Thursday, October 10
I woke up around 8, hardly "super early so i can do laundry," but i figured it was the responsible thing to do anyway. I gathered all of my dirty clothes, including my shorts and vest, put on my swimming trunks, and wrapped the sheet from my bed around me so that i could throw all of my shirts in. Then i headed up to the 7th floor, which is just the laundry room and the rooftop bar. Interesting combo.
The washers and dryers had a credit card pictured on the usage instructions decal, but as far as i can tell, there is no actual credit card slot or place to tap. I was going to need coins, which i did not have.
I brought my stuff back down to my room on the 2nd floor, and fished through the bag for the least-smelly items, and got dressed. I'd have to make getting cash a priority while i was out and about today, and do laundry tonight.
I took my laptop to the 2nd floor bar to have my aminos and buy film fest tickets for today, which i'd failed to do before bed again last night. I decided to skip breakfast, i was still kind of full from the late-night paella. It was earlier than i'd been getting up, so i thought i could pack in an extra showing, if i hurried and got out of the hostel quickly enough.
10:45 Luna
12:30 Planet B
15:15 The Colors Within
17:30 Call of Water
19:30 Dead Mail
A pretty solid lineup, and i should be on the train back to Barcelona like an hour earlier than yesterday! That'll help ensure that laundry happens.
It was barely after 9am, so i should have plenty of time, but i booked it out of the hostel anyway, just to be sure. Hopefully that would give me some time to find a little something to eat once i reached Sitges, before my first screening.
I got to the Passeig de Gràcia station and bought my ticket. There's a couple coffee shops down there with some pastries, i thought about swinging over to one of them. I checked the departure board first, though, to see when the next train going that direction would be.
Two minutes? Oh shit, okay! Well, i guess i'll get down there.
Good thing i did, because it was only about two minutes late, which makes it perhaps the most punctual Barcelona Metro train i've gotten on this entire time.
As we approached the next station, Barcelona Sants, the train came to a stop in the dark tunnel before the platforms, and we waited. Presumably, another train must have been ahead of us on the same track. We waited there for several minutes.
The same thing happened at the next station. The waits were so long, i was starting to get worried.
It should only be a little over 40 minutes from Passeig de Gràcia to Sitges, now that i don't have that long walk between the hostel and the station like i did the first day. We arrived in Sitges at 10:25.
Luna was at the Tramuntana, nearly a mile from the train station. And i realized i'd forgotten to fill my water bottles before leaving the hostel.
The best course of action from here would be to just head to the theater and find some water later, but we all know how that's been going for me; i also needed to pee, and didn't know if i'd have time for that, which seemed like a higher priority than filling water bottles. There's very little time between the end of Luna and the beginning of Planet B. Fortunately, Planet B is in the Melià Auditori, just upstairs in the same building as Tramuntana. So it would not be in my best interest to leave that area to find water.
I came to the intersection where i could go forward for the most direct path to the Melià, or turn right to go down by the food trucks and the beach, where the one and only bottle filling fountain i've found in all of Sitges is located. I checked my phone. It was 12 minutes to showtime and an estimated 8 minute walk. I was a pace beyond the turn when i made the executive decision to spin around and go for the fountain.
Even with making the stop to fill the bottles, i made that one-mile walk in 15:50.
Four minutes to showtime. I went for the bathroom. There was no line.
I had gotten everything i wanted and was settled into my seat with two minutes to spare.
I had been a little unsure if i wanted to see Luna, to be honest. The blurb on the web site says it's about a team of astronauts who, while walking the surface of the moon, see a comet hit Earth and lose all communication. I was afraid this would be an isolated, hopeless survival horror, which i don't typically respond well to. Regardless of setting, they make me feel claustrophobic, which i otherwise am not.
And...yeah, that's pretty much exactly what this is, with the addition of comet debris also raining down across the lunar surface as the astronauts try to find a way home.
I did end up enjoying it, though. I'm not sure what makes this one special. But it was pretty alright. I liked that lots of important plot details play out in the reflections of their helmets, it's a small thing, but a nice touch.
Planet B takes place in the dystopian near-future of 2039 in Paris, where a group of environmental activists, (correctly) feeling that the Paris Accords didn't do enough to combat climate change, have taken to terrorism to shut down factories and systems which are creating enormous amounts of pollution. When several of them are caught, they wake up in an unfamiliar beach resort called "Planet B." They figure out pretty quickly that it's a simulation, and the French authorities are using it to hijack their minds and attempt to gain intel on the rest of their group.
The title means exactly what you think it does. I thought that was a bit ham-fisted, especially the way they ultimately work that famous saying into the movie; literally the last line of dialog spoken by a named character is, "There is no Planet B," and it does not feel natural. Maybe something was lost in the translation.
It should be no surprise that i enjoyed the film quite a bit. This was another audience award candidate. I gave it a 5. I only saw two other people put their votes in, one was also a 5 and the other was a 2. That's too few data points for me to make any assumptions on how it was received.
