Ode to a bathroom
By Joseph Lavers
Good morning 🐣
I was standing in front of the mirror in my office building’s restroom recently and I found myself feeling nostalgic for this damn place. You see we’ve had our office here (in the building, not the bathroom) for 32 years and the landlord recently ordered every tenant to clear out. Being a small family business, our office is full of memories of people long since passed. There are pencil markings on the wall charting my height from when I was a kid. And now standing there, washing my hands in some poorly lit corporate bathroom as I had countless times before, the loss felt so real. Those family members are long gone. One day our office won’t be remembered by anyone. And this will be one of the very last times I’ll ever forget that one of the soap dispensers doesn’t work and I have to use the other one.
We’ve collectively experienced the cinematic equivalent a couple times now this year:
If you’ve ever seen “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” the iconic Circle K scene was filmed at an actual store in Tempe, Arizona, and it’s been plugging away as a business in those 30+ years since. Until now, that is. As a fun little send-off, fans gathered for a special screening of the film in the parking lot before the store closed for good.
The Jumbo Floating Restaurant, a 260-foot, three-story… jumbo floating restaurant… has been sitting in Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Harbour for nearly 50 years. Designed to look like an imperial palace with bright neon lights, you’ll recognize it from Jackie Chan’s “The Protector” (1985), “Godzilla vs. Destoroyah” (1995), “Infernal Affairs II” (2003), “Contagion” (2011), and the “Amazing Race” reality TV show. Similar types of floating restaurants can be seen in a couple Bond films, among others. Unfortunately, the restaurant closed in 2020 and sank while they were towing it out to sea last month.
My office, a Circle K in Tempe, a tourist trap restaurant: all forgettable, throwaway commercial places. All full of happy memories. All gone.
Life is change. You can never return to the past. Sometimes you just have to let go, wash your hands, and walk out that door. Don’t forget to turn off the lights.
A quick intermission 🍿
“Made for Love” (HBO Max) finally hit its wacky stride in its second season back in May, but was canceled last month in the Great Purge after Warner Bros. and Discovery completed their corporate merger. It’s still worth checking out this dark sci-fi comedy starring Cristin Milioti (“Palm Springs”) and Ray Romano, though we’ll never know what happens to Zelda, the talking dolphin.
The final episode of “Ms. Marvel” (Disney+) debuts today. Following the delightful Iman Vellani as a Muslim teenager living in New Jersey and the #1 Biggest Fan of Captain Marvel, this six-episode miniseries is one of the few Marvel movies/shows that truly sticks.
I rewatched “Men in Black” (on demand) for its 25th anniversary in the theater recently and boy is it a perfect summer blockbuster with that exhilarating dash of weird.
Now watch this 👀
Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of one of Hayao Miyazaki’s classic animations, “Princess Mononoke” (HBO Max and on demand). Still a kid at the time, I had only ever seen Miyazaki’s very gentle children’s movie, “My Neighbor Totoro,” so you can imagine how surprised I was when this movie’s protagonist, Prince Ashitaka, fires an arrow at an enemy soldier, slicing both of the man’s forearms clean off like butter. The arms get pinned to a tree, swinging and flopping in the momentum. Before your jaw even has time to process this and drop to the appropriate depth, Ashitaka fires another arrow into the distance and a man’s head bops right off. This is all within the first fifteen minutes by the way.
The movie starts with a simple enough premise: A monster attacks a remote village in medieval Japan and the local hero sets off to discover where it came from. Along the way we meet myriad contradictions and shades of gray in what we thought was a black-and-white world. In fact when Ashitaka first confronts the monster (actually a giant boar god that’s been infected and consumed by rage), our prince pleads with it to stop rather than just attacking it automatically.
I wrote about Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” back in April, in which I was gobsmacked by the copious creature designs, but in this case it’s the humans that fascinate me. They all have such personalities; their faces, clothes, and movements all make these little villages feel so real. When Ashitaka camps for the night with a monk, he shows the man a mysterious iron ball found in the belly of the beast from the opening scene. The monk picks it up with his chopsticks, examines it, then returns it and goes back to eating. How do you know that thing’s not gonna infect you too? Mundane actions like these throughout the film are so interesting to watch.
Though our protagonist is male, women (including the title character) are the heart of this film. After the initial attack, the village’s wise woman bows to the dying god and promises to bury him with respect. We later meet an ox driver’s sassy wife and her friends in Iron Town. They don’t take crap from anybody, but they fawn over Ashitaka, the mysterious and dangerous new guy. They’re under the command of Lady Eboshi, who has grown the town to new industrial heights. She takes lepers and prostitutes under her wing while trying to design rifles that are light enough for the girls to carry. She’s like a gun-toting Jesus, the ultimate contradiction.
Lady Eboshi’s sworn enemy is Princess Mononoke, a wild girl who lives with wolves. Our first look at her is when she’s sucking poison out of a giant wolf’s wound and spitting out the blood. She defends the forest from the insatiable might of human greed. But when you’re viewing the story from both sides, how are you supposed to condemn a leader who’s trying to save her people from starvation and death?
As the monk points out earlier in the movie, where they’re camping used to be a lovely little village, wiped out by a flood or something:
“The only sure thing is that everybody’s dead. These days there are angry ghosts all around us — dead from wars, sickness, starvation — and nobody cares. So you say you’re under a curse? Well so what? So’s the whole damn world.”
Now don’t get me wrong; this movie’s chockablock with unearthly delights:
- the Forest Spirit, a deer-like creature with a red, human-ish face by day, and a giant seemingly made out of glitter gel by night;
- gods in the forms of massive boars and wolves;
- demons with hateful, wriggling tentacles; and
- creepy, ghoulish apes.
But in my opinion the absolute MVPs are the Kodama, tiny tree spirits that look like Pillsbury Doughboys by way of Picasso: they have wobbly heads, oddly arranged faces, and plump little butts. Silent but seemingly friendly. Cute but disconcerting. A classic example of elemental myth: jesters with solemnity. Some of them give each other piggyback rides, imitating Ashitaka as he carries a wounded man on his back. They remind me of the soot balls in “Spirited Away,” but much more ancient.
“Princess Mononoke” bathes in the magic of nature with gorgeous imagery of birds flying by in the fog or a golden morning light shining through the trees. But it also follows the bleak path of hatred, fear, and anger, before finally breaking free from the endless cycle of killing and revenge. It argues that we need to stop talking past each other, that we need to start living in harmony with both nature and ourselves, that there’s beauty and majesty in even the most mundane things.