Love in Tokyo and a Totem Pole

Jay and I just got back from a short stay in Tokyo. He was remembering a 1966 Indian film called, 'Love in Toyko'. As most Bollywood films, there are numerous musical numbers. He cast it from YouTube on the computer to our TV. Singing in a park was not usual for films of that era. However, one set in Japan was rare, of course. In it, I noticed a totem pole and it made me wonder where the segment was shot. 

I typed this question for my AI: I just noticed a totem pole in 1966 Bollywood movie filmed in Japan. Explain this.

 

That visual anomaly in the 1966 Hindi classic Love in Tokyo is actually a fascinating bit of "Hurd-spec" history connecting your current home in British Columbia to the "Land of the Rising Sun." 

The park you saw is Shiba Park (Shiba-Koen) in Minato, Tokyo. It is the iconic setting for many of the film's most famous sequences, including the title track and the song "Sayonara Sayonara," primarily because it sits in the direct shadow of the Tokyo Tower (completed just eight years prior in 1958). 

The totem pole in the background was a very real landmark with a direct link to your own backyard:

The Origin: It was a gift to the city of Tokyo from the Government of British Columbia. 

The Occasion: Presented in 1961 by the then-Premier of B.C., W.A.C. Bennett, during a major trade mission to Japan. It was intended as a gesture of friendship and a symbolic "welcome" to the international community as Tokyo prepared for the 1964 Olympics. 

The Artist: The pole was carved by the renowned Doug Cranmer, a master Kwakwaka'wakw artist (and a frequent collaborator with Bill Reid). 

Seeing a piece of west coast First Nations art standing amidst the cherry blossoms and mid-century Tokyo architecture is a jarring, high-fidelity collision of cultures. For a resident of New Westminster like yourself, it’s a peculiar digital "easter egg"—a 1960s Bollywood lens capturing a 1961 B.C. artifact in a Japanese park. 

The pole stood in Shiba Park for several decades as a symbol of the Vancouver-Tokyo connection before it was eventually removed due to natural deterioration. In the 1960s, however, it was a "must-see" for any tourist—or any film crew looking for a unique, international vibe for their romantic musical. 

Sayonara Sayonara from Love in Tokyo 

This musical number features the vibrant atmosphere of mid-60s Tokyo, where the Shiba Park scenery—including the Tokyo Tower and the gift from B.C.—served as the backdrop for one of Bollywood's most enduring hits.

Finding Movies Good Enough to Watch Again

 

There's a portable hard drive on our home network that is expressly for movies. Today, it contains two new classics; in this case, one Italian and one French. They were mentioned last night in a conversation with friends. 

Over the last one hundred or so years, there have been many moving pictures that should be considered common knowledge for all.  We are in interesting times now that one can curate titles themselves.

What's Your Favourite Movie?

For years, I've had a dedicated mobile drive for a collection of popular and favourite movies. The current red Seagate drive is 5TB with lots of remaining space. I have around a thousand mp4 and mkv files preserving films from the 1920s through this very year. 

Most recently, I'd been accessing the digital accumulation by plugging the drive's USB directly into our LG TV.  Its WebOS software player worked well for the task. 

I am extremely organized and have accurate file names.  The drive has folders for every decade and subfolders for individual years.  Still, that was not a very efficient way of browsing hundreds of feature films.  Therefore, today, I decided to directly plug the Seagate drive into my modem/router.  

Modifying the router's firmware to use one empty USB port was not very difficult.  Then, I set up the drive as network storage so all devices in my apartment can access its folders.  Android was a cinch but getting Windows 10 to access via BCRM-LVG took a bit of sleuthing.  Yay, success.  There is no more need for plugging and unplugging the movie drive!

      

I happened to find the most marvellous Android software for my Nvidia Shield. It's called Nova Media Player.  It is an open-source app based on the former Archos player.  As it allows for passthrough, my receiver can best decide what to do with the audio tracks.