I had a 45 minute gap between Planet B and The Colors Within, and i needed to move from the Melià to the Casino Prado, where i would be camped out for the rest of the day. A fortunate coincidence that my last three films were all at the Casino. It's a 17 minute walk, a bit less than a mile, and i go right through the food trucks on the way there.
I refilled my water bottles and grabbed a burger called the Pendejo from the same truck i'd gotten the Madame from a few days ago. This one had guacamole and caramelized onions. It was nice.
Despite being low on time, i thought i could afford to sit down and eat my burger, if not take the time to savor it. That bun was too small for what it was stuffed with, and eating while walking seemed to be courting disaster.
I made the casino three minutes before showtime.
I don't really know what to think of The Colors Within. It's another anime, again seemingly targeted at a younger audience. It's about a schoolgirl who can see auras. I've known people who claim to be able to see auras, there's a fascinating culture built around that, but i don't feel like it was explored very much in the movie. She talks about it a lot in the beginning, and then it comes up again at the end, but it's sidelined for most of the runtime.
It's a lot of teenage angst, these kids on the cusp of adulthood, coping with their families' expectations of them which don't necessarily match their own goals. The three leads end up forming a band together, as a creative outlet for their emotions.
Each of them write one song during the main story, three completely different musical visions for a single band. In the end, there is a full concert scene where all three songs are played in their entirety, and it honestly works pretty well. I really enjoyed the music. And the dancing nuns.
Oh yeah, it takes place at a Catholic school. The whole thing is pretty entrenched in Catholicism.
I had been a little nervous going in, after what happened with the last children's anime movie i saw in this very room, but i didn't have any such reactions to this one. There are some scenes dealing with loss, but it's not nearly as heady.
The movie was alright. I'd love to track down the soundtrack, but i don't know if i'll revisit the movie itself. Unless i have a teenage niece/nephew i think could gain something from it someday.
Call of Water is another weird French film. I realized at this point that i hadn't seen a single film in English today; it went Spanish, French, Japanese, French. I couldn't remember what the last movie would be.
The movie starts out with a mom and her two young sons, ages 7 and 9, on the beach on a cold day. The younger of them really has to poop, and is evidently too young to go to the bathroom by herself, so she takes him to the outhouse. When they come back, the nine-year-old is missing. After shouting and searching frantically for a few minutes, including asking everyone on the beach if they've seen him, where the kids he was just playing ball with deny having ever even seen him, they find his jacket. Nearby, the boy is standing in the surf, still fully clothed, but drenched, and verbally unresponsive.
At home, his behavior starts becoming more and more bizarre. He becomes obsessed with water, he says he can hear voices when he's submerged. It's aliens, and they're coming soon, to save them. A psychiatrist tentatively suggests exploring the possibility of schizophrenia, but the mom chooses to believe him. Her behavior, too, becomes unhinged, tearing the family apart, although it seems like her and her husband were already having some serious issues and considering separation.
Then the weird stuff starts happening.
Anyway it was pretty good! The director and two members of her team were there for an introduction, but none of them could speak Spanish and they all had pretty limited English, so they did the intro in French and then a translator repeated it in Spanish. So, i've no idea what was said.
I've seen a lot, but not all, of these intros being filmed, mostly by people in the audience with their phones, but occasionally by official-looking people with real cameras near the stage, so i wonder if they'll be available online in the future, hopefully with subtitles.
The last film of the day was, in fact, in English. Dead Mail is also a bit of an oddball. I cannot tell if it's actually based on a true story or not; it seems to indicate that it is, and at the end there's one of those montages where they show the actors' faces fading into old photographs of similar-looking people with a paragraph about what happened to them after the events of the film. But then, at the very end of the credits, the boilerplate "This is a work of fiction, any similarity to real people or events is purely coincidental" comes up and hangs on the screen for just a touch too long. So i don't know.
Sometime in the latter half of the 20th century, i'm guessing late 1970s but i'm not positive, a Black man, bound by his hands and feet, bloody, bursts out of the front door of a secluded home on a back country road and writhes his way across the lawn to a big, blue postal box. He manages to drop his blood-soaked distress message in before his captor can intercept him. While the villain is struggling to regain control of his prisoner, the mail gets picked up and taken to the post office for sorting. Without a proper address, it's pushed off to the Dead Letter office, coming to a man named Jasper. Jasper is terrifyingly good at tracking down the proper destinations for mislabeled mail in an age before the World Wide Web, as we're shown with a package containing a valuable necklace before he gets to work on the plea for help.
The story reaches almost all the way to its conclusion in the first act, then backs up to show us how we got here. It's an interesting choice, because it turns out we've seen the villain so many times before it's revealed who he is; which is cool, because it preserves some of the mystery while we're watching those events unfold. However, once we see that character in the flashback, knowing what he's capable of by the end, it really gets the audience to speculate wildly how he came to be what we've already seen in the opening. If this story had played out in a linear fashion, we would have a completely different view of that character.
