Alex Moves to Zlín

The moving van arrived, somewhat before Alex, and the driver made it known to Jesse and Julia H (Alex's former roommate) that he had a couple of guys handy who could load it then and there. But Alex was nowhere to be found, so the moving men had to be dismissed and the rest of us had to load the van, just as we had originally expected. (Oh well. It has done our muscles good.)
So... it was pretty much your standard American-type student move, where a gang of convenient friends drags everything down to whatever sort of truck has been borrowed or rented, and hopes to fit it all in without any breakage. We did a great job, I must say.

Alex contemplating the situation. Items visible in the background stayed where they were.


Jesse interviewing Alex's puppet Shirley about the move. Shirley was unsure about the whole operation and pointed out that she had been born in Germany, er, make that Alabama or someplace like that.


Alex, who had not fully realized the amount of stuff she had collected in the past year, was ecstatic that we fit all of it in the truck. Julia certainly did a brilliant job of stacking things securely.

Jesse interviewed Alex herself as well as Shirley the puppet. Alex had less to say than Shirley.

After downing a quantity of beer and Italian food, we moved on to Hubert's, as he seemed to have his heart set on filming us recreating scenes from Czech films, employing Alex and Jesse's videographic skills. Since we were supposed to do this in Czech, and had no time to transcribe the scenes (Hubert had not thought about preparing that in advance since he was writing grant proposals), our method was to play the films on Hubert's laptop and read from the subtitles. Realism was therefore not exactly paramount in these production. Since Hubert's dinner was still in place, we added the laptop to his pseudo-table and performed dinner-table scenes.
Julia, Jesse, and I played the speaking roles in that memorable scene from Samotaři wherein the daughter visits her parents in hopes of having a heart-to-heart talk only to discover that they've invited a group of Japanese tourists to watch them dine. (Hubert played the role of the tourists.) As the mother, I got to deliver lots of angry lines about the daughter's vile friends and their unwillingness to sacrifice for her. It was a little hard to read some of the subtitles, as the word spacing wasn't always very clear. On the whole, however, the scene was a success on its own peculiar terms.
Hubert and Alex then got to do the dinner-table scene from Nuda v Brně. This was made difficult by the fact that the scene is intercut with scenes involving other characters, but they managed to convey a suitably weird dinner encounter, even if not quite the tense affair presented in the film.
We wanted to do the gnocchi/noky scene from Pelišky, but I hadn't brought my copy because I thought Hubert had one of his own. Instead, Hubert and Jesse performed the opening scene from Samotaři and I had a walk-on role that involved some short exclamations and attacking Jesse with righteous verve.
I'm not sure that karaoke film-acting will catch on with a wider segment of society, but it kept us entertained.

Filed under:
Prague film