Casabloga: Rear Window

 

 In 1954, Alfred Hitchcock made one of his best movies, Rear Window. The film is about L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies (played by Jimmy Stewart), a professional photographer ho took a huge risk to get a great picture and ended up breaking his leg.

The film tells you this in a very unique way. Instead of showing us the accident, the camera pans passed Jimmy's leg in a cast to a broken camera, and then to a picture of a race car mid-wreck, clearly heading towards the camera (thus the broken leg). The camera then pans to the left showing us that he is a professional photographer with many awards and featured in magazines. We learn all this without a single word having been spoken yet.

Due to his injury, Jeff is forced to stay in his apartment and look out over the apartment courtyard, observing his neighbours. I am a huge fan of character development, and this film does an amazing job at that with characters that we don't even know the names of. The neighbours each have distinct personalities, habits, and lives. And most of them never speak or have any real importance to the story except for being in it. You watch these people and really believe it, because Hitchcock had a way of making everything seem like it was really happening. What adds to it is that Hitchcock used real sounds of people living. So there will e long stretches of time where you will be watching a neighbour doing something, and instead of music, you will hear kids playing, traffic in the distance, birds and other city animals. If there was music it was coming from one of the other neighbours.

Jimmy Stewart is my favourite actor, and it's performances like this that is the reason. Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) wants to marry Jeff, but he feels she deserves a better life than he could ever provide. His lifestyle requires that he always be on the move, and he doesn't think she would be able to keep up with that and wouldn't be suited for it.She keeps trying to prove that she is up for it, even going as far as to buy a small suitcase.

But while Jeff is watching his neighbours one night, he begins to suspect that one of them may have murdered their wife. At first Lisa and his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter) think he's lost his mind, but they eventually see enough for themselves and realize he is onto something. Jeff constantly watches from that point on, using his camera lens to spy on who he suspects for murder.

When the neighbour, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr, and the only neighbour with a name) realizes what Jeff is doing, he confronts him in his apartment leading to bit of a frightening encounter.

The film ends with a panning of the courtyard, showing that all of the characters had an ending to their story. Even though you never knew their names, and they weren't technically essential to the story, they had a full character arch. The film is that detailed.

Casabloga: City Lights

After the mainstream success of Talkies in 1927 with The Jazz Singer, Silent Films quickly went out of style. In fact, several movies that were in production as silent films were re-shot with sound. There were some, however, who believed that sound in films was just a passing phase and preferred sticking with the old way of making films. One such person was the legendary Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin refused to make his movies Talkies. So when his 1933 movie, City Lights, was released, it was one of the very few Silent Films still being made. While the films features some sound, such as a slide whistle a scene mocking Talkies, the film is very much a Silent Film.

This film is slightly different from most of Chaplin's previous films. While a vast majority of his earlier work was straight comedy, City Lights  is a romantic comedy. The Tramp character meets a blind girl (played by Virginia Cherrill)  who sells flowers and is immediately taken with her. She mistakes him as a rich person due to one walking past her and into a car and driving away. She calls out to him to hand him his change, unaware that he is standing right there. The Tramp (I'll just call him Charlie for the rest of this) slowly walks away so that she can keep the change.

Charlie's goodness has always been evident in his films, but City Lights is a good example of him going out of his way to help someone who is in need. He gets a job just so he can help her out. He even does a boxing match just to help her pay her late rent. He befriends a drunk millionaire after saving his life from suicide. In the end, he pays to have her have an operation that lets her see again. The final scene is one of the best sad-yet-sweet endings ever.

Casabloga: Introduction

There is a list I have been wanting to make for a long time, but I didn't know how to do it. It's a list of the greatest movies of all time (in my opinion). I always felt a mere list wouldn't be be enough. So it occurred to me the other day to not just make a list, but to explain why I felt each title deserved to be on the list. It was going to be a Facebook status, but when I decided to expand it, it was going to be a Facebook Note. But then I decided that each title should have it's own entry... I felt this was too big for a mere Note.

Then I remembered this blog. I haven't posted since October, as I hadn't had luck finding things to post about. I didn't want to post the movie posts because up to this point I had only written facts, not opinions. But then I remembered that my very first post in this blog was a review of the Psycho sequels.