Perhaps the best part is how Nova runs a great library front-end.  It scrapes IMDb for movie posters and tons of information.  It automatically organizes everything into a large number of categories.  Because a TV-friendly version runs on my Shield device, I can simply pick up the remote and, by saying the name of the title, search the collection.  Every time I add a new file, the app will automatically add it to the easy-to-use menus.  It has been years since my movies have been this well organized.

Be Our Guest

Today was rather rainy and cold. It wasn't a very pleasant day to go outside. Right after breakfast, we did, however, walk to Columbia Station for the cinema. We saw the 3D version of Beauty and the Beast at 10:00 am. It was quite a stunning eyeful.

Aware that the traffic is always better on a Sunday, I drove over to Central City Brewing to fill some growlers. As well as easier access across the Patullo Bridge, each refill gets a dollar discount. I was a little sad there was no more Black Larger on tap. I returned home with Red Racer ales in red and amber.

Duck Dinner Day

It was a normal morning of grocery shopping but a Duck Dinner Day later. This time around we went to the downtown West End for the food and company. It was nice meeting up the gang of six as schedules generally keep the event from happening more than a half dozen times a year.

After dinner we watched the movie version of Chicago. None of the guys had ever seen it. We recalled the time we saw Lynda Carter playing mama in the West End Theatre District of London.

YouTube But Really Big!

I've had a graphics card with 1080p output for awhile. I have gone to specific sites to stream video but we never spent much time looking at YouTube clips on the television. When many are scaled up on a 42" LCD, they don't look so hot. It's hard to remember how very bad VHS tapes used to be though. If there's something which can be seen no other way, it's surprising how one can put up a poor quality image. To keep things in perspective, I grew up without cable in an area that was 100 miles from the Boston. Massachusetts. I thought 'snow' was a part of the television viewing experience.

Last night we went to YouTube to see what sort of old clips were available from Sinhala movies. Sri Lanka has always been greatly affected by Bollywood (Indian cinema) too, so surfing through some of those was a pleasant enough diversion. I really do see a time when physical media will disappear. Yet, I'm more interested in how copyright law will deal with some content currently restricted. After less time than is presently allowed, materials should probably fall into public domain. I'd say thirty years after release, a movie forms part of a common heritage and should belong to all.


Umrao Jaan (1981) - Dil Cheez Kya Hai

Next in Queue: Saw 4!

Yeah, I'm pretty butch. Lately though, we've been watching a lot of Disney as they do put out impressive Blu-ray editions. Sure, I had heard about Enchanted but had no idea I'd like it so much. I am probably not in the prime demographic for its intended audience. Yet, I was amazed by the disc's bonus material on all the work that went into the Happy Working Song. Before putting the disc back into the zip.ca envelope, I just had to watch that section again.

Of course, it's not quite as impressive in the fuzzy little YouTube player. Why is it allowed on the site anyway? Apparently it's been posted as a marketing tool so it probably won't be pulled.

If you've seen the movie you'll want to remember the sequence and if you've not, then you'll want to discover it.

How to Run an Empire

We don't go to the movies near as often as we once did. As today was a free day, we went to the Strawberry Hill Cinemas. Because that section of Surrey / Delta has a big Indo-Canadian population, a 12-screen Cineplex-Odeon always runs several, big-budget Bollywood Blockbusters there.

I can't think of a better way to spend a grey afternoon, than in front of a screen showing a bigger-than-life colourful Bollywood movie. This was a bit of an epic film called Jodhaa Akbar. It was set in the sixteenth century with Moghul emperors, a Rajput princess, and thousands on the battlefields.

This film was more historical than typically histrionic. Still, I wasn't disappointed that it had only several musical numbers. There was enough intrigue and drama to satisfy. And clocking in at 3 hours and 30 minutes, Jodhaa Akbar was surely worth the cost of a ticket.