I really liked it, and i like it the way it's structured, but i can't help but wonder if, at one point, this was meant to be told linearly, and if the nonlinear approach came about in the edit. Sometimes that's the way things come together. Whatever serves the story best.
It was not even 9:30 when i came out of that theater. I should definitely be able to catch an earlier train, and still feel good about doing laundry tonight! Plus, i'm at the Casino Prado, which is the closest venue to the train station. The one time i went to the Casino first, the day i saw Umbrella Fairy, it had taken me nearly 20 minutes to get there, but that's because i went searching for Eguzki Lizarran first. Surely it's a bit closer than that if i go direct!
I put it into Maps.
...It's two blocks away. Maps is quoting me a three-minute walk.
I turned right. Sure enough, i could see it from here.
Motherfucker.
Anyway that's incredible. Perhaps i should try to plan my days to start and end, or at least one of those, at Casino Prado.
This is it, we did it, finally! All the way, directly from Sitges to Passeig de Gràcia, no missed departures or cancelations, no broken-down trains, no buses involved, no going out the wrong end of the station and getting stopped by a gate and having to walk all the way back. Just a smooth, smooth, smooth ride home! It's so nice!
I got off the train and started looking for an ATM, since i'd forgotten to handle this while in Sitges. I'd hoped to grab some cash and get change from a food truck, but i never had the time for that. I seemed to remember seeing an ATM in the subway station.
Five euro service charge?!? Jeez. Okay, well, i guess include that when figuring how much it costs to do laundry tonight instead of just using the scrubba bag. God damn.
I was walking toward the hostel, cash in hand, hoping they could just make change at the front desk, when suddenly i realized
oh shit
have i eaten anything today?
Just that burger? It wasn't even that big of a burger. I didn't even get a side. That's literally all of the food that i've put inside me today. It was quarter past 10, so it was just a smidge too late to get food at the hostel. I didn't really want to sit down at a restaurant, since i still wanted to do laundry. But there was a small market just down the block, so i went over there.
I grabbed a premade sandwich in a triangular box, a bag of Snatts-brand Natuchips (Tomate, Queso y Orégano flavor), and what i thought was a Pepsi Max but turned out to be regular Pepsi. I paid in cash, and asked for the change in coins. He didn't seem to understand me, i was saying, "Coins please, instead of the bill," as he tried to hand me a ten. I was able to reach out and tap his coin tray, so he put the 10 back...and still handed me a five, plus seven €1 coins. Seven euros is exactly the amount i need to both wash and dry my laundry, so i didn't push it any further and accepted the fiver.
I succeeded. Now here i sit, on the floor in the laundry room, in my swimming suit with a towel draped over my naked torso. Everything is getting washed. I suppose it's worth the €12 total, to not have to sit next to strangers and stink at a film festival for the next few days. I don't know if i'll end up doing laundry again before i leave, but i might.
From where i sit, i'm at eye level with the clear glass door of the front-loading washer. After it filled, as it first began to spin, i heard the smack of something metal against the glass. i figured it was probably just the buttons of my vest, but i looked up instinctively. The drum had stopped turning; it would do this several times at the beginning of the cycle. But from the position it made that first stop in, dead center in the window, i could see something i'd forgotten.
My pin with the symbol of the Popular Front of Latvia was still in the lapel of my vest.
Fuck.
God damn it.
It was too late to stop the washer now. I just had to hope that the enamel on the pin didn't get damaged, or that the pin itself didn't damage the vest, or fall out and damage anything else; my clothes or the washer. All i could do was wait and see. 40 minute countdown.
When the washer stopped, i pulled the things off of the top of the vest and chucked them carelessly into the dryer. As soon as i could pull the vest out, i went for the lapels immediately.
My pin was gone.
I pulled each item out carefully and shook it. The pin did not appear. I spun the drum, running my hands along its smooth interior, checking the drain holes, which surely were too small for the pin to fall into.
Nothing.
Maybe it's stuck in one of my other pieces of clothing. Maybe i'll find it when i'm folding them, or when i'm putting my pants on in the morning and i stab myself in the butt. No, i can't do that. I need to find it now. Going through the dryer can't be good for enamel pins. Pins can't be good for the dryer.
I was able to slip my finger underneath the seal between the drum and the door. Still nothing. I found i could pull it partially away, and check underneath. Lot of gross stuff, but still not my pin.
Wait. There's another bit of seal here, with an additional fold. What's in here...?
A whole lot of sequins. Someone washed something they shouldn't have.
And sitting on that bed of sequins, there was my pin. Fully intact, no noticeable damage to the enamel or the metal.
Oh thank gosh. I'm quite attached to this thing.
Alright. I'm gonna say the log is done here, i've just got to wait out the dryer for another six minutes, and then i can head to bed. It's barely past midnight, maybe i can even take a shower and still get an earlier start tomorrow!
Maybe i should look at showtimes now, though?
Ehhh. Maybe. What's playing at the Casino Prado?
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