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The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twenty-Seven: Alita: Battle Angel

Posted on December 27, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      6 Comments

Alita: Battle Angel is a $170 million dollar production from 2019 that feels and plays like modern CGI effects were superimposed on a cheap, janky science fiction film from 1985, the sort of $6 million, B-movie-level schlock that was put out at the time by Cannon Films or New World Cinema, two of the most notable “make ’em cheap, make our money in home video” studios of that era.

This sounds like an insult, I’m aware, and I’m not sure there’s an easy way to assure anyone that it’s not. I am not saying this film is prettied-up crap. I am saying it has a vibe, and the vibe is: the other movie you rent from a video store on a Friday night, once you’ve gotten the actual movie you came for from the “New Releases” shelf. You know, the one starring that TV actor whose series ended three years ago, and the Playmate of the Year from a decade back. The one that you had to decide between it and a Chuck Norris flick. That film. This is that film. It’s that film, on a whole lot of steroids and Muscle Milk. You can thank Robert Rodriguez for that. More on that in a second.

To call Alita a rehabbed 80s video store second pick is slightly anachronistic. The manga upon which based, in which an android warrior left on a junk heap searches for clues about her identity, debuted in 1990 and would eventually encompass nine volumes. It caught the attention of James Cameron, who apparently heard of it from Guillermo Del Toro(!). For a while Cameron was committed to directing it, but eventually picked another project instead, which would eventually become Avatar, a little indie film that struggled at first to find an audience but would eventually become a cult favorite. Cameron’s attention as a director was thus diverted, but he was still on board as a producer, and after some time another director was found: Robert Rodriguez.

Robert Rodriguez fascinates me a little because he is either a true cinematic polymath, or he’s a weird little control freak, or maybe he’s a little bit of both at the same time. He directs movies. He also writes them, which is not that unusual for a director to do. But then also edits them, acts as director of photography, operates the cameras, composes the scores, does production design, sound design and produces visual effects. It’s possible he acts as crafts services on his sets, too, I just haven’t found the IMDb listing for it.

Rodriguez rather famously got his start in film with El Mariachi, the 1992 action movie he made for just $7,000, if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands of dollars Columbia Pictures put into its post-production and the millions it spent marketing it. But hey, they were the ones to spend that money! Rodriguez himself only spent $7k! When the legend is more interesting than the facts, go with the legend.

No matter what, however, the movie was made for next to nothing, and Rodriguez wrote, directed, shot and edited the film, setting the tone for future projects. He worked fast and tight and lean, and in this, he absolutely resembled the filmmakers from the New World Cinema and Cannon Films eras, who were given not a lot of time and not a lot of money to get their films into the can and into theaters. Prior to Alita, only one of Rodriguez’s films had a budget over $50 million (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, for $65 million), and nearly all of them made their production budgets back at the box office.

Is there a drawback to Rodriguez’s “fuck it, I’ll do it all myself” sort of sensibility? From a financial point of view, not really. From a creative presentation point of view… well, let’s just say Rodriguez does not lack for style, but you can feel when a corner is being cut, and he’s not always 100% percent in control of his film’s tone or his scripts. He’s mostly good, mostly fast, and mostly cheap, and also sometimes you get the feeling that along the way he says “good enough, print it” and moves on. If you’re a movie exec at a studio, you probably love this, because you know what? He’s probably right! And for what he spends on a movie, even when he’s not, you’re not out much. But that’s how you get the “second pick at the video store” vibe out a movie.

Which brings us back to Alita: Battle Angel. Rodriguez here is rather uncharacteristically credited only once, as director, but he also apparently did an uncredited pass on the script, paring it down from James Cameron’s original 180-page behemoth to something that could be watched without your bladder exploding before the third act (the final script is credited to Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis). The resulting script, however it was completed, is, charitably, disjointed. The progression Alita (Rosa Salazar) has from discarded android foundling to bounty hunter to rollerball athlete to avenging angel is telegraphed more than explained, and the forces she finds herself arrayed against, from bloodthirsty cyborgs to evil billionaires, never really gel into compelling menace. This is very definitely a “things happen because now is the time in the plot where they should happen” kind of movie. Corners, they be cut here!

