Horrible neighbor may be a film major

A completely different person who has nothing to do with them.

I drove up and parked in front of my house. One of the loud neighbors next door---one of the rich bastards from California whose parents bought the house for them to live in while they went to the university which means they'll be there for years without hope of them moving out---was outside walking around with a steadycam with a large SLR. 

Maybe he's a film major. He obviously has rich parents. There aren't film schools in California?

Those people are assholes. They can't go out in their yard without setting up speakers outside to blare their terrible music. I'm not the only one they're annoying, but I'm the only one who yells at them to turn it off. 

I waited until he stopped filming because I didn't want to be captured on video. I thought for a moment that it was too bad I kept yelling at them and calling the police because now I can't converse pleasantly with them about what they're doing. Then I thought, no, I don't want to talk to them. To hell with them.

The Homecoming (1973)

The Criterion Channel is featuring the work of Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. This was a play filmed with the original cast as it appeared on stage about a degenerate family in North London.

A retired father, his brother who works as a chauffeur and his two sons, one a pimp, the other trying to be a boxer, live together in a house the two older men inherited from their mother. A third son, a philosophy professor working at a university in California, returns unannounced with his new wife who the others meet for the first time. 

Turns out the apple doesn't fall far from the tree even if it does have a PhD. The wife is a surprisingly good sport.

Paul Rogers, Ian Holm, Cyril Cusack, Terence Rigby, Michael Jayston and Vivian Merchant. That's the full cast.

It was great. It was brilliant. And it might make a good double feature with Ride the High Country. You'll see why.

Stay back from people who look like this

Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski has COVID-19 and was probably contagious when these pictures were taken a week ago.

He doesn't look like someone named Corey.

Election (1999)

I was sitting in a restaurant years ago, alone, reading a newspaper. It was the Portland paper, not the local news. A high school teacher had written a letter to the editor. She defended her school's decision to kick a kid out for publishing an underground newspaper because the paper revealed that one of the teachers was sleeping with a student.

The woman's letter didn't make sense. She argued that the teacher would be denied a fair trial if high school kids knew about his crimes, like they were potential jurors. 

But the point here is that teachers will often defend any act of depravity as long as it's committed by another teacher against a student.

Election (1999) stars Matthew Broderick as a conniving high school teacher who blames student body presidential candidate Reese Witherspoon for another teacher getting fired for molesting her.

Come to think of it, I was slightly acquainted with a guy in high school. I don't remember who he was. But he said he once ran for student council. I didn't witness this, but he said there was an event where all the candidates had a few minutes to address the school. He stepped up to the microphone and mumbled some jokes. My impression was that he didn't say anything coherent. He said that after the event, he laughed when the principal told him he might have to suspend him. That sort of thing happened in the movie, too.

And, by the way, when I started high school, the student body president spoke to the in-coming students. He started with a joke. He said how happy he was that all of his friends were there to support him-- "I see both of you are here."

That got a laugh. I laughed. Then I remembered that I only had two actual friends myself. Was I really so unpopular?

Lifetime, Hallmark channels back in action

 

I feel like signing up for the Lifetime Movie Channel again. They were awful. I could watch them with little feeling of inferiority.

Apparently these movies are back in production. Read the whole story here from Connecticut:

https://www.theday.com/article/20201101/ENT09/201109988

Synthetic Cinema International, the Rocky Hill-based film company, is usually flat-out busy making movies for, say, Hallmark or Lifetime — and is usually shooting those projects in Connecticut.

When the pandemic hit in mid-March, Synthetic’s filming came to a sudden halt.

Finally, come June, Synthetic started shooting again, first with a romance filmed primarily in Putnam and Woodstock and then a thriller in towns including East Lyme, New London and Ledyard.

Andrew Gernhard, Synthetic’s co-founder and producer, says that as far as he knows, their romantic drama/comedy “One Royal Holiday” was the first movie to go into production on the East Coast after the pandemic shut everything down. He believes that “Stalker’s Prey 3” was the second movie to be shot in Connecticut after the lockdown, following “One Royal Family.”