No Kid with a Shotgun

A week ago I spent over $500 a Sony PS3 essentially for its capability to play Blu-ray high-defintion movies. I also checked what it costs to rent a movie at a Rogers Video store nowadays. I'd not been inside the New Westminster branch for years due to joining zip.ca. It is an online movie rental company similiar to a Canadian version of Netflix. A cheerful, Rogers counter clerk said renting a single movie cost $6 something. Then, he added that all Blu-ray disks are only one-day rentals. "I see. I'll wait to get my Blu-ray movies through Zip," I said. I left.

I was willing to wait as we pay about $2.50 per disc and there's no late fees when renting by post. I will probably never enter that Rogers again. Is there any irony in my spending a half K on a player but then refusing to cough up $7 for a rental? Nah, I didn't think so, either.

If you've ever been involved in online movie rental, you know that one creates a list of movies desired. The company then sends off the next available disc as soon as the previously returned movie has reached them. At any particular moment we may have fifty or sixty movies in the queue. So, last weekend, I modified our existing list so titles available in borth formats would ship on Blu-ray.

Of the dozen or so Blu-ray discs on the Zip list, just one arrived in the mail box today. It's a bit embarrassing to admit that the first-ever Blu-ray title that'll be viewed on our TV is Disney's High School Musical 2 (2007). That certainly doesn't sound very butch. Perhaps it's a good way to break in the PlayStation 3 though. Also, it's okay, as 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Rescue Dawn (2006), Saw IV(2007), and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) are also on their eventual Blu-ray way.

Watching the Silver (or LCD) Screen

This blog is just a month shy of its fourth birthday. In that time, I really didn't know I had run on so much about movies. Although by no means exhaustive or even representative, I have typed quite about about the subject. Click the following link.

my eJournal and images: The Movie Reviews




When we first came to Canada we went to movie theatres a lot. This probably was due to the fact of having accessible venues. I would venture that except for Saudi Arabia where they're banned, the ones in Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE are probably more upscale and mainstream than during the eighties and nineties. I recall dark, dirty, old cinemas showing late, often cut, films.

Around Vancouver, there was a massive building spree at the beginning of this decade. The multiplexes do offer good seating, screens, and sound systems now. It's necessary to see blockbuster events in them. Yet, DVD's are now released surprisingly soon after the original theatrical release. We watch a lot more non-mainstream and indie films on DVD.

I only wish the format wars for high definition DVD hadn't occurred. HD-DVD seems to be cheaper than Blu-ray but who wants to commit to a format before there's a clear winner. Damn them for cutting their collective noses to spite their faces. The studios could be churning out their entire collections in HD by now if a common format had been agreed upon a few years back.

The Merry Old Land of Oz

I'm adding this picture taken from our May trip to Los Angeles.



This is in honour of film in general. It's here today because I'm watching the extra audio track for the Wizard of Oz (1939). There's some absolutely amazing trivia on the 2005 DVD.

I have a new problem, however, as it's now a bit hard to accept the plot after seeing Wicked.

Meet Me in Salzburg

Earlier in the afternoon, I was positive I was going to leave a voice clip as a blog entry today. After all, my evening students do it as a part of class every evening that we meet. I was going to relate how wonderful it was to have a free Thursday.

Being between Intensive classes, I was completely free and it felt wonderful. I went uptown to the library and walked around London Drugs half dreaming about buying a new camera. I escaped without doing so and made it home happily.

Now that I know we're, for sure, going into Munich and Central Europe as a vacation in the autumn, I found and pulled out The Sound of Music from my vast DVD collection. It's funny how I remember most parts of it up to the intermission but the end seemed all new to me. How could I have understood all the historical implications when I was a babe and saw the film before? Even as a young adult I don't think I understood where Austria was. Now I'm assured that as long as we've got the time, we'll have to get to Salzburg, although it's all a tad Hollywood in the movie.



