There are two types of Clint Eastwood-directed movie – the unpopular ones that everybody hates and the unpopular ones that win Oscars.

But now we can add a third type of Clint Eastwood-directed movie to the list – the popular ones. Because Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood’s newest movie, hasn’t just claimed the number one slot at the weekend box office, but it’s the biggest-opening movie of his career.

Perhaps Gran Tornio‘s weekend box office success will allow Clint Eastwood to direct more popular fare. We hope so, because then he could helm Marley & Me 2: Did He Do Six Craps On The Carpet Or Only Five?

Clint Eastwood, we want you to take this as a lesson. As good as the films you direct are, they’re not as good as the films you also star in. It’s why you won awards for Million Dollar Baby and not Letters From Iwo Jima. It’s why Gran Torino is top of the weekend box office and it’s why Changeling vanished without a splash.

No wonder, though – Gran Torino looks like the best Clint Eastwood movie in years, not least because Clint Eastwood appears to be playing himself in it. He’s a snarling, haggard, angry old man who beats foreigners up but then learns to love them. We’d almost call it perfect, were it not for Gran Torino‘s glaring lack of a monkey sidekick. Here’s the weekend box office top five…

1 – Gran Torino (According to Box Office Mojo, Gran Torino has enjoyed an 888% gain on last week’s weekend box office takings. Is this because a) last week it was only shown on 80 screens compared to this week’s 2,800, or b) because everyone’s racist and enjoys watching old men beat up Asians? Oh, let’s say both) $29,025,000

2 - Bride Wars (We were certain that Bride Wars would open as the weekend box office number one, you know. It just goes to show that wedding dresses aren’t as much fun as cranky old right-win men firing guns into crowds of teenagers. When will Kate Hudson learn?) $21,500,000

3 - The Unborn (OK, trailer checklist: teenage girl, creepy kid, spooky video, silent screaming, dog in a mask, funny old man climbing the stairs. Yeah, not going to see this one) $21,095,000

4 - Marley & Me (Weird that Owen Wilson didn’t really promote Marley & Me that much, isn’t it? It’s almost as if people prefer naked pictures of Jennifer Aniston to harrowing tales of self-destruction, isn’t it? Weird) $11,350,000

5 - The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (Soon to be followed by the sequel, which is basically just three hours of Brad Pitt trying to climb inside a woman’s vagina. We don’t hold much hope for it, to be honest) $9,450,000

Read more:

Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo

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At the last count Clint Eastwood was roughly 6,000 years old – and yet he can still beat you in a fight, you pathetic pussy.

Yeah, that’s right. Clint Eastwood thinks you’re a pussy. You know that time you had an argument with your neighbour and decided to back off instead of attacking him with the back of a shovel? Clint Eastwood knows about that, and he thinks you’re a pussy for it. You pussy.

Clint Eastwood has given perhaps the best interview of all time to Esquire, and it’s all about how much of a pussy you are. No joke.

As a 78-year-old man, logic dictates that Clint Eastwood should spend his days mumbling things like “I know what you’re thinking; did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth I can’t even remember where I put my slippers or the names of any of my children,” and “Make my day – empty my colostomy bag.”

But that’s not what Clint Eastwood is doing at all. In fact, Clint Eastwood’s new film Gran Torino sees him play a violent, bad-tempered old bastard who beats up Asians a lot and looks like he wants to punch the world in the face. And that must have been a stretch for Clint Eastwood, since in real life he appears to be a violent, bad-tempered old bastard who looks like he wants to punch the world in the face. Nothing about beating Asians up, you see. A stretch.

Actually we’re just assuming that’s how Clint Eastwood is, based on the jaw-dropping interview he’s just done with Esquire. In short, it seems to suggest that everyone younger than Clint Eastwood is a pussy and everyone older than Clint Eastwood is dead, which leaves Clint Eastwood as a sort of God-figure who’d be quite happy to break everyone’s nose if he had to. Again, no joke:

“We live in more of a pussy generation now, where everybody’s become used to saying, “Well, how do we handle it psychologically?” In those days, you just punched the bully back and duked it out. Even if the guy was older and could push you around, at least you were respected for fighting back, and you’d be left alone from then on.”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Elsewhere Clint Eastwood’s points seem to be a) people who think about things are stupid, b) stupid people deserve to die and c) what’s with all these young folk with their piercings and haircuts these day? They sure do look strange.

Of course, there’s a chance that Clint Eastwood is just playing up this side of his persona because it suits Gran Torino, but we sort of hope he isn’t – after all, he didn’t promote Million Dollar Baby by helping disabled women bite their own tongues off, did he? No, we want Clint Eastwood to be like this all the time.

In fact, more than that, we want Clint Eastwood to use this anger to start a vigilante pussy-fighting group for elderly male celebrities. Would you talk openly about your feelings if you thought that Kofi Annan would chase you down and kung-fu you in the throat? Would you earnestly listen to the music of Paolo Nutini if it meant that Sir Donald Sinden would break into your house at night and smash your kneecaps with a breezeblock? No you wouldn’t. Make it happen, Clint.

Read more:

Clint Eastwood: What I’ve Learnt – Esquire

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Five up, five down.

