The Quiet Man

I've never been a big fan of John Wayne. I think that's mostly because he did westerns and I don't really care for westerns. However, he did make a few movies where he didn't wear a cowboy hat. The Quiet Man was one of them.

Many actors have a counterpart of the opposite sex that often play opposite them in many movies. There's Bogey and Bacall, Tracey and Hepburn, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. John Wayne's Katharine Hepburn is Maureen O'Hara. Her most popular movie was probably Miracle on 34th Street. Other big titles were Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, How Green Was My Valley, and the original The Parent Trap.

In The Quiet Man, Wayne is an Irishman, Sean Thornton, returning to Ireland after living most of his life in America, to reclaim his family's property. Neighboring property owner Red Danaher (Victor McLaglen) wants the property, but Sean outbids him. Meanwhile, Sean falls in love with Red's sister Mary Kate (O'Hara), but Red refuses to allow him to marry her.

Sean, a former boxer, eventually wins approval, but as Sean is unaccustomed to the pride of the Irish and their customs, he has a difficult time appreciating what is important to others, which strains his marriage. He eventually loses respect from many, in addition to losing Mary Kate, and must fight to win her and everyone's respect back.

The best line of the movie is when someone asks Sean Thorton where he lived in America. He said he lived in Pittsburgh, if you can call that living. Hysterical!

The movie was filmed in color, but not by a high quality color film, so by today's standards it looks pretty bad. I initially thought it was a colorized black and white movie. The movie was mostly filmed in Ireland, home to many of the actors, including supporting actor Barry Fitzgerald.

The Quiet Man is 2 hours and ten minutes long. The movie was made in 1952 and directed by the famous John Ford, often considered the best director of all time. In fact, he won an Oscar for Best Director in The Quiet Man. The movie also won an Academy Award for Best Cinemotography. It was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Victor McLaglen), Best Art Direction, Best Sound, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

I found the movie to be a bit long and without a clear direction. As acclaimed as the movie was, I only thought it to be moderately good. I did, however, enjoy the culturally appropriate music. And I always enjoy Barry Fitzgerald, especially when he's been a wee bit to the bottle.

I give The Quiet Man an even 3 stars.

Up In the Air

One of my friends has a man-crush on George Clooney. He doesn't really. But the story is funny. One time at lunch with our boss we were talking about some movie that starred Angelina Jolie. My friend mentioned that he understand what what all the hype was about her. Um, duh. She's hot! My boss then said, "What? Do you prefer George Clooney?" And so the joke started.

Up In the Air does star George Clooney. And, of course, I mentioned to my friend that I was going to watch the movie and I knew he would be jealous.

Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a consultant who is hired to go to companies and fire people. The job requires him to be on the road a lot, so he's 'up in the air', so to speak - a lot. His goal in life is to rack up 10,000,000 miles on his frequent flier card. As he is nearing his goal a new-hire at his company, where his boss is Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman), the new hire, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) has a great idea: instead of flying to all of these companies to lay off people, they will do it via a new online video-conferencing program.

While on the road, Bingham picked up a love interest in Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), also a consultant always on the road. And I'm not sure if it was a butt-double or if Vera really showed us that nice shot of her back-side, but I honestly don't care. I'll take it for what it is - a nice rump.

Meanwhile, Natalie has been assigned to work with Ryan and learn the business and determine how to train new consultants the techniques needed to be able to fire people online. However, she learns that the business is not as easy as creating a process and following it. There's more of an art to it.

Up in the Air, despite being a movie about firing people, is actually a very inspiring movie. It sets the tone for cutting the ties to something you don't like and being free to pursue your dreams, a theme that arises throughout the movie.

Rated R for booty and language, Up In the Air was directed by Jason Reitman, who also directed Juno and Thank You for Smoking. The movie is an hour and 49 minutes long. Also staring in the movie are Sam Elliott, Amy Morton, and Danny R. McBride.

Additionally, Up In the Air was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director, though it didn't win any of them.

I like Clooney myself, though I don't have a man-crush on him. And as I've mentioned before, I've seen a lot of Jason Bateman movies, and I don't think I have a man-crush on him either. But I can comfortably say that I like Vera Farminga. And her butt. Or whomever's butt that was.

