C&C 34: Public Restrooms and Private Equity
On PERFECT DAYS and DUMB MONEY, plus the scoop on my go-to movie snack
First up, the last piece of Noir City Seattle 2024 promo. Here’s the opening night red carpet SIFF Tiny Mic Interview with Rosemarie and me. Please note how Rosemarie, in noir-appropriate black-and-white Nike Dunks and Agnès Varda pin, shames me in the casual elegance department as usual. I’m more pulled together on nights when I’m hosting. Festival master of ceremonies Eddie Muller fielded the same queries.
What I’m Watching
Perfect Days (Japan/Germany, 2023). The rare movie that may have actually rewired my brain. Wim Wenders’ masterpiece is both a work of art and a radical act, asking and answering an existential question: how much—or really, how little—do you need to live your life? Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho, in a transcendent performance that won the Best Actor Award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival) cleans Tokyo’s public restrooms, dedicating himself to a position of service with monastic grace. He has distilled his life down to the essentials. He has his music and books—physical media rules—and is a regular at several places; he may not say much, but his presence adds to the atmosphere and his absence would be felt. Hirayama is no paragon or holy fool. There are hints of discord in his past, along with glimmers of a hopeful future. He experiences frustration and voices it. But he shows up, day after day, and imbues his every action with purpose.
Wenders and Yakusho tap into the extraordinary power of the nod, the simple recognition of another human being. The film also showcases the architectural, technological, and humanistic marvels that are the Tokyo public restrooms; other cities, including the one I live in, could learn from them. Perfect Days made me think of another favorite film, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016), as well as Charles Willeford’s famously unpublished novel Grimhaven; I blame the jumpsuits. (I will not divulge my source for the Willeford manuscript.) In Grimhaven, ex-detective Hoke Moseley has also reduced his existence to necessities. His choice is punitive, while Hirayama’s is liberating; Hoke’s privations exile him from humanity as Hirayama is freed to concentrate on what truly matters. Both men have young female relatives abruptly insert themselves into their routines. This intrusion sends Hoke into a tailspin, but Hirayama selflessly accommodates his charge, inviting her in and opening up her world as well as his own.
Perfect Days hit me with extraordinary yet benevolent force. That might be because Hirayama’s choices, including his commitment to a job too readily slighted or overlooked, reminded me of a friend. See it in a movie theater if possible; it’s akin to a devotional act.
Dumb Money (2023, currently on Netflix). I’ll watch any movie in which the Kingpin from Daredevil, Vincent D’Onofrio, plays New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, complete with enormous pet pig. The film, about GameStop’s wild stock market ride, deserved a better box office fate. It taps into the political and class rage underlying the GameStop story, and may be one of the few movies to depict the disorienting early days of the pandemic that we seem to have collectively chosen to forget. The script by Orange is the New Black writers Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo covers an impressive amount of ground while folding a broad range of perspectives into the mix.
What I’m Reading
For the New York Times, Julia Moskin interviews thirty chefs about the current state of the restaurant business. Pull quotes abound, like this observation from Geoff Davis of Burdell in Oakland, California.
Nobody says that a pair of Jordans are overpriced or an Hermès bag is overpriced when it costs them pennies on the dollar to produce. And that does nothing to keep you alive or have jobs in your community and a place to celebrate your birthday or anniversary.
Ted Gioia follows up his viral essay about “dopamine culture” with one on the necessity and power of ritual, a piece that landed differently with me after Perfect Days.
Will Leitch on how enshittification, once endemic to social media platforms, “is coming for everything … Things are getting worse because it’s essential to the business plan. Enshittification is simply efficient.” He rightly ties Major League Baseball’s uniform fiasco into this downward spiral; Molly Knight and Chelsea Janes report on this farce, brought to you by Rob Manfred and his cronies at the League office, along with Nike and every sports fan’s retailer of last resort, Fanatics.