While the productions had to follow all the expected COVID safety protocols, one of the other big changes was the necessity of limiting the number of extras.

In “Stalker’s Prey,” they did use some extras — but only about 20 over two or three days. The extras were given COVID tests, had their temperatures taken and were kept away from the main cast and crew.

“One Royal Holiday,” on the other hand, needed more people. There is a big parade, for instance, that might normally feature 200 extras. Instead, Synthetic used green-screen technology.

“We got a bunch of extras, we put them in front of a green screen and shot them, then we had them change and shot them again,” Gernhard says. “We’re going to actually green screen them into different backgrounds and foregrounds.”

*  *  *

Making movies during COVID

“Making a movie is stressful because of all the moving parts,” Gernhard says. “This (COVID) adds, no joke, about 35 percent more stress. The logistics alone are insane. … It’s not fun. You know, (in the end), I don’t feel accomplished, I feel relieved. Because I legitimately have been a stress ball the entire time.”

Gernhard says they were lucky in that the screenplays for both movies “were originally written a little bit tighter and a little bit smaller, and a little more intimate anyway, and we did a slight rewrite to both to make them a little more COVID compliant.”

For instance, they tried not to have too many scenes set in public places.

On set, they adhered to the expected safety protocols: wear a three-ply mask; socially distance; do as much outside as possible and, if things have to be done inside, limit the amount of crew and cast involved. Everyone was tested multiple times a week and mostly stayed at their hotels or inns, tending to restrict themselves in terms of off-hours activities to outdoor pursuits like golf and jogging. 

A ‘Royal’ romance

Synthetic began filming “One Royal Holiday” in June mostly in Putnam and Woodstock, and Gernhard says, “At that point, (those towns) only had, like, 11 cases of COVID. On purpose, I chose that location, never mind that they have beautiful inns there.”

They shot at the Inn at Woodstock Hill and the Mansion at Bald Hill.

“That was our bubble. Our cast and crew and everything was up at these two inns, and that was it,” Gernhard says, adding with a laugh, “It was actually kind of a summer vacation.”

In “One Royal Holiday,” a nurse heading home from work not long before Christmas runs into people who need a place to stay during the oncoming blizzard. She brings them to her father’s inn, and it turns out they are the queen and prince of (the fictional country of) Galwick. As the nurse and the prince fall for each other, he learns to be a better person.

“One Royal Holiday” features a lot of Broadway actors. With Broadway closed for the foreseeable future, these talented but usually busy performers were available. In addition, Synthetic tried to limit travel for the movies because of COVID, and Broadway performers tend to live in or close enough to Connecticut to drive rather than fly to the locations.

“One Royal Holiday” stars Aaron Tveit, who was just nominated for a Tony for his performance in the stage adaptation of “Moulin Rouge!,” and Laura Osnes, who earned Tony nominations in past years for playing Bonnie Parker in “Bonnie and Clyde” and Cinderella in “Cinderella.” “One Royal Holiday” isn’t a musical, but there is some singing.

Trump declares himself the winner

 

I got to see the historic moment on live TV. Trump declared himself the winner and will go to the Supreme Court to stop the vote count. He did what he said he'd do. Stunning but not surprising. Things have gone exactly as predicted.

Garden State (2004)

Acting.

Zach Braff plays an actor in Los Angeles who has apparently refused to speak to his father in New Jersey for some time. When his father calls to inform him that his mother is dead, Braff flies home for her funeral. He hangs around with his quirky friends and with Natalie Portman. 

His father is a psychiatrist. In spite of being alienated from him for years, Braff has continued taking the medication he prescribed for him all this time. It has left him unable to feel emotion which you'd think would be a serious impediment for an actor, but that may have been the point.

I watched a little of it, didn't like it. I googled it and read something explaining why people once liked it but later turned against it and against Braff himself. Something about an anti-hipster backlash. 

I liked it better after reading that and watched the rest. 

Just seemed kind of middling. People enthused over Braff's taste in music when it came out and I guess it was good although music doesn't interest me. He's like Woody Allen going through his record collection for music for his movies.