bath journal

Here I log in movies I've watched while
soaking in my bathtub, including bathing products and a movie review!

First themed bath! (that I remember)
I bought the bath bomb on a whim because its design spoke to me, and I expected The Craft to be some kind of more mature Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but it was a lot more compelling than that! Loved all the girlbossing going on. I picked the bath salts because it reminded me of the game Rose & Camellia, so I looked for a movie that could work under the same theme (woman vs woman duels, family drama, costumes), and it absolutely delivered, 10/10, had a great time. I didn’t expect the bath to look like I murdered someone in it* and I didn’t realize the leaf on the packaging was literal weed, but I also didn’t expect this Precure 20th anniversary fan service movie to go so freaking hard both in its themes and animation, so I guess in the end it all came together beautifully.

* When I poured the blood-like liquid in the tub I immediately thought of pairing this bath foam with Les Diaboliques (1955), let’s see if I feel like rewatching this banger some other time… With a name like “devil’s claw” I wanted a movie with a devil in it but couldn’t quite find something I wanted to watch, so I picked Onibaba, which I had already seen, but it is a great movie and I needed to rewatch it for… research purposes.

Lo and behold a few days later I learned that a movie called The Devil’s Bath is about to premiere… well at least I already know under which conditions I’ll watch it :^) I watched this movie because a Letterboxd review said “Can you believe this film invented the color pink?” and my god it is true. I came in with no expectations but it was genuinely hilarious and I would summarize it as Citizen Kane, but woman (and sort of anti-capitalist). Very cool opening credits, loved all the characters and their outfits except the main “antagonist”, my only regret is that he still gets away with it. Had a very good time overall! Fun movie, I didn't know anything about the cast so each new appearance was a pleasant surprise. Very funny to see Dan Stevens tell his gf she looks too pale when he’s the whitest palest looking mfer in Downton Abbey.

I feel like there’s an interesting coming-of-age feminist “what is girlhood, what is womanhood”, “my body my choice” metaphor going on + fun political undertones but the wiki page simply doesn’t have enough info for me to nib on… Also the outfits in this are incredible!! (the CGI not so much tho lol) (yeah I need to finish my bottle before I can experiment with new bathing products... I'm saving money but I'm getting kinda bored with it)
I listen to Carpenter Brut's Maniac regularly so it was about time I watched Flashdance.

Male gaze masterclass, but Jennifer Beals is sooooo pretty in every shot, the flashdancers are incredibly talented (Tina Tech omg!! but why didn't they let Heels dance...) but I spent half of the movie pissed at Nick lmao if you want to help your gf ask her first bitch!!! I don't think I ever really was into mermaids that much, but I knew this was going to be a bath movie and I needed the right product for it... Unfortunately the bath salts weren't that incredible despite the awful whale pun and the marine themed packaging lmao but the movie sure overcompensated for that!

What a perfect girl movie... Pure girl friendship triumphing over a speed date, magical starfish earrings, mood-changing nail polish, incredible hues of blue and pink everywhere, a coming-of-age undertone...

I wish I had seen this when it came out and that I'd had friends to see it with but for now I'll just paint my nails blue ~

Bonus point for the random black forest cake cameo ofc I was in a phase of catching up on French classics I missed and so far this is the only one that held up to the passage of time lol. I'd watched Clue a few weeks earlier, so it was nice to slide back into a murder mystery, except this one has musicals and pretty women who are all after each other and uh, not just out of disdain or jealousy :^)

It's a shame that each character is shown to be equally flawed but only the one man around whom the whole plot resolves gets to be somewhat redeemed... But the cinematography was incredible, and mid-way I started wishing for a remake with a contemporary twist (but maybe I shouldn't, monkey's paw etc). The perfect movie to end this bottle on.

I'm usually not a fan of deconstructed or nonchronological narratives, especially in movies with heavy symbolism or surrealism going on because they're already hard enough to follow, but in this movie it worked perfectly. The abstract, symbolic shots squeezed between scenes, the mastery of black and white contrasts, it's all telling a beautiful story but you already know that it will not end well, and yet you still wonder about the "how". That is, until you reach the end, and realize that not only you've been watching a Greek tragedy the whole time, but the movie has been hinting at it all throughout its duration in scenes that didn't seem to have any relation to one another.

