5) Clint Eastwood
This one I’m not going to wring my hands over. Clint Eastwood is a douche. I guess I have the space to elaborate, so I will. I have sympathy for him because he’s old and seems to be losing his marbles. His little show at the Republican National Convention last year, during which he gave a firm dressing down to an imaginary Barack Obama, was obviously crazy, but it wasn’t completely inconsistent with a history of a kind of socio-political douchiness for Eastwood.
Most famously, he has tangled with Spike Lee, who I also find a slightly personally intolerable, but the demeanor with which he made his statements was unnecessarily hostile and condescending. This was right before Gran Torino came out though, so I may be getting my pictures of racism mixed up here.
There’s no denying Eastwood’s influence on modern tough-guy acting, though. He invented the whole tough whisper act, or at least revolutionized it. You know the voice, the one now used to great effect by the likes of Jason Statham, Bruce Willis, and many others. They’re all essentially imitating Clint Eastwood. His direction has typically been outstanding, aside from some recent blunders indicating a possible decline in his abilities, and his acting has followed a similar trajectory, weak of late but for the most part very strong. Maybe at the next RNC they can just show clips from Unforgiven or Million Dollar Baby instead of giving him a microphone.