gran torino

Originally posted by Darth Martin
I thought the film was hilarious with all of the racial slants and jokes. I liked the movie.

His racial slurs are just his way of keeping everyone at bay around him; he doesn't even like his own family much, or his late wife's priest.
He goes only as far as the front of his lawn, then the world can do what they want. Him growing to like and care about his Asian neighbours, isn't so much about him being less racist than letting someone past his stubborn armour.

I thought he shouldn't have acted again after Million Dollar Baby; that would have been a perfect exit for him. But I think he acted in this film to do something he's never done before: get killed on screen, when he chooses not to even carry a gun. That's something John Wayne didn't do until the end of his career as well.

I think he was trying to show the contrast between generations. People in and from his era measured people more by their actions rather than their words. His character and personality is from a time where political correctness and mass integration was not as familiar and forced as it is today. I got the impression that he lived during a time where the area that people lived was determined by nationality and heritage. Even though he had become a cynical bitter man his predjudism wasn't entirely negative but rather more observatory. Sure, his experience in war may have instilled racism in him but it wasn't to the point where it was irrational blind hate. He never used racial slurs to hurt people. It was just how he referred to people.

A lot of people today throw around racial slurs like he did in the movie and even though the slurs aren't used to express hate or intended to hurt, most of these people are stigmatized as racist backwards thinkers due to political correctness. Either way, it seems very obvious to me that his predjudist nature came from a different time and the slurs he used weren't used as a vehicle of hate.