And then, just as the drama reaches its climax, it cuts to Nagaharu Yodogawa (I had to google it) saying "Well that sure was scary, huh?" and I had to burst in laughter at how tongue-in-cheek the whole movie is, despite its fundamental tragedy.

(I won't comment on the whole gender discourse because 1/ it's not my place and 2/ I still think that Japan has a very different perception of gender than the West, which imo makes it difficult to understand or criticize in good faith if you're not deeply familiar with it.) I managed to get a bunch of different bath salts for free so now I'm trying to find movies to go with them... When Matty brought out the "magic wishing dust" I knew I had picked the perfect flick for this one.

It's certainly very tame, but not to the point that it's boring. Above all I liked the budding friendship between 30 yo Jenna and her 13 yo neighbour, and the slumber party looked really fun (I really like how it breaks down the psychological barrier between child and adult, when really slumber parties are about play, gossip, and sharing advice, so why not shake things up and mix age groups once in a while...). On the other hand I also wondered about the ethics behind a guy falling in love with a 13 yo child trapped in a 30 yo body, but towards the end Jenna's "internal age" was ambiguous enough in the way she behaved and spoke that I stopped questioning it (it's not supposed to be sci-fi and taken too literally, I imagine).

"I wanna be thirty, flirty and thriving" Girl, same. Same... I spent ages trying to find a movie to go with this product, and in the end I decided that muscle relaxing bath crystals would go great with an esoteric pseudo-scientific bullshit movie about crystals (I was also deep in contemplation over the state of FFXIV and my WoL and whether I wanted to stop playing or not, so it seemed fitting).

As expected, it was a whole lot of nothing lmao. A bunch of white men talking about science and history when none of them are scientists or historians (except for one geologist), a lot of phallic symbolism no one wants to acknowledge, no credible sources whatsoever, you get the idea. It was so boring relaxing that I almost fell asleep when they spent a little too long using science to prove that crystals affect the magnetic properties of a room.

The only part that really caught my interest was the intro, particularly "We need to become crystalline from within", or crystals being "ambassadors of eternity" (which is very in line with my FFXIV lore hehe), but ultimately it's more about these German guys saying whatever and not so much about crystals, what properties each stone has, or how they were perceived in different cultures (something I would be super interested to learn more about rip). I wanted to finish my stock of freebies with this one and potentially pair it with Hocus Pocus (a movie I never managed to finish because I wasn't in the mood for it), but in the end I changed my mind.

The bath product was super disappointing lmao, it was like dropping little green tablets of watercolor paint into my bath and waiting for them to slowly dissolve... didn't notice any color changes either. Some of the "therapeutic"/aromatic bath salts I've tried before were way more colorful than this.

The movie on the other hand!! There are so few movies that tackle the topic of immortality, and this one truly delivered. It's camp as hell, Meryl Streep is fantastic as usual, the practical effects are great, and girls win the day... but at what cost..... Had to look up what "Kampferbaum" was and learned camphor comes from East Asia, so might as well go for a movie with a lot of plants taking place in China/Vietnam.

I watched this movie a very long time ago when I was starting high school, a strange time where people around me were starting to be a little bit more open about their sexuality, but not quite yet. A classmate who was very honest about being gay lent me the DVD, and I watched it at home on my brand new laptop. I remember enjoying it at the time (even if I didn't remember much of it), but I'd been wanting to rewatch it because now I'm a lot more Aware* of the issues this movie raises and I wanted to see how it held up to the passage of time.

Unfortunately it's very hard to stay focused on the movie when the first track, which is featured continously throughout all the sentimental scenes, is part of the famous French new age musical project Era (the 15th track on The Very Best of Era to be exact, a CD I'm very familiar with lol).

That being said, the set was great (that pyramid-shaped green house!), the yellow hues really added to the atmosphere and historical period the movie was conveying, but on the other hand I'm still not sure how I feel about it... The first time I watched it I was wrongly under the impression that it was a French movie, and even now that I'm aware that the director is Chinese and that I've watched it in Mandarin, the presence of Mylène Jampanoï (who I loved in Martyrs, but who still had to be dubbed over by someone else), the very postcard-like scenery shots, and even some dialogues felt like the movie was "Chinese, but made for a Western audience" (which was probably the case, and I imagine the French funding also enforced some requirements). Sometimes it made me feel like a tourist, a bit like the Shenmue games do (in contrast to the very little Chinese media I've consumed, which doesn't take the time to show and explain things to the uninitiated, since this is their everyday culture).