If this bothers Rodriguez as a director, he gives no sign of it. He just keeps doing his job, shoving the story along, plot point to plot point, action set piece to action set piece. And you know what? His shoving mostly works! You’re not really given all that much time to wonder about the plot holes and omissions, because here’s Alita fighting cyborgs! Then kicking the ass of a whole bar full of cowardly bounty hunters! Then she’s off playing rollerball! (It’s not called rollerball, it’s “motorball,” but come on, there are roller skates and blood.) Rodriguez isn’t here to make much of his own mark visually — this is Jim Cameron’s (and the WETA effect house’s) world. He’s just here to direct traffic, with the biggest budget he’s ever had. He directs traffic just fine. It’s good enough. Print it.

What’s printed is all very heightened and melodramatic and maybe a little bit silly. It has the pulse and feel of a live action anime, because it pretty much is. In the janky 80s version of this film, all of the fight scenes would have been fought in a small dark room with chain link in it for some unfathomable reason, and the rollerball scenes would take place in a disused warehouse in San Pedro. Because it’s the 21st century and this movie has money behind it, we get the the widescreen CGI version with lots of destruction and chrome. The sets very much still feel like sets, though, just bigger, or at least extended by computers. Realism is not what they’re going for here.

Then there’s Rosa Salazar, who plays the title character. As with the Na’vi characters in James Cameron’s Avatar, Salazar’s Alita isn’t Salazar herself, it’s a performance capture. Salazar was on-set, acting the role, and then she was entirely painted out and replaced with a CG version of her character, one that has big anime eyes that skate her right up to the uncanny valley — which is the point for Alita, as she is not actually a human being but a cyborg. With that as a given, Salazar handles the progression from shy confused girl to badass warrior pretty well; what the script sort of slides over in terms of progression is given to her to perform. She provides the most nuanced performance in a film that does not exactly prize nuance.

(The other acting in this film ranges from perfunctory (Christoph Walz as the deceptively kindly doctor who finds Alita) to scene-chewing (Jackie Earle Haley as an improbably buff cyborg) to fluffy (Keean Johnson, as Alita’s love interest, whose hair in this film appears to have been stolen from a lesser Stamos brother). It is also weirdly packed with slumming Oscar winners, with Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali joining Walz in the “too much gold hardware for this film” category. Everybody’s gotta eat, I suppose.)

None of this is brilliant filmmaking, even if it is efficient, and much of it isn’t even necessarily good, but damned if I can’t stop watching it. This is a movie I put on when I want my eyes to see something that I don’t necessarily need to reach my brain — which again sounds like an insult but is not. Sometimes you have a day when you are just plain done, and you want something with pretty lights and cool action scenes and easy-to-follow emotional cues. If doesn’t entirely track on the level of plot or storytelling, well, you’re not in a state to complain about it anyway.

When you’re having one of those days, a little Alita will cure what ails you. Sometimes that second-pick video is the one that hits the spot.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025 Day Twenty-Six: Get Shorty

Posted on December 26, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      13 Comments

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said that there are no second acts in American lives. This is an aphorism that is pithy and sounds smart, but isn’t true, not even for F. Scott Fitzgerald, even if his second act (the late blooming popularity of The Great Gatsby) happened after he was dead. Second acts happen all the time, primed by luck and/or talent and/or nostalgia and/or opportunity. The interesting question for me is, what do you do with that second act when the curtain comes back up.

Get Shorty is about two second acts in American lives, one that’s just starting up, and one that’s in full swing. The one that is just beginning belongs to Chili Palmer, the movie-loving loan shark who is the film’s protagonist. The one that’s in mid-swing belongs to John Travolta, who, as this film was released in 1995, was in the middle of a career renaissance that, honestly, had seemed improbable even two years before.

Chili first. He’s a mid-level guy in Miami who as the movie opens is in a bit of a spot; his boss has suddenly died, and the new guy in charge of his book hands him off to Ray “Bones” Barboni (Dennis Farina), whom Chili has recently punched in the face over a coat. Ray Bones wants him to track down money owed by a dry cleaner, who recently died in a plane crash… or did he? One thing leads to another and then Chili finds himself in Los Angeles and making the acquaintance of Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) a producer who makes C-list horror films, but has one great script in his pocket, if he can just get the funds to get it made.

