in just after World War II it was a much easier place to live in. Neither my cousin or I had to get out a loaded gun and to point it at someone like our grandfather did or my father did. We luckily were able to miss all that so we don't have the resulting PTSD to contend with that everyone who points a loaded gun at someone with the intention of shooting that person has to contend with ever after. So, because of all the Gran Torino men who lived and died we live in a pretty good country now.

The real question now is are there enough people willing to make the sacrifices necessary for the United States to remain great or are we going to fall from greatness just like the fall of Rome almost 2000 years ago now? Only the future will tell.