GREENWICH VILLAGE IN REAR WINDOW
Of all the fantasies Rear Window offers – marrying Grace Kelly; being
an action hero photographer; playing ‘choose your own adventure’
through your neighbours’ windows – maybe the best one of all is the
dream of affordable Manhattan real estate. (Because I am a stickler
for very good research, I googled house prices in Greenwich Village –
the first price I glimpsed with my delicate eyes was 13.5 million
dollarydoos.) Hitchcock’s movie is set in a time when ordinary people
could afford to live in the heart of the Big Smoke. The grab bag of
neighbours is a big part of Rear Window’s initial charm – as Jeff,
housebound and bored, watches his neighbours for fun, he comes
to realise just how deceptively bland they seem. His neighbours are
actually quite spicy! Of course, the spiciest neighbour is the evil
Thorwald, who maybe murders his wife, so, uhh, perhaps it’s a good
thing we all live in terrible windowless boxes now.
...................
WILSON IN HOME IMPROVEMENT
Before The Block, a terrible reality show where the gross over-
inflation of house prices is turned into a fun competition, there was
Home Improvement, a terrible sitcom about a dude named Tim who
enables house-flippers by selling them tools. Tim, you see, is a bit of
a tool himself – he’s a man-child who’s overconfident, embarrassingly
inept and makes feral grunting noises, including one that sounds like,
“AwoOooouhhhhH?” I don’t like Tim. Sorry. His one saving grace might
be that he seems to listen to advice from his neighbour, Wilson, but I’m
not sure this really counts for much. Wilson – full name Dr Wilson W.
Wilson Jr, PhD – is everything Tim isn’t: he’s thoughtful; he’s patient; he
likes to quote both Western and Eastern philosophers. A running gag is
that we never get to see Wilson’s face and, honestly, I don’t blame him –
if I lived next door to Tim Taylor, I’d be cowering behind a fence, as well.
TOTORO IN MY NEIGHBOUR TOTORO
OK, OK, I’ve just finished watching My Neighbour Totoro and I have
some questions: 1. Is Totoro only the BIGGEST of the three magic
rabbit spirits, or are each of the three rabbity things a different
type of Totoro? 2. Is Totoro a name or is it a taxonomic rank (like
a species or a genus)? 3. What’s the deal with the cat bus? While
I’d really like to know the answers to my very important questions,
I’m also not so sure they matter that much. There’s something
enchantingly weird about My Neighbour Totoro – understanding its
gentle strangeness is maybe a bit beside the point. If there’s one
thing we can all agree on, though, it’s that Totoro is most probably
the CUTEST neighbour on this list. The human neighbours in the
film – Kanta and his granny – are all very nice and everything, but
I’ll take the funny, round-bellied forest goblin any day....................
WINNIE COOPER IN THE WONDER YEARS
If someone were to make a sitcom about me when I was but a
slightly weird 12- to 17-year-old, the number of scenes involving me
falling in love with my next-door neighbour would be approximately
ZERO (important contextual information: my next-door neighbour
was an old guy named Bruno who owned a bunch of strip clubs).
One thing is clear from my teenage years: I was no Winnie Cooper.
And Bruno, bless his phlegmy cough, was no Kevin Arnold. In
The Wonder Years, Winnie and Kevin grew up together and meant
everything to each other, even if they didn’t know it at the time. In
the show’s final episode, the narrator – a grown-up Kevin – explains
what he’d come to understand: “Once upon a time there was a girl
I knew, who lived across the street... When she smiled, I smiled.
When she cried, I cried. Every single thing that ever happened to
me that mattered, in some way, had to do with her.”popcorn