I've simply got to 'do re mi' down the same steps as seen in the film, even if I cannot carry a tune in a bucket. How nice of ancient Ms. Fisher to have told me to stand in the back of the choir and just mouth the words so I wouldn't bother the real singers. That was most probably in sixth grade but, oh, how far we carry the scars of youth!

(I still have a place near my ankle where hair doesn't grow because I tried to stamp out a 'combustion-able' mixture of gas and baking soda which we created for a junior high-school science fair volcano exhibit. Thank you Mitch Latva, my partner. Didn't we also do something on the effects of music on mice? I got stuck playing Hawaiian music to my sleeping white lab mouse whereas your rock'n roll critter kept biting through its wire cage?)

Razzle Dazzle 'Em

Our city's Hyack Festival Parade was today. Now it's billed as The Largest International Parade in Western Canada.

There were something in the neighbourhood of 136 entries this year. That made it several hours long. As usual the 'Seafair Pirates' pulled up the rear exploding their cannon in shock waves that made poodles tremble in fear.

While the parade was en route though, I was thinking how people, similar to crows, like shiny objects. The local students did a fine job but there is certainly something 'showy' about the visitors. Many high school marching bands were up from the US. This video shows a group of Californian students.

With all the flash, I couldn't help but think of the music from the musical Chicago. Then, with a strange twist of fate, a few minutes ago, I watched the song mentioned in the title in HD. The 2002 movie version is on NBC tonight!

Welcome to Sacred Heart!

I've been a fan of NBC's [scrubs] for a while. Actually, I've been a bit of an on again/off again viewer. CTV airs the program rather irregularly and I didn't have it set to record on the old satellite recorder. Now, I'm picking it up from NBC directly. It really is clever and generally a joy to watch.



Last week's episode was especially hilarious. I even burnt myself a personal copy on a DVD. In order to find the name of the episode, I ran to the official website. This is the show's sixth season and last week was the sixth show of the season. It was entitled My Musical and here's what the site says:

'Sacred Heart is turned into a full scale Broadway stage when Patti (original "Avenue Q" cast member Stephanie D'Abruzzo) checks in complaining of hearing incessant music. While trying to determine the cause of this strange complaint the residents of Sacred Heart star in their own musical. Carla and Turk tango over her decision to be a stay at home mom or to return to work, while Elliot struggles with telling J.D. that she doesn't want to be roommates with him anymore -- both girls hope that the boy's "Guy Love" will help them through the rough patch. All the while the staff wonders if life would be happier if everyone was in constant harmony.'

Umrao Jaan (2006)

On Saturday evening we went with friends to see a newly-released Bollywood movie. As it was in limited release, we had to drive to a multiplex in Richmond, BC to see the screening of Umrao Jaan.

We've been around Indian movies enough to know what we were getting into. It had a runtime of three hours and felt it although I didn't find myself checking my watch even once. In this story of a famous courtesan, I was expecting lots of music. If anything, I was surprised it took so long to get to the first song. The movie didn't disappoint with stunning backdrops and amazing costumes. As expected, Aishwarya Rai was drop-dead gorgeous although she was crying in most every scene. I did hope on one or two occasions that another character would slap her and tell her to just get over it. Circumstances weren't kind to Umrao but millions of others suffered to a much larger extent during those years.

This epic was based on 1905 Urdu novel and was previously made into a movie in 1981. We've not seen that but have checked it off on www.zip.ca to see on DVD. Today, modern Indian cinema can put out higher quality visuals and sound than 25-years ago. I like how the camera now frames very tight shots and can linger on a single face for an extended time. Whether these techniques lead to better storytelling can remain a point of argument.

I found the movie was a positive experience. Internet bloggers are not being very kind in their reaction, but why should we believe any of them? When all is said and done, we really only take the time to see classical dramas and not the general, run-of-the-mill slop that Bollywood can generate. This film was worthy of our attention.

Wee Litt'l Romance

Any movie in which people start singing in order to express a thought or feeling is obvious fantasy. Many of us cannot carry a tune in a bucket.