The story itself is... well, you know how well it's going to end already, so it's all about learning how it will happen. It's interesting that a few scenes mention toxic plants, some lethal, and yet murder is something neither of the girls ever consider... I was wondering for a good chunk of the movie why this was never on the table, but I'm now reading a Letterboxd review saying "They never do anything wrong." and maybe those scenes were there to highlight that, you the spectator want them to survive and succeed by any means, but they are too pure, too kind and too innocent to even consider it, and that brings them to their downfall. Still... A lot of the romantic scenes felt somewhat voyeuristic, and I wonder how the movie would be shot nowadays (by a lesbian director).

* To make it clear, I was SO unaware of things at that time, I never realized another classmate had been hitting on me every week during philosophy class because she never explicitly said she was gay (so clearly her hand on my leg was just a sign of friendship, right?), and it's years later that I had a ".....oh." moment realizing there was an opportunity there I never saw (and subsequently realizing that my "fuck! how did I miss that!! there could have been a thing between us!!!" reaction confirmed I was very probably bi lol). And even today I have no clue if that classmate who lent me the DVD was testing the waters or not... I was just "cool, free exotic non-mainstream movie, thanks". I had seen this movie a while ago and remembered enjoying it, but then not too long ago I watched A Little Princess, which I expected to like but made me raise my eyebrows really high instead with the blatant orientalism slapped on a black girl for no good reason (and its pretense of examining social classes but really reinforcing the status quo...), so it was time for a rewatch (and I needed something with a lot of random plants anyway).

And the movie starts very strong wiiiiith... racism. It's a bit difficult to like this girl who sees everyone around her as her servant (especially if their skin happens to be darker), even more so when she throws the most violent tantrum after a maid says she was expecting her to be Indian (the audacity! the horror!). Considering when the original story was written, I guess it can't be helped, but for a 90s movie adaptation I expected some slight rework. I wonder how the 2020 remake tackles this, but I'm not interested enough to bother watching it.

That being said, nothing beats an old English manor with secret passages, mystery residents, and labyrinthine gardens, which obviously is the real appeal of the movie. That and Maggie Smith delivering one of her best performances, as a believable antagonist who still shows a very human side towards the end (she did her best with what she knew, and it must be so much pressure to work with the lord's son...). I was looking for my next bathing products with a few movies already in mind and I knew this was going to be a match made in heaven. Watched on a Russian website with hardcoded Polish subtitles in 360p for an even wilder experience.

Even though the artist/director is Swiss and the movie mainly filmed in Austria, I must admit that it is very representative of a kind of aesthetic? genre? that existed in Germany around that time (but started much earlier) and to which I was exposed a lot as a kid. Seemingly parentless children who are guided by the disembodied voice of an elder on their epic quest against evil (Tabaluga), rebellious girls who question laws and conventions through the power of play and wonder (Momo), an oddball protagonist who lives on the fringes of society and seems to live in his own world in the middle of everybody else (Peter Lustig)... I wasn't surprised at all when I read the wikipedia page later and learned that Pippi Longstocking (which was HUGE in Germany) was one of the inspirations for Pepperminta.

The movie is absolutely weird, but it manages to put you in a happy mood all throughout, and the more time passed the more I saw Pepperminta as some sort of anarchist magical girl (she even has a transformation sequence and secret gadgets!) who fights against boredom and existential dread, encouraging people to push past their boundaries to rediscover optimism and what is possible beyond the social and cultural barriers we put on ourselves.

...Definitely an early 2000s movie.

The only downside is that, because it's an early 2000s movie that wants to be unabashedly feminist, it's obsessed with menstruation, and there is one character who's coded as gender non-conforming who seems to be sort of coerced into accepting their biological body as their gender...? I can't tell if I'm reading too much into the TERF-y vibes or not, there were subtler symbols going on at the same time that sort of hinted that gender was maybe another game for the group to play with and I'm desperately holding onto that to give the movie the benefit of the doubt lol