Not to mention the subtitle of this blog is, "The Blog About Whatever". Limiting what I can post about isn't posting about "whatever", it's posting about a specific topic. So now I shall use this blog more now that I've freed my mind of that trap. The next posts will be a series I'll call Casabloga, because I like cheesy jokes.

The first review will be Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.

Jane Dornacker

Jane Dornacker was born on 1 October 1947 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In 1969, she became the first female postal worker. However, in the 1970s, she toured with a rock group called The Tubes. She later became the lead singer of a band called Leila and the Snakes, where she went by the name Leila.

In 1983, she appeared in the film The Right Stuff as Nurse Murch.

In the early 1980s, Jane began doing stand-up comedy routines, and began doing traffic reports on KFRC in San Francisco. She was well-known in the area for her fast speaking voice. While doing her reports, she would tell her daughter to get up and go to school.

She moved to New York City after awhile, and became known as "trafficologist" and "Jane-in-a-plane.

On 22 October 1986, she was doing a live traffic report from an N-Copter on the Joey Reynolds Show, when millions of listeners were shocked to hear the sound of the helicopter's engines speeding up and Jane screaming in terror, "Hit the water! Hit the water! Hit the water!", followed by a static sound and then silence.





The helicopter had plunged into the Hudson River. Jane Dornacker was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital, her last words still fresh in everyone's ears.

The following day, on the Joey Reynolds Show, they paid tribute to her.

Jane Dornacker

Thuy Trang

Thuy Trang was born on 14 December 1973 in Saigon, South Vietnam. Her father was in the military tasked with defending Saigon. In 1975, when she was 2 years old, the North Vietnamese army invaded the city, forcing them to flee, and in 1979 secretly boarded a cargo ship heading to Hong Kong. Thuy became sick and came close to dying during the trip.

When they reached Hong Kong, Thuy's father petitioned the US government for political refuge for his family. They lived in a Hong Kong detention camp until they reunited in 1980, in Little Siagon, California.

Thuy earned a scholarship to study civil engineering at the University of California, planning to follow in her father and siblings' footsteps. She also took up learning Kong Fu, based on a suggestion by her father, who unfortunately died of cancer in 1992. While hanging out with friends one day the same year, she happened to run into an agent and she formed an interest in acting.

The first thing she did was appear in a video about the Church of Scientology (she is 9 seconds in, and says "Tin tôi", a Vietnamese word), even though she was Buddhist. This led her to being in a couple other PSAs, until, in 1993, Thuy Trang landed her first major role, and the role which most people know her from; Trini Kwan (A. K. A. "The Yellow Ranger") on the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.

She stayed on the show for a year and a half, appearing in a total of 88 episodes, before leaving during the second season, along with other cast members.

In 1995, she appeared in a documentary called Encyclopedia of Martial Arts: Hollywood Celebrities. The following year, she made a cameo in the Leslie Nielsen film Spy Hard, and was the villain in The Crow: City of Angels, where she added to the movie by doing her own Kung Fu, which wasn't even in the script.


On 3 September 2001, Thuy, along with some of her friends, all of whom were to be bridesmaids in another passenger's wedding, were in a vehicle outside of San Francisco when the driver lost control, swerving violently across the road before hitting the roadside rockface and flipping several times before hitting the safety rail and plunging over the embankment. Upon arrival at the hospital, Thuy Trang was declared dead. She was 27 years old.

Tokyo Rose

During World War II, Allied forces in the South Pacific would often hear Japanese propaganda over the radio from an English-speaking Japanese woman. It was reported that she would accurately go into detail about the Allies' plans, and would even name individual servicemen. She was nicknamed Tokyo Rose, and most people know her today from the film Flags of Our Fathers. She is said to have playfully tormented the troops.

Following the war, two reporters, Harry T. Brundidge and Clark Lee, searched for Tokyo Rose, who they determined to be American-born Iva Toguri. They offered her $2,000 for an interview, which she agreed to. When she stepped forward, instead of getting paid, she was arrested. End of story, right?

Well, there's only one problem; Tokyo Rose never existed.

Iva Toguri was born on 4 July 1916 in Los Angeles, California. Her parents, Japanese immigrants, had came to America from Japan in 1913. As a child she was a Girl Scout. In 1940, she graduated from the University of California with a degree in Zoology. She was considered by everyone around her to be a loyal American.

On 5 July 1941, Iva sailed to Japan to visit a sick relative and to perhaps study medicine. She did not have a passport, so in September, when she decided to return to America, she filed a request for a passport so she could return home. Unfortunately, on 7 December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, and her request for a passport was denied, leaving her stranded in Japan. 

