John Fardy was back in studio with Shane Coleman for this week's Cultural Toolbox.

It was an uncommonly contemporary choice this time around. A film from 2008 is definitely one of the youngest Toolbox inductees - albeit one with a rare maturity and older perspective. 

Indeed, Gran Torino is a film that quite intriguingly plays with audience knowledge of and fondness for one of Hollywood's great movie stars, Clint Eastwood.

Eastwood stars, directs and even sings in Gran Torino, which proved to be a critical and commercial hit for the veteran filmmaker. In the film he plays a disgruntled Korean war veteran named Walt, who develops a relationship with a Hmong teenager and his family who living in the neighbourhood - a relationship which sees Walt ultimately embroiled in a gang war.

John observed, "it's a Clint Eastwood movie in the third act of his career. If you saw Dirty Harry or even any of his films from the 80s, you would have thought 'there's a body of work'. You never would have thought he'd be writing, directing, starring in movies in his 70s and 80s. And movies that are brilliant. We could have easily done Million Dollar Baby either".

Shane said he very much enjoyed watching the film, but not without a few reservations. "It's just too neat," he explained. "It reminds me of another film you put in the Cultural Toolbox not too long ago, Good Will Hunting. Lovely film, really thoroughly enjoyed watching it, but a little cheesy, a little clichéd, a little two-dimensional".

"Two-dimensional, I don't agree at all," John countered. "This is a film that isn't black and white, there's a lot of grey in it. This man begins as an out and out racist, and there's a change... I think it's a statement of its time as well".

For John, it's also very much a Clint Eastwood film, and not just because it's his name in the credits. "In a way, he's deconstructing his own characters from the past," he argued. "That kind of malignant squint he has in all these movies, when he was standing in the desert... from any of his westerns."

"This is almost like Dirty Harry for the 21st century," Shane added.