Old, sad white guys

So G is way more into the movie-watching thing than I am, and since I've been in Mexico with him, I've watched three movies in three weeks, which, I swear, is a record for me. Thing about those three movies is they all revolve around an old, sad white man character. It wasn't on purpose that we watched those three movies; it just happened. G had wanted to see "Grand Torino" for a while. I think I actually fell asleep on that one twice before he got me to see the whole thing. "The Visitor" had been suggested to me by a number of friends. And "Crossing Over" was a random choice; something about the movie poster and the plot description drew us in--maybe, too, something about Harrison Ford. No matter how silly his movie's get, he's hard to resist. So "Grand Torino"--directed by and starring Clint Eastwood--and "Crossing Over" had the whole aging famous leading man thing going for them. Clint Eastwood was certainly my favorite of the three movies' respective protagonists, playing the very gruff and blunt yet somehow still intriguing Walt Kowalski, a man with a wife newly dead, a family that has a hard time loving him, and also abandoned by his old neighbors to face the Hmung immigrants now living next door. Less interesting by far is Harrison Ford's character, a very sympathetic ICE officer who gets way too wrapped up in his cases. "The Visitor"'s sad old white man is a university professor played by Richard Jenkins (unknown until viewing and definitely lacks the sex appeal of Clint or Harrison). University politics force the widowed Walter Vale to leave Connecticut to attend a conference in New York City. In the apartment he keeps there he finds an illegal immigrant couple who has been living there a few months, paying rent to some fake landlord. And this gets me to the other similarity between all these movies: the abandoned, sad, old white men in them are each changed, in some way, by new immigrants. I won't get too much into the individual plots but to say that "Grand Torino" was most satisfying as a story. "Crossing Over" was sort of in the style of "Crash" or "Magnolia" in which snippets are told of vaguely intersecting lives, and so you are following a few stories as once. It's a risky story-telling strategy because it's likely that one of those stories is stronger than the others, leaving the viewer uncaring about the rest, as in a book when you skip the italicized sections or the flashbacks. "Grand Torino" was also least cheesy of all of these movies. The worst cheese-factor award goes to "Crossing Over" in which the whole proud to be an American thing is slapped at you over and over at the end. "The Visitor" was disappointingly lacking in any real substance beyond the devices of the international/hot-topic plot. And Haaz Suleiman, playing Tarek, the drumming Syrian, was definitely hot. Most of the relationship developments here were a little hard to believe, and I wanted more more more. Another similarity between the three? They all made me cry. But I'm easy like that.