Well, Chili is a film nut, and he knows a little about getting hold of money, so he decides to stick around and see what he can do. Is this easy? Not at all, since others are circling the script, there’s problems with the Mexican cartels, Ray Bones re-enters the picture, and most of all, Chili has to convince two-time Academy Award nominee Martin Weir (Danny DeVito) to come on board a project, and Weir is, how to put this, every single cliche of an entitled movie actor in one compact package. Oh, and there’s Karen Flores (Rene Russo), who was a “scream queen” for Zimm, and who Chili, quite reasonably, takes a shine to.

This is Chili’s story of remaking himself in Hollywood, but it’s also a travelogue of, if not the underside of the film industry, then at least some of its shabbier quarters. Everyone in this film (excepting Ray Bones and the cartel guys) is on the make in one way or another, looking for more money, more status, more presence and more cool. While this is all obviously exaggerated for the story, anyone who has ever spent any time lurking about the movie industry, either as an observer or as a participant, knows about these guys. Tjey’re all just one script or one movie star attachment away from getting their own big break into the “A”-list, dreaming of clutching that golden statuette and thanking the Academy.

There’s no crime in any of that! (Well, there is crime, and lots of it, in this film, but you know what I mean.) The striving must be exhausting, though. All that smooshing your face against the glass of the hottest restaurants, waiting to get the table, in prime seating time, that’s not by the bathroom or the kitchen door. Only Chili, in this movie, seems entirely immune to all of this. It’s because he’s new and entranced by all of it, but also, it’s because, as a loan shark, he understands the psychology of people who always feel like they’re just one roll of the dice away from their big score. They’re the people who keep him in business, after all. Chili loves the movies, but he’s too cool to lose his cool about them. At least, the money part of it. The big difference between the people he collects vig from and the people making movies, is the people making movies are having a lobster cobb salad for lunch, not the Moons Over My Hammy.

It takes an extremely cool actor to play an extremely cool character, and this is where we come to John Travolta. For a relatively brief moment in the 1970s, John Travolta was the coolest actor in the world — he had landed the one-two punch of Saturday Night Fever and Grease. The first of these exploded the disco craze, was a social phenomenon and a top ten movie at the domestic box office, and garnered Travolta his first Oscar nomination. The second of these was the top grossing film of its year, was also a social phenomenon, and gave Travolta a number one Billboard hit, one of his four top ten musical hits overall. It was literally not possible to be a cooler star than John Travolta was at the end of 1978.

That level of fame is hardly sustainable, and Travolta was not the person to sustain it. After a string of less successful films, some of which were outright flops (Moment to Moment, anyone? Two of a Kind?), Travolta’s career was in a doldrum by the middle 80s. Now, let’s be clear that when I say it was in a doldrum, this is a matter of perception, not necessarily box office: in 1989, Travolta was one of the stars of Look Who’s Talking, which was the number six box office winner of its year, and which is, counting global box office, still the second highest-grossing film of his career after Grease. We should all have such profitable doldrums. But let’s not pretend that as a matter of perception, as a matter of star power, as a matter of coolness, there wasn’t a precipitate drop. When you’re playing second banana to a talking baby, you might be rich, but you’re sure as hell not cool.

Then along came Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction. There are many things to say about Quentin Tarantino, not all of them great, but one thing that cannot be denied is that he does a fantastic job of resurrecting the cool factors of formerly washed-up and washed-out actors. He’s like a financial analyst seeking out value stocks, except the stocks are actors looking to get their mojo back. Tarantino saw that Travolta and his cool factor were severely undervalued, so he dropped the actor into Pulp Fiction as the likeably strung out Vincent Vega. One role, one hit and one Academy Award nomination later, it was like Travolta, and his ability to embody extreme coolness, had never gone away.

Get Shorty was Travolta’s first film after Pulp Fiction, and while Vincent Vega and Chili Palmer are superficially similar (both mid-level cogs in a much bigger crime machine), there’s no question that Chili is the cooler character. He’s smarter, he’s more ambitious and he’s more in control of himself and his fate. Vega is (probably) who a lot of mid-level criminals are; Chili is who they all wish they could be. Travolta needed Vincent Vega to get him back to the level where a character like Chili Palmer was available to him, but once he was there, Travolta showed why the character needed him to work onscreen. It’s said that Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman and Michael Keaton were all offered the role before it was given to Travolta. No offense to any of those excellent actors, but not a one of them could have pulled off this role with the same panache.