Once upon a time, I didn't know singing occurred on film other than My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins. Then a few years ago DVD's had became so widespread, all sorts of old material were pressed on them.

In 1954, MGM shot Brigadoon. Two American stumbling into a magical village which only appears every one hundred years is a really silly concept. At least fifty years later, it doesn't really matter that every scene was shot in a studio rather than in Scotland. It amazes me that all that work was cheaper than sending a crew overseas.

I've not finished this film but soon I will have ticked off another piece of Hollywood from a bygone era. Who was Gene Kelly?

Quick and Quicker

This week will come crashing to a close today after my students complete their final exams at 5:00 pm. At first I must admit being a bit skeptical about teaching the intensive courses. We know that language skills are acquired. As a general rule students need time to accommodate new material. Yet, these students seem to thrive in this stressful situation. Motivation surely is an important factor. Many are immigrants who have a strong desire to get ahead. It is absolutely amazing how much learning can be packed into five weeks of study. My hats off to them!

On a completely different note, I copied a Flashdance DVD. It's an epitome of early 80's movie music. There's a line where a character and his wife are attending the skating try-outs of their daughter. The guy looked at his wife and said, "That was you 20 years ago."



If you remember, the performance turned out to be a bit of a disaster. Still the thing I found amazing is that twenty years ago then meant 1963 but today twenty years ago is well after the movie was produced. Time is funny, if you know what I mean.

Trouble in River City

When there's a huge variety to choose from, it can be difficult making a decision. Luckily on the www.zip.ca website, there's no rush in deciding on DVD's. It's easy to browse the selections and read about them. If it looks like it'll be of interest, one just clicks and it's added to one's personal upcoming zip list. There's so much of everything. My viewing habits have never been so eclectic.

I didn't know there was a TV remake of The Music Man in 2003. I've long considered the 1962 version a favourite. So when I saw the newer one on the site, I put in a request. That was a while back. There are 50 or 60 selections lined up on my list. The DVD arrived in the mail yesterday, and I started typing this entry while it was playing.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is good. It is colourful. The songs are, of course, familiar. There are a few numbers that were omitted from the original movie version. Some updating was to make it more politically correct. It's nice to know there were actually black people in Iowa at the turn of the last century. Still, this version doesn't seem quite 'right'.

It's funny how much we resist seeing a remake. I applaud Matthew Broderick's portrayal of Professor Harold Hill. It was reserved and smooth, yet I couldn't help but compare it to the original's Robert Preston. The same goes for Marian Paroo; Kristin Chenoweth was great but I kept wanting to see Shirley Jones. Of course it'd be impossible to update Ron Howard as the ultimate little tyke!

The 2003 version is very good and, in some ways, technically superior, but if you've missed the one that's 44 years old, do grab a copy for comparison.

Target Marketing

Last night I was able to sing along with what I once considered the initial Viagra television commercial. The song really comes from an old film and I was viewing a DVD.

'Good Mornin' actually comes from Singin' in the Rain (1952). I guess those who are old enough to remember this fact, probably do need Viagra's help, eh?

And on a related note, Happy Valentine's Day.

Diamonds

There is absolutely nothing better than having time off. I can understand why individuals requiring money punch a time clock; however, I cannot fathom why some people I know go to work merely to keep busy. I think hobbies can be a full-time vocation.

In recent times, I've been struggling to become more movie literate. There's so much film history to catch up on. There are quite literally tens of thousands of hours to be witnessed. What is it called when a modern work references past works? It happens all the time on film and without basic knowledge of the original, one is left without a clear understanding.



Some bits of Hollywood are so important as to define who we are. Storytelling, after all, compresses the randomness of life into small, digestible pieces. The odd thing for me is that they can be saved so well. I am so thankful for DVDs as any living room can now be an art-house theatre. In the flick above, Marilyn is approachable although she sung the tune a half dozen years before my birth. How can one appreciate Moulin Rouge (2001) having never seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)?