I give Up In the Air 4 stars.

L.A. Confidential

On the list of movies I need to get around to seeing, I finally got around to seeing L.A. Confidential. Based on the book of the same name by James Elloy, L.A. Confidential is set in, surprisingly enough, Los Angeles.

Set in the 1950's, Los Angeles is competing with Chicago and Washington, D.C. to be the most crooked city in America. Not only is their a lot of organized crime, but organized crime within the police department. But then Guy Pearce (Edmund Exley) is promoted to Detective Lt. He has it set in his mind that he's going to do his job the right way and without corrupting influences, much to the chagrin of Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell).

When a disgraced former cop ends up dead, Exley wants to solve the case, but is butting heads with Detect Sgt. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) and Officer But White (Russell Crowe). But in this case of cops versus cops, Exley's investigation is turning up more than he bargained for. And he better be careful, because people close to the case start ending up dead.

L.A. Confidential has an all-star cast. In addition to those previously mentioned, Danny DeVito stars as Sid Hudgens, the magazine insider who works with the police for inside tips on hot stories, Kim Basinger, as Lynn Bracken, the love interest of many a man, and David Strathairn as Pierce Patchett, the local pimp lord.

Directed by Curtis Hanson, L.A. Confidential is Rated R for violence, language, violence, sexuality, and violence. The movie is about 2 1/2 hours long, so if you've never seen it make sure you block out a good chunk of time to watch it because you'll be glued to the screen.

I LOVED this movie and would easily watch it again. I'm actually disappointed that I never saw this movie earlier than I did. The movie was nominated for 9 Academy awards, including Best Picture. Kim Basinger won for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, and Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland won for Best Adapted Screenplay. Additional nominations were Best Original Dramatic Score, Best Director, Best Art Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing.

For the above reasons, I give L.A. Confidential the sparsely distributed 5 Stars.

The Hurt Locker

Another in a series of movies about war in Iraq, The Hurt Locker follows Bravo company, a group assigned to disarm IED's (Improved Explosive Devises).


The plot is not very complex and there really isn't much of a story-line in the movie. It's more on the lines of a documentary which is being reenacted. I couldn't find information stating if it was based on a compilation of true stories, but I suspect that it was. The storyline was written by Mark Boal who was embedded with a bomb squad in Iraq.


The movie follows several long sequences of events when IED's are discovered and must be disarmed. There is a lot of tension throughout the movie as Iraqi spectators gather and watch the bombs being disarmed. No one knows if any of the spectators have remotes to explode the devise or if they will come under fire during their mission.


I anxiously watched the movie from the edge of my seat wondering if the next bomb would detonate while it was being disarmed. Tension remained high throughout the entire movie. Additionally, there is a sequence where the company inadvertently rendezvous with a British outfit, one character which is played by Ralph Fiennes, and they suddenly are engaged in a firefight with insurgents from a distant home on the hillside.


The movie is a bit long - about 2 hours and 10 minutes, but I had no trouble sitting through the entire thing. The Hurt Locker is directed by Kathryn Bigelow (ex-wife of Cameron Bigelow, director of Titanic and Avatar), and she hasn't directed a big movie since K-19: The Widowmaker starring Harrison Ford in 2002.


The Hurt Locker also stars Jeremy Renner as William James (the disarmer), Anthony Mackie as JT Sanborn, the leader of the group, Brian Geraghty as Owen Eldridge, the somewhat incompetant rookie, and Christian Camargo as John Cambridge, the social worker who is concerned about your feelings.


Filmed in Jordan and Kuwait, The Hurt Locker is Rated R for war violence and language. Reading about production of the movie, it was excruciatingly hot during filming and they were shot at several times while filming only 3 miles from the Iraq border.


As you can tell, I really enjoyed this movie. I didn't leave hollering "Get 'er done, America!" like a Southern redneck. The movie really opens your eyes to the stress that our soldiers face every day in war and the movie does a great job of making you feel like you are in the middle of it.


I give The Hurt Locker the coveted 5 stars.