Travolta’s second act, like his first, wouldn’t last forever. Travolta pretty much put a capper on it in 1999 with a little passion project named Battlefield Earth, which is rightly considered one of the worst films ever made, a genuine turd that no amount of personal cool could ever have saved. But before that moment we got this film, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Phenomenon and Primary Colors, among others. That’s a pretty decent stretch (after Battlefield, we got Travolta in some Look Who’s Talking-tier comedies like Wild Hogs and Old Dogs, some standard-issue thrillers and also the animated film Bolt, which is a personal favorite of mine. That’s fine! He’s doing fine). Very few people get to be cool forever. I would argue that even fewer get to be the coolest actor alive twice in their career.

This is why I really like rewatching Get Shorty; it’s a study in a movie star being such a goddamned movie star, being so very much the movie star, that everything about the movie is just that much better because he’s in it. This is not role that made Travolta a star, and it’s not the role that resurrected him. It’s not the second act in the making. It’s the role where Travolta is saying, that’s right, I’m back, now watch me own this town. And then he does just that. It’s a blast to watch.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twenty-Five: Groundhog Day

Posted on December 25, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      29 Comments

Is there a day in your life that you would want to live over and over again? I can think of one or two perfect days I’ve had, and at least initially I might be okay stuck in them in an eternal loop. But eventually, even a perfect day would get monotonous, and there’s the fact that the reason it was a perfect day was because you didn’t know it was going to be perfect when you woke up that morning. Knowing would take the shine off it. Also, you wouldn’t be able to replicate that day perfectly, over and over and over.

Like smelling a rose forever, eventually you would become immune to the charms of the day. You would get a repetitive strain injury of the soul, and eventually, that perfect day, eternally on repeat, might be a working definition of Hell.

Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is not having a perfect day in this film. A Pittsburgh weatherman, he’s slated to go to Punxsutawney, north of Pittsburgh, to take part in the town’s annual Groundhog Day celebration, a day where (for those you who have just beamed onto the planet), a large rodent forecasts how long winter will continue depending on whether he can see his shadow or not. Phil loathes Groundhog Day because despite his professionally genial nature, he’s a misanthrope and finds people and their quaint little traditions annoying. But it’s his job, so he heads up to Punxsutawney with his cameraman Larry (Chris Elliot) and his new producer Rita (Andi McDowell), and does a perfunctory and slightly nasty stand-up.

Then weather happens and the three of them are trapped in Punxsutawney, one of them more than the others. Phil wakes up and it’s Groundhog Day again. The day repeats, he’s weirded out, and then it happens again, and again, and again.

Why is it happening? We never get an explanation (rumor is Columbia Pictures demanded an explanation and the filmmakers made one up to make the studio happy, and then intentionally never got around to shooting it). Why is it happening to Phil? Mostly, because the jerk needs it. Many of us take years and years to deal with our shit and come out the other side a better person. Phil needs only one day, it’s just that this one day is going go on forever until he gets it right.

In this, Groundhog Day feels like A Christmas Carol turned on its head. Ol’ Ebenezer Scrooge needed the intercession of three ghosts and one night to realign his worldview; Phil Connors gets no ghosts but eternal recurrence to sort himself out. Given the choice I think I’d rather have the single night; it feels more efficient that way. But I suppose not everyone can do it all in a single night, and Phil doesn’t seem like the kind to take a hint with a single whack to the skull. He’s going to have to get whacked, again and again and again and again.

Which is fine, because it’s fun to watch Phil play the changes: first panic, then glee, then methodical trickery, then despair, and then… well, you’ll see (or have seen, this film is universally acknowledged to be one of the great film comedies of all time). At one point someone asks Phil, who seems to know everything because he’s well into the middle of his eternal loop, how he can know so much. Phil says, “Well, there is no way. I’m not that smart.” And you know what, he’s right. He’s in this loop because he’s just not that smart. He can’t learn his way out of this conundrum; he has to experience his way out of it, if he is going to get out of it at all. This isn’t a criticism of Phil, per se. I’m probably not that smart, either, and probably neither are you. If Phil could be taught to be a better and more decent human, he probably wouldn’t have been a candidate to be in that loop at all.

(This does bring up the question of why the universe or whomever thinks Phil, of all the pinched, unhappy people out there, merits a loop to sort out his issues. This is also left unanswered, and maybe there is no answer. The universe is weird and capricious, and if you or I or anyone could really understand it, we’d probably try to find a way out of it. As ee cummings once said, “Listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go”)

Groundhog Day is a tale of existential horror played for laughs, which is one of the reasons I think it resonates for so many people. It’s an easy way to approach the concept of how hard it is to turn ourselves around when we only have a single life to do it in. There are a lot of different theories about how long it is that Phil is stuck in his loop, ranging from ten years to 10,000. There’s only one correct answer: He’s in it for however long it takes to fix himself. There’s no escape before then.

