New in Town and Gran Torino

We generally don't make it out to the movies much, but since I'd been able to see a couple of movies over the last few weeks, I thought I'd post about them.

About two weeks ago, I caught New in Town with a couple of girls from work. Since we were all without our husbands, we decided on a chick flick. The previews looked good, and since He's Not That Into You wasn't playing at our preferred theatre yet, it was our choice by default.

I was pleasantly surprised. The movie wasn't too sappy and really was a cute film. A corporate girl from Miami is sent to small town Minnesota to downsize the local manufacturing plant - in the dead of winter. After managing to insult the entire town, she begins to fall in love with the heavily-accented caricatures of the area and changes her mind about them.


On the opposite end of the spectrum was Gran Torino. We did a double-date this weekend and caught it with the 'rents. I can't remember the last time that I saw a Clint Eastwood movie, but this was also a good one.

Gran Torino starts out with Walt Kowalski, a retired Ford assembly line worker and Korean War vet, at his wife's funeral. He sees his kids and grand kids as overindulged, selfish people who are only interested him when they think they will benefit from it.

The movie is about how Walt deals with the decline of his once-beautiful suburban neighborhood and his own racism when a young Hmong family moves in next door. The eternal grump, he makes enemies with several different ethnic groups and gangs while forging a friendship with his new neighbors.

Clint's real-life son has a small role as neighbor Sue's date who gets cornered by some local thugs.

If you can get past all of the language, it's a very good movie.

I had several people see and recommend Slumdog Millionare to me over the weekend, so maybe I can talk Matt into seeing it with me before we have to put it on our Netflix queue...