Folded:

• The Sweeney on ITV4 in the day sometime (if you’re bored, ill or skiving)
• British Style Genius (good set of programmes on BBC2. Good if you like clothes, of course, bit of a waste of time if you don’t)
• Spiralling by Keane (officially we hate the song, but it would still work better as the new Bond theme than Another Way To Shat)
• Gran Torino trailer (Clint Eastwood’s upcoming film proves why he is still the rock hardest, baddest muddy funster in all the movies)
• Want to know which watch Sly Stallone wears in Cobra? (hell yes!)

Creased:

• Craig in Creep (a down on his luck Luke Goss impersonator hides in the London Underground killing people. Worst horror villain ever? We feel another Top Ten coming on)
• No downloadable GTA IV content for PS3 owners (at least not for a while. That’s quite annoying for some of us)
• The Diesel ‘Fuel For Life’ TV advert (that dirgey piano bit near the end should be played at Guantanamo Bay)
• Candy Skulls (didn’t these used to have some gooey pink fondant crap inside? Or is it just us and we’re that old?)
• Cheap spooky movies at HMV (don’t bother – just watch The X Factor on Saturday, that’s scary enough)

We don’t know if we’ve mentioned it, but Angelina Jolie has a movie out – it doesn’t look very good, but keep that to yourself.

But, despite what you might think by the amount of time that she’s spent promoting the movie by hanging babies from her boobs on the cover of magazines, Angelina Jolie isn’t the only person involved in the making of that movie. It also happened to be directed by Clint Eastwood, whoever he is.

And in a shocking break, Angelina Jolie last night decided to do a little more promotion by paying tribute to Clint Eastwood at a Hollywood awards gala. In fact – and we’re not making this up – people were so shocked to see Angelina Jolie talking about someone that wasn’t her that there were audible gasps in the crowd. And some people fell over and vomited like in the opening titles to Quincy. Alright, we made that bit up.

It took a while, but now we’ve finally figured out why Angelina Jolie has been killing herself rotten trying to promote The Changeling with tattoos and breastfeeding and knives and marriage and any other vaguely controversial stunt that ambiently drifts into her mind.

We didn’t think that Angelina Jolie would bother with any of that because The Changeling is a Clint Eastwood film – that means nobody will go and see it but it’ll definitely win about 16 Oscars. But that might not be the case any more – because in December Clint Eastwood has another film coming out and it looks amazing and populist and, since it features what’s rumoured to be Clint Eastwood’s last ever acting role, it’ll be that movie that wins all the Oscars instead.

So, not wanting to end up in another movie that’s critically and commercially ignored like A Mighty Heart, Angelina Jolie has had to change strategy. Rather than just blathering on about herself all the time, she’s decided to attach herself to Clint Eastwood instead.

At a Hollywood Film Festival Awards Gala last night, Angelina Jolie made a surprise appearance to sing the praises of Clint Eastwood, as People reports:

The mother-of-six took time out of her busy schedule to present Eastwood – who helmed her most recent move, The Changeling – with the director of the year award. “There are some people in this business that are icons, and we often wonder if, when we meet them, they’ll live up to what we imagine them to be,” she told the audience. “And Clint Eastwood in person is even better.”

We mock, but only in jest – actually it’s touching that Angelina Jolie took time out of her schedule to pay tribute to a Hollywood icon like Clint Eastwood. Just think, in the time it took her to present him with the award, Angelina Jolie could have probably done four or five more interviews about her children, blurted out up to 12 new deliberately headline-grabbing controversial statements and made everyone just that little bit more sick of her.

Selfless, that’s what Angelina Jolie is.

It all started when Spike Lee complained that there were no black soldiers in either of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-nominated war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

Spike was upset that the African-American contingent didn’t seem to get any acknowledgement whatsoever from Clint, and he spoke up at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

He said:

Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen. If you reporters had any balls you’d ask him why. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It’s not like he didn’t know…

To which Clint Eastwood replied:

A guy like that should shut his face.

A guy like what exactly? Like a black man? Or like a scrawny-faced owl man? We just don’t know. What we do know is that this town aint big enough for the both of ‘em. Yee-haw!

As far as hecklerspray is concerned, the bigger crime here is on the white soldiers who were included in the films, as Clint managed to make their own stories about as emotionally stimulating as sitting through a Paris Hilton album from start to finish.

But anyway, Spike Lee has responded to Clint’s comment. He told ABC News:

First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation. The thing about it though, I didn’t personally attack him. And a comment like ‘a guy like that should shut his face’ – come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry, old man right there. It’s just that there’s not one black in either film. And because I know my history, that’s why I made that observation.

Lee is currently in the midst of post-production on his own WWII epic, Miracle as St. Anna, which, according to IMDB.com, ‘chronicles the story of four black American soldiers who are members of the US Army as part of the all-black 92nd Buffalo Soldier Division stationed in Tuscany, Italy, during World War II’.

Did we read that correctly; the ‘all-black’ division? Not even a token white boy to occasionally nerd up proceedings with his embarrassing dancing? Outrageous.

Spike furthered:

Many veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version.

Clint was initially reluctant to respond to Spike’s remarks, but eventually told the Guardian:

The story is ‘Flags of Our Fathers,’ the famous flag-raising picture. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.

Anybody know any war historians to clear this up?

As it currently stands, Spike has had the last word, and here it is:

Even though he’s trying to have a Dirty Harry flashback, I’m going to take the Obama high road and end it right here.