The rest of us are not so lucky, or unlucky, depending on your perspective. We have to live with our mistakes and screw-ups and disappointments; there are no do-overs, only occasional second chances. I don’t want to be stuck in a time loop for years or decades or centuries, but hurtling heedlessly through time with no brakes or track-backs also seems not a great way to run a universe, at least for the humans in it.

Another reason the film resonates so much is that Bill Murray is the perfect person to play Phil Connors. Like his character, Murray’s a funny and acerbic fella who is also, if the various stories about him on set and in his personal life are close to true, fully capable of being a real asshole. There’s a “biting on tin foil” edge to Murray that makes it easy for him to sell Phil as a person who doesn’t much like people, or himself, and it’s a toss-up on any given day which he likes less.

The production of this film had Murray butting heads with director Harold Ramis to such an extent that the formerly close friends had a falling out that lasted nearly until Ramis’ death in 2014. Apparently Murray wanted the film to be more philosophical; Ramis, who was the one who had to deliver a hit to Columbia Studios, needed it to be more comedic. In the end, they both got their way, so I think it’s a shame this was the film they fell out over.

In the end, though, who else could have been Phil Connors? Of all the actors in Hollywood at the time, I can only think of one on a similar tier of fame who could have pulled it off: Tom Hanks, who despite his current reputation as “America’s Dad” was capable of some real acidity and anger back in the day (see the movie Punchline for a Tom Hanks character who is basically a talented asshole). But even Hanks would have been second best here; Hanks doesn’t teeter on the edge of being unlikeable as well or as long as Murray. Murray makes you believe in Phil’s redemption arc.

Early in the film, when he had only recurred a few times, Phil remembers a day where he was in the Virgin Islands, met a girl, with whom he drank pina coladas and got busy, and wonders why he couldn’t be repeating that day. As you might imagine from my first paragraph, when it all came down to it, I don’t think he would eventually like recurring on that day any more than on Groundhog Day. Eventually the pleasure of it would stale and he would end up the same place (metaphysically) as he was in Punxsutawney.

That’s because, as the noted philosopher Buckaroo Banzai once said, no matter where you go, there you are. The problem was not Punxsutawney, or Groundhog Day, and never was. The problem was always Phil, just as the problem would be, inevitably, any of the rest of us in the same situation. Phil gets as much time as he needs to solve himself. Groundhog Day reminds us, however, that we just have the time we’ve got, and we better get to it.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twenty-Four: Pitch Perfect

Posted on December 24, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      15 Comments

My senior year of college, I was invited by the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine to come and write a story about the college’s Green Key Weekend, a weekend of partying and games and partying and also partying with partying on the side (why did they invite me? Because I was from the famously unfun University of Chicago, and they wanted to see what the weekend looked like from the view of an outsider with that sort of perspective).

There was much of the weekend I don’t remember (ahem), but one thing that sticks in my mind is the Spring Sing concert, in which the several acapella groups of Dartmouth got together and did their thing. I thought they were all fantastic, and also, during the concert there was one girl who took a penny, balanced it on the end of a stretched-out wire coat hanger and spun it, keeping it stuck on the end of that coat hanger while singing the Toy R’ Us jingle, backward. I remember thinking this was the most hilariously amazing thing I’d ever seen, and also, I wanted to marry that girl, whoever she was.

Spoiler: I did not marry her. But neither has a year gone by that I have not thought about her and wondered what she was doing with her life now. We don’t always pick the things we remember. They make an impression nevertheless.

It is perhaps this personal history with acapella that primed me to enjoy Pitch Perfect as much as I did. It is a very silly film about something that doesn’t have much consequence, namely, the hyper-competitive college acapella circuit. This is obscure to the real world (or was, until this film), but is life-or-death to the theater-adjacent-kids who yearn to get out and sing without instrumental accompaniment. I first watched Pitch Perfect not expecting much, and came away having laughed more than I thought I would, and having been unexpectedly moved in a couple of places.

