English: Gran Torino
FEATUREIMAGE
Poster
Gran Torino Themes
- Caging Gran Torino Style From the trailer you might get the idea the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino is about a 78-year-old Eastwood growling, “Get off my lawn,” while pointing a shotgun at Asian gangbangers. But the film is more than a story of erupting racial tensions and gang violence in a distressed Detroit suburb—its profound insights into aging in America rescue it from devolving into a hackneyed plea to overcome our differences.
Torres, S. (2010, February 2). Culture Reviews : Aging, Gran Torino-style.
Retrieved from http://sociology.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/33890/
GranTorino_Contexts_Torres.pdf
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Western narrative genre
- Western narrative genre The western has always provided a rich mine for stories of adventure, and indeed a huge number of purely commercial works have capitalized on the basic appeal of gunslinging frontier adventurers, desperadoes, and lawmen. But the western has also furnished the material for a higher form of artistic vehicle, particularly in motion pictures. This was perhaps because the historical western setting lacked the subtly confining web of social conventions and mundane safeties that typify more settled societies. The West’s tenuous hold on the rule of law and its fluid social fabric necessitated the settling of individual and group conflicts by the use of violence and the exercise of physical courage, and the moral dramas and dilemmas arising within this elemental, even primeval, framework lent themselves remarkably well to motion-picture treatment.
Persecution of Hmong
Facts on File (2006). Persecution of Hmong. Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide, Retrieved from http://search.infobase.com
Motor City : The story of Detroit
- Motor City : The Story of Detroit By 1950, Detroit had become the fifth largest city in the United States, home to nearly two million people. But in the midst of that prosperity, the auto industry restructured its operations. Between 1948 and 1967—when the auto industry was at its economic peak—Detroit lost more than 130,000 manufacturing jobs. The auto industry began to decentralize its production, building new plants in suburban “greenfields” and in the small towns of the upper Midwest and, increasingly, the Sunbelt. Many smaller auto-related manufacturers also left the city in search of low-wage workforces and open land for new factories. At the same time, the auto industry experimented with new labor-saving technology—called “automation”—that replaced many assembly-line jobs with new machinery. The results were devastating. Many of the large, early twentieth-century factory buildings in the city emptied out. The massive Dodge Main plant, which employed more than 30,000 workers at its peak, winnowed its workforce to a few thousand before closing in 1980. Ford’s River Rouge plant hemorrhaged jobs beginning in the 1950s—and although it continues operations today, it has but a few thousand workers, a shadow of its World War II–era might.
The US and Korean Conflict
- The United States enters the Korean Conflict While the end of World War II brought peace and prosperity to most Americans, it also created a heightened state of tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. Fearing that the Soviet Union intended to "export" communism to other nations, America centered its foreign policy on the "containment" of communism, both at home and abroad. Although formulation of the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, and the Berlin Airlift suggested that the United States had a particular concern with the spread of communism in Europe, America's policy of containment extended to Asia as well. Indeed, Asia proved to be the site of the first major battle waged in the name of containment: the Korean War.