Vintage

The Boiler Room is a story about one man and his search for morality in a den of financial thieves.  The film puts a green accountant’s lamp over the world of "Boiler Room" brokerage firms. The film centers on college dropout Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), a budding underground casino owner from Queens, New York, who gets a job at J.T. Marlin, a less-than-reputable brokerage firm.  At the time, Seth is totally unaware of the firm's criminal reputation. He is just happy to have a job. Aren't we all?

At times compelling, Boiler Room is not a great film by any means.  To me it was filmed by a fan of the movies Wall Street (1987) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).  Both of those films are heavily quoted in Boiler Room.  Both are are on a higher pedestal then this "need for greed" flick.  

Gran Torino is the story of a haggard, gritty, and retired Polish American Korean war veteran by the name of Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood).  Kowalski is a hardnosed, autoworker who apparently killed people in Korea.  Years later he lived out his life—married, had a couple kids—worked at a Detroit Ford factory and is now content to watch his world change over into a rundown neighborhood, overrun, if you will, by Hmong immigrants, teen gangs and what not.  In his garage, he keeps a vintage 1972 Gran Torino.  Memories of war bombs explode in the locked trunk of his mind, which he guards privately and as fiercely as his prized car.

All vestiges of his old glory life are gone if Walt ever did have a glory life.  It would be more accurate to say Walt had a way of life, which he came to grips with and, one might say, had a life that came to grips with him.  He wasn’t going to change just because of the times and even if his times saw that his wife died before he did, Walt would remain unchangeable.  

A priest tries to get him to confess what appears to be a submerged iceberg of guilt.
His wife of the ages recently passed as the film opens and Kowalski can only grimace and literally snarl a bit, which he does a lot of during the film.  We are lead to believe, Walt is unkind at the beginning of the film, but that is not true. His character is revealed by adversity, tempered by history that called for him to be hard and tough or die.

Try as he might, Walk simply can’t ignore the new reality of his world.   The world is moving in on him. Whereas he fought against Asian, it would be appear a tough pill to swallow as Asian immigrants slowly replace White working class Americans in his Michigan neighborhood.
A Hmong neighbor, a teen, Thao Vang Lor (Bee Vang) is pushed into trying to steal Walt’s Gran Torino as part of an initiation into a street gang, which Vang Lor attempts to resist but can’t.  He gets caught by Walt stealing his car and is almost shot.