Gran Torino is Eastwood’s Greatest Generation finger-wag at the Boomers and the Echo. “I stacked gooks seven-deep as sandbags so you fucks could sell my house and buy Chinese-made iPods.”

And he’s shamed me.

I cannot over-emphasize how gangsterish Eastwood rolls in this flick. It’s easily my most recent must-see (IMDB rating: 8.4/10.0 agrees).

It’s got racial, religious, philosophical, and masculine themes everywhere, dealing with everything from around-the-home fixit-work to American-Bushido gunfighting to zen-like existential crotchetiness. If you don’t know what you’re good at then you can count the birds in that tree.

It re-appropriates “get off my lawn” as a lethal geriatric fuck you (see clip, above). It’s scary and suspenseful — almost action-packed — with liberal doses of humor. It has things to say about gang violence and how getting old sucks and what it means to be a man.

The symbol systems are effective and clear without being cliché. It’s easy to “get”. It’s quite a good film, and it’s got some fantastic one-liners the trailer doesn’t spoil. Arguably on the do-you-feel-lucky order:

Eastwood is one of the Godhead-merged immortals, his memetic image forever stamped across Western ideals of the masculine. Gran Torino is another tome in His canon.