In their 11.18 Variety story about Gran Torino, a just-revealed Clint Eastwood that film will not only begin shooting soon but will also open in mid to late December (a month or so after The Changeling comes out on 11.7). Diane Garrett and Pamela McLintock report that “details” — like the basic plot — “are being kept under tantalizingly tight wraps.”

Well, it’s the second Eastwood movie named after a car (the last being Pink Cadillac), so the odds seem to suggest — do we dare go out on a limb? — it’ll be some kind of jocular blue-collar comedy. You know…one of Clint’s easy-going films like Bronco Billy or Every Which Way But Loose. A good-natured good-old-boy thing, something folksy and easy-going. Right?
Eastwood will also costar in Gran Torino. Cool. He’s obviously got more behind-the-camera energy than your average 45 year-old and he looked at least 10 years younger than his calendar age of 76 when I last saw him in person a year ago.
The other possibility is that Gran Torino will be a family drama on the surface, but will actually be a Robert Bresson-ian political parable about how American middle-class and lower-middle-class voters consistently take the donkey bait tossed to them by the flag-waving, fear-bating right-wing political machine and vote against their own economic interests, over and over and over and over.