How Green Was My Valley

One of things that I am trying to do with my movie watching is pick off the winners of the Best Picture. How Green Was My Valley was the winner in 1941. The movie is based on the book by Richard Llewellyn about life in the mining towns in Wales during the late 1800's or early 1900's from the perspective of young Huw Morgan, though now told through his eyes as an older man.

The movie stars Walter Pidgeon (who has a magnificant voice) as Mr. Gruffydd, a very beautiful Maureen O'Hara as Angharad Morgan, Huw's sister, and Roddy McDowall as Huw Morgan. Roddy is probably better known as one of the apes from Planet of the Apes during its heyday in the 1960's.

Life in the mining town was peaceful, but soon turned sour when talks of unionization started and rumors of communist ties began to be associated with different residents. Huw, appearing to have a higher intelligence than most of his townsfolk, is sent off to another town to attend school, but soon learns of the prejudices and stereostypes that afflict his town. He quickly learns to fight to protect himself and his valley's honor.

Meanwhile, rumors spread of an unholy relationship between Mr. Gruffydd, the new preacher in town, and Angharad. Though not true, the rumors destroy the reputation of the good preacher and he ends up leaving the Church and Angharad's reputation is likewise soiled.

Throughout the movie tragedies strike, mostly at the mine and the Morgan's begin to lose the members of their family and Huw has little interest in staying in the Valley. Eventually, everything good that once represented the town has disintegrated. What was once a green valley is now one covered in the gray and black slag of the mine, and the happy smiling faces of the singing townsfolk are now the quiet saddened & ruined faces of a people whose spirits have been destroyed.

How Green Was My Valley won numerous awards including Best Picture for Producer Darryl F. Zanuck, Best Director for John Ford, Best Supporting Actor for Donald Crisp for his role as Gwilym Morgan, the patriarch of the family, Best Black-and-White Cinematography, and Best Black-and-White Art Direction-Interior Decoration.

The Award for Best Director was significant for John Ford as it was the third year in a row that he had won the award, the others being Stagecoach in 1939, and The Grapes of Wrath in 1940.

The movie is just under 2 hours long and was produced prior to movie ratings, though there is nothing that would garner it anything other than a G-rating except that it wouldn't draw an audience unless it had a PG rating.

I read the book several years ago and admit that it is one of my favorite books. Given that, I criticize the movie for what it is missing, though if it did icnlude everything in the book the movie would be about 6 hours long. I therefore give How Green Was My Valley a hesitant 3 stars.

Das Boot

As we all know, VHS tapes are on the out and DVD's are here for a bit longer. We'll probably all be watching movies digitally in the next few years. However, in that time I still have my VCR and a few VHS tapes. I decided to watch them again for posterity sake while I still own a VCR.

The movie I dug out of my box for this weekend was Das Boot, the German movie about World War II - from their perspective. As any historian will tell you, history is told by the victors. In this case, the Germans decided they wanted to show what it was like for German seamen of the submarine flotilla, or Kriegsmarine.

The movie starts out with a party in some French town and everyone is totally out of their mind stupid drunk. However, they know what they're getting into. Nearly three-quarters of all Germans who went out on a submarine never returned. Most knew that there was a good chance that they would never see land again.

The next day, Captain Leutenant Henrich Lehmann-Willenbrock is led to his new boat, U-96 and they head off to sea to intercept ship convoys and sink their prey.

What is interesting about the movie is that there is a strong anti-Nazi feel amongst the men. Most seem to understand that they are being led by an ego-maniac and eminent death awaits the country.

In reading about the movie, the actors were confined to the submarine model that was created for the movie for many hours and denied sunlight. This was to help give a more realistic sense of the anxiety and darkness that the sailors would have experience at sea.

Truly a military movie classic, this is a must see. The only actor that would be known to Americans is Jürgen Prochnow who was in The English Patient, Beverly Hills Cop II, and Dune.

Das Boot is Rated R for violence, language, and tense situations. The movie is long - it's 209 minutes, which for people that attended Baltimore City Public Schools - that's 3 hours and 29 minutes. I give this movie the maximum rating - 5 stars.