Coping with the COVID

It’s been a tough month, March has, and we’re well into April now, with no sign of being able to go outside and play.  So we’ve had to make our own fun.  Material for this blog is being provided by my two sons, their wife or fiancée, and their dogs. They made their fun indoors.

Gardy, my older son, and his wife Tiffanie are filmmakers; he is an editor, she a screenwriter/director.  So in these days, they are staying at home, more or less idle, for the industry has closed down. Their dog is Ocho, a corgi-poodle mix:

Ocho stars in Ochorona, a sub-three-minute film on Vimeo.  Gardy is his supporting actor.  This Oscar-worthy short may be seen by clicking the following link:  https://vimeo.com/402062234. It was shot entirely inside their apartment, except for the brief sequence on the roof.  Ocho’s surname, by the way, is a portmanteau creation of his parents’: Tiffanie Hsu and Gardner Gould, thus Hsuld.

Sam and his fiancée, Georgia, live in San Francisco with their dog Ruggles, a Miniature Australian Shepherd-poodle mix.  Sam is a Twitter developer; she works for a start-up, both working at home. Their COVID project was an exercise in still photography, with Georgia taking the photographs, Ruggles and Sam posing.  They decided to recreate the posters of famous movies, five per week.  I have selected five of my favorites.  I will identify the actors each is playing (except where to name him/her would completely give the game away), and readers must identify the film.

We begin with my favorite film of all time:

Here Sam takes the part of Hugh Grant, and Ruggles stars as Julia Roberts.  (We must note that Ruggles is an extraordinarily versatile actor, able to bend his gender at the drop of a hat.)  I’m a life-long bibliophile; thus to watch a beautiful film star walk into a bookstore and fall in love with the owner, well, in my dreams….

            The next one features Ruggles in a solo role:

            Here, fresh from Peru, he is enjoying a marmalade sandwich.  This was Ruggles’s most enjoyable role, for he was able to finish eating his prop, the slice of bread.  And this was his first (but not last) species bending role – well, aside from his canine/human bending, which goes without saying.  But canine/ursine bending, that’s versatility.

Next, Sam returns as Hugh Grant.  Ruggles is someone I’d never heard of, although he has grown up since and played a number of notable roles: Nicholas Hoult.  I noticed Hoult as Jack in “Jack the Giant Slayer,” and IMDB records 55 film and television credits for him.  Sam tells me he was Beast in the new X-Men, and he is Jennifer Lawrence’s ex-boyfriend.  Anyway, here is Ruggles’s impression of him:

            Rotten Tomatoes gave this film a 93% rating.  (Ruggles looks a little sadder about it all.  Look at those eyes.  Perhaps he wanted another slice of bread.)

Next, we come to one of my favorites, I’m afraid to admit.  Rotten Tomatoes barely passed it at 68%.  Sam is portraying Mark Wahlberg, and Ruggles is performing another canine/ursine bend, although this one is voiced by Seth McFarlane, who has one of the most excellent Boston accents around.  Ruggles, although he is named for a Boston T stop in Roxbury, has lost his Boston accent and now barks with a full California voice:

            Note Ruggles’s tongue.  Now that’s acting!  My favorite moment in this film is when Mark Wahlberg tries to guess the name of Ruggles’s trailer-trash girlfriend and runs through about 20 names in as many seconds.  When Ruggles shakes him off, he says, “Wait.  Is it one of those names followed by ‘Lynn’?”  The answer is, of course, yes.

And now the piéce de resistance, one of the greatest love movies of all, a real heart-breaker: Sam plays Bogie in this one, and Ruggles, doing his most excellent job of gender-bending, is Ingrid Bergman:

            Come on, play it again, Sam. We’ll always have Paris.  Round up the usual suspects.  This movie keeps echoing in my head, and I’ll bet in yours, too.

Sam (Gould) is posting all the posters on Twitter.  You can find them at  https://twitter.com/i/events/1245818910386999298.  Meanwhile, Gardy, Tiffanie, Ocho, Sam, Georgia, Ruggles, and I are urging everyone to stay inside, stay safe, watch movies on TV – until this COVID crap is really, really over.  Oh, but it’s okay to walk your dog.