Don't you dare insult Eastwood by comparing him to Lars Von Trier. Von Trier doesn't make movies so much as intellectual exercises that are unwatchable. (I was forced to see Dogville in the theaters when I was in twenty five. It's one of two movies I walked out on during the final scene.)

In a more serious vein, Eastwood has been a brilliant filmmaker because his vision is a bleak one and this is true even in his movies that don't deal with justice. Flags of Our Fathers showed the dark side of the Greatest Generation and Letters from Iwo Jima showed the consequences from the other side of the battle. J. Edgar honestly didn't hide anything when it came to showing what a monster the head of the FBI was in his ugly glory. And Gran Torino showed a man who could only find a way who found more connectiion with his neighbors at the end of his life then he ever had with his own family.

Maybe Eastwood as a director has moved away from the westerns that he became famous for and the vigilante cops he famous played and realized that those men were giving lie to the way justice could be brought out into this world. Yet for whatever reason i've never found his movies as bleak as the other often dark directors in this field - Von Trier's not a fair exampe as I hate him with an unfair passion but more then the works of Nicholas Wending Refn or many of the films of Irrantu (he may be a great director but I'm not his fan) There's a gallantry to Eastwood's films that makes them beautifiul even if the ramifications don't occur to you until you've left the theater. He's a ruthless filmmaker, I grant you, but I don't see his world view as so much sadistic as it is a dark realism that is in his opposition to the image put out. Most times in our world the good guys don't win and if you use a gun to kill the bad guy, that's the start of a new set of problems rather then the end of them. And hell, at least he gave a possibility. Von Trier once said Melancholia was the first movie he made with a happy ending. Let that sink in.