Gran Torino (2008) on Netflix
Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran newly widowed, lives alone in his Highland Park, Michigan house. A Hmong gang pushes his teenage neighbor Thao to steal Walt's 1972 Gran Torino.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb8.1/10870,424 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes81%
Trailer
Plot summary
The neighborhood around Walt Kowalski has changed since he moved into his house in Highland Park, Michigan, and the family next door is Hmong, with teenagers Thao Vang Lor and his sister Sue. Walt has just lost his wife, has little to do with his grown sons, and on his eightieth birthday refuses to consider moving into a retirement community. His only company is his aging Labrador retriever, Daisy, and Father Janovich, a priest, keeps pressing him to make a confession. Thao is under pressure from a Hmong gang run by his cousin Spider, which wants him to steal Walt's treasured 1972 Ford Gran Torino as his initiation. Walt catches him at the car, and when the gang comes for Thao by force, Walt drives them off.
Cast
- Chee Thaoas Grandma
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Gran Torino (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film was ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the 81st Academy Awards, not nominated for a single Oscar, which led to heated criticism from many who felt the academy had also deliberately snubbed Revolutionary Road and Changeling, which Eastwood directed.
- The producers selected the barber shop out of sixty candidates in Metro Detroit because, according to Frank Mills, the son-in-law of owner Ted Widgren, they liked "the antique look inside", and Eastwood asked Widgren himself to act as an extra in the barber shop scene.
- The casting agency Pound & Mooney recruited thirty actors and over five hundred extras for the film, and recruited many of its Hmong actors from a Hmong soccer tournament in Macomb County, Michigan.
- Vang later argued that the use of the Hmong people did not seem relevant to the overall plot, saying "there is no real reason for us to be Hmong in the script", and that Walt Kowalski, though he had fought in Korea, still confused the Hmong with Koreans and other Asian ethnic groups.
- Bill Huizenga of Zeeland, Michigan, who once served in the Michigan House of Representatives, helped write and coordinate the State of Michigan's incentive package to the film creators, and the film ultimately received a 42-percent tax credit.
- Even though a real Hmong shaman plays the Hmong shaman in the film, Schein said "his expertise was overridden by the screenplay and the filming, which distorted the ceremonial scenes by making them inaccurately exotic."