As the war in the Pacific between Japan and the Allied Forces began, Iva was pressured into revoking her American citizenship by the Japanese government. She refused. Because of this, she was declared and "enemy alien" and denied a war ration card.

To help support herself, she found a job as a typist at a Japanese news agency, and eventually ended up at Radio Tokyo. In November 1943, Allied prisoners were forced to air Japanese propaganda, and Iva was chosen to host parts of it, called The Zero Hour. The producer was an Australian Army officer, Major Charles Cousens, who had pre-war broadcast experience, and had been captured at the fall of Singapore. He had been tortured and forced to work on the radio show, along with his assistants, U.S. Army Captain Wallace Ince and Philippine Army Lieutenant Normando Ildefonso "Norman" Reyes".  Iva had risked her life to deliver food to the POW camp they had been held captive, therefore gaining their trust, which is why they chose her to host the program. She was assured by them that they would not have her say anything against the United States, and they didn't.

Iva took the stage name "Orphan Annie". Although she never took part in actual news broadcasts, she mostly acted in radio comedy skits, and announcing songs. She only made $7 a month (or ¥150), which she mostly used to buy food for POW camps, sneaking it in as she had done before.

Not one time did she ever refer to herself as "Tokyo Rose".

After the war, Iva heard about Harry T. Brundidge and Clark Lee's $2,000 offer for an interview with Tokyo Rose, and decided to take the offer. She needed the money to return home. She did not know that it was a trick, and she was arrested after being forced to sign a document "confessing" she was Tokyo Rose on 5 September 1945.

The reports used her arrest to attempt to further their career, and even tried to sell transcripts of their "interview" with Iva, where she "confessed". However, a year after she was arrested, she was released due to lack of evidence. The POWs who wrote her scripts backed her up and defended her, showing that she couldn't have been Tokyo Rose.

However, in 1945, she was brought to trial for treason. Even though she was defended by the POWs at the radio station, she was found guilty of treason do to the fact that she announced a loss of American ships in 1944. This was the "evidence" the court brought against her. She was fined $10,000 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In 1976, it was uncovered that several of her accusers' testimonies had been falsified, and had been coached on what to say on the stand. Due to this, then-President Gerald Ford granted a full and unconditional pardon to Iva Toguri D'Aquino on January 19, 1977, his last full day in office.

On 15 April 1945, Iva married Felipe D'Aquino, a Portuguese citizen of Japanese-Portuguese descent. During the trial, he was arrested. When he was released, he was exiled to Japan. Iva returned to the United States and lived in Chicago, where her father had opened the J. Toguri Mercantile Company Japanese-import retail store during the war, following the release of the Toguri family from internment at the Gila River War Relocation Center in September 1943. Due to Iva and Felipe's forced separation for thirty years with no chance of seeing each other, they officially divorced in 1980 so that they could go on with their lives.

Felipe D'Aquino passed away in 1996.

On January 15, 2006, the World War II Veterans Committee awarded Iva its annual Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award, citing "her indomitable spirit, love of country, and the example of courage she has given her fellow Americans". According to one biographer, she found it the most memorable day of her life.

Iva Toguri passed away on 26 September 2006 in a Chicago hospital of natural causes. She was 90 years old.

Song Reader

Singer-songwriter Beck has been sharing his musical genius with the world for the past 25 years, when he recorded a cassette called Banjo Story back in 1988, and releasing his first studio album, Golden Feelings, in 1993. Even if you've never heard his name, you have heard his music, especially Loser.

Beck Hanson was born 8 July 1970 in LA. His grandfather was artist Al Hanson, his parents are Canadian composer David Campbell and musician Bibbe Hanson, and his brother is artist Channing Hanson. As you can see, he comes from a very talented family, so it's no surprising that he is so full talent.

On 11 December 2012, Beck released his latest album, Song Reader, which he had been working on since 2004, Unlike a traditional album, where the artist writes then records the album, Song Reader is a book of sheet music. If you want to hear the songs, you have to perform them yourself. Or go on YouTube and see other people performing their takes on the songs.

Beck has set up a website for artists to upload their versions of the songs on the album.

Here is pianist Hanna Silver performing The Last Polka from the album. In the video, she discusses the album and even holds up her copy.



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