Bites, Camera, Fashion is a column from Davey McNelly, who is disabled, likes films and makes poor choices while trying to simplify his life.
Sometimes you just need to watch a feel-good film of a feel-good book that you have read; something that you already know the plot to. It’s a dark time, after all.
Geopolitically, it’s hard to know what to do to heal the world. It’s easy to feel frozen when you see so many atrocities happening: in Palestine, to our immigrant neighbors, and with the new freeze on allowing new home health aides in Ohio for disabled people.
Over the week, I did what I could, and then needed to recharge. So after Justice Choir at United Campus Ministry (look it up and check it out!), we got MuM MuM Hibachi on Columbus Road and settled in for a cozy movie night at home on a rainy Friday.
Bites
We got a steak and chicken with fried rice and extra veggies. You know how food made at home never tastes as good as it does at a restaurant? Well, I noticed a visible sheen of oil on my bowl after I ate, and felt satisfied.
At $18, the meal also came with miso soup and a side salad. It was enough to feed my partner and I for at least four meals. Why is it called MuM MuM Hibachi? I have no idea, but I do know the owner/workers are friendly and fast with take-out orders.
Camera
There’s a key difference between the Netflix film “Remarkably Bright Creatures” and the Netflix documentary “My Octopus Teacher.” In one, the human does not have a pseudo-sexual relationship with an octopus. Seriously, in “My Octopus Teacher,” a diver basically divorces his wife to wax lovingly about a foot-long centapod.
“Remarkably Bright Creatures” is directed by Olivia Newman and starring Sally Field as Tova, a recently widowed curmudgeon in a Pacific Northwest town. It follows a standard “new person comes to town plot,” as my college creative writing professor calls it.
The wise sage in the film is an octopus named Marcellus, played by CGI and voiced by Alfred Molina. Tova hates her friends, who gossip, and her grocer, who gossips, but she’s the biggest talker of them all, cleaning the town aquarium late every night. And Marcellus is all ears hearing tentacles (?).
Look, I’m not sure how octopuses work. I’m not a science person. I am not bothering to look up how to spell the plural version of octopus, and am instead varying it throughout this column.
Anyway, Marcellus likes her — in a friendly way — and eventually helps her solve the mystery of her dead son. Classic Lassie shit, no?
I don’t normally say if I like a movie or not, but I will say that I gave this one a 5/10. It was too formulaic and I could feel the writing in the dialogue. (Although I loved Colm Meaney as the Irish Deadhead shop owner.) And I’m sorry, but how hard would it have been to work with a live octopus? They made dozens of “Air Bud” movies, and octopuses are supposedly as smart as humans.
For those who want to give octopi their due, I would highly recommend the book “The Mountain in the Sea” by Ray Nayler. It matches our times, being an apocalyptic future run by corporations. Fortunately (for them) /unfortunately (for us), octopi have been evolving under the sea and are set on revenge. I hope this book is turned into a film, and that octopi actors are paid to walk around on land and taught to use swords instead of going the CGI route. What could go wrong?
Fashion
I’ve been on the hunt for some linen suits to wear for our wedding in August. I have gone from zero suits to three in the past couple months as I find things at thrift stores or make a 2 a.m. online shopping order.
I wore a new one to the farmers market to test it out, and got a compliment that I looked “elegant,” which is much better than my normal look, which I call fashionable grandmother.
I hope that you find what you’re looking for, and that you do what you can to make the world better — a la Marcellus, the octopus.
