gran torino, part one

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1205489/
Gran Torino
directed by Clint Eastwood
2008

The basic plot of the movie involves the growing friendship between aging veteran Walt (Eastwood) and two teens next door, Sue and Thao; all are menaced by a gang. Walt takes Thao under his wing and teaches him how to be a man - and I don't mean that sarcastically. It's actually a very funny movie; a lot of it involves Walt / Clint complaining about everything.

At the beginning of the movie, this gang essentially saves Thao from being harassed by another gang. They then want him to initiate into their gang by stealing Walt's Gran Torino. Walt stops this - stops Thao from being initiated into this particular gang. What's interesting, though, is that what this really results in is Thao getting initiated into a very different gang, one with different rites - what the movie depicts as the community of men (of a certain sort - not every male is a man).

Actually, one major theme of the movie is these sorts of communities. You can see this in so many places - when the white wannabe gangsta calls a young black man "bro" and gets rebuffed; when the Hmong gang saves Thao from the Hispanic gang (they each start shouting at each other to go back to their own country), and then expects something in return. You see it when Sue tells Walt that Thao needs someone to look after him, because Hmong girls do better in the States than Hmong boys: "Hmong girls go to college, Hmong boys go to jail."

In other words, the movie is an interesting exploration of how we find ourselves in these communities, some of our choosing and some not, what serve as the passwords of entry, the perks of membership, the sort of actions we're inclined to take, and how we relate to others in other communities. And, of course, they all overlap.