I respect the fuck out of Clint as a filmmaker, and I agree Frosty, he's a consistently good solid director. He knows his acting limitation, but that never stopped him from being ambitious for art. Even popcorn like PLAY MISTY FOR ME, a very good erotic thriller that FATAL ATTRACTION shamelessly ripped off (w/ inferior results), you have sexual and gender politics with a playboy paying the price for treating women like shit and being forced to go back to his ex-lover...an independent woman.

Or for that matter, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER. That movie has grown new undertones after 9/11, a town scared by terrorizing cowboys who give carte blanche to not just an outlaw who uses his dictator power to rape, murder, and repaint the town and rename it "Hell"...but also a vengeful ghost that was a victim of the same town's people.

GRAN TORINO was a great little picture, the admirable sort that I admire for its compact dense simplicity. It really could've been a western if you think about it.

(Honestly the only really bad movie he's directed was THE ROOKIE, and that was just a flat, lazy misfire. They happen.)