The plot: Beca (Anna Kendrick) is a jaded wanna-be DJ attending Barden University, mostly because her dad’s on the faculty so presumably she’s getting a tuition discount. She mostly wants to work at the college radio station and focus on her remixes, but one day Chloe (Brittany Snow) hears her singing in the shower and basically dragoons her into auditioning for the Barton Bellas, a once-proud all-girl acapella group now struggling because of an infamous event at the previous year’s national competition (which I will not relate, you will see it soon enough if you watch the film).

Beca auditions, gets in and immediately butts heads with Aubrey (Anna Camp), the group’s type-a leader, who wants to do things just so. Beca wants to loosen things up, whether everyone else agrees or not, and eventually there’s a battle of wills for the future of the group, interspersed with various competitions and run-ins with the Treblemakers, Barden’s all-male acapella group, who include Jesse (Skylar Astin), a fellow freshman who is sweet on Beca more than Beca is sweet on him.

Truth to tell, Beca is not a hugely sympathetic main character, even if she is played winningly by Kendrick. Beca gets a lot of mileage out of not being a joiner and being her own person, but mostly it just means she’s unhappy and maybe a little miserable to be around, and causes more trouble than needs to be caused. This is not bad for the movie, since it precipitates at least a couple of amusing scenes (including an acapella rumble, which is as ridiculous as it sounds). It does make you wonder what everyone in this film sees in her. Usually when someone is this casually dismissive of everyone and everything, you just let them get on with being their own little ball of gloom.

But no, the film and its characters are determined to pull her out of her shell, mostly because otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a movie, but also because they intuit that Beca’s lone wolf act is just that, an act. She likes being part of a group, and having friends, and being someone that others can rely on. The question for the movie is whether all of that can be achieved through the power of song, and whether Beca’s own particular set of musical skills will come into play. Inasmuch as this is a crowd-pleasing comedy, you will get no points for guessing how it’s all going to turn out.

No points, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still fun and even affecting. Acapella doesn’t mean anything in the real world, but there are worse things to get wrapped up in as a college-age person, and there’s something to be said about the joy you can have, getting into the same groove as all your friends. This movie is a jukebox musical and all the music is diegetic, but when you’re with a group of people who will naturally burst into song just because they feel like it, that diegetic nature doesn’t feel materially different from a standard musical. There’s something winning about a bunch of people just singing because, you know, why not? Why not sing? Even Beca eventually gives in to it. The power of pop compels her!

Naturally this all leads up to the movie’s final musical performance, where Beca has come up with a way to bring the underdog Bellas back to glory. I don’t know enough about the state of collegiate acapella in the early 2010s to know if what occurs here is an actual innovation or just the film reinventing the musical wheel, but at that point I also didn’t care. It’s a banger of a performance, so full of music nerd energy that I couldn’t help but smile all the way through it, and maybe even tear up (I am a weeper, deal with it). As musical payoffs go, it’s a winner.

Does the world change because of it? Not really, no. But not everything has to change the world. Sometimes just saving a dour little freshman from her own self-imposed alienation is enough. And in the meantime, the movie packs in a lot of snark along with the songs, thanks to a fun script, a very funny supporting cast (including Rebel Wilson in her star-making role), and a greek chorus in the form of two acapella color commentators (John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks, the latter of whom also produced, and who would direct the sequel). It even made a pop star out of Anna Kendrick, as “Cups,” a version of a song she performed in the film, went to number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Pitch Perfect was a moderate-sized hit at the box office and blossomed in home video. Its two successors were box office smashes and there was even a TV series spin-off that detailed the adventures of a Treblemaker named Bumper (Adam DeVine) following up a fluke hit in Germany. None of these quite had the magic of the original, but they didn’t have to have that full measure of magic. Turns out people just seem to enjoy low-stakes comedy with a lot of music thrown in. I’m somewhat surprised that this film hasn’t yet been turned into a Broadway musical. If ever there was a property designed for the a long Broadway run as a tourist favorite followed by an eternal life as a touring show, it is this one. I suspect it’s a question of when, not if.

I watch Pitch Perfect when I need a little pick-me-up, because it’s fun, it has music, and inevitably it makes me smile. I suspect I am not alone in this assessment; I imagine every single acapella kid ever feels the same way, up to and including that penny-swinging, backwards-Toys-R-Us-theme-song singing girl. I know she’s still out there. I bet she loves this film to death.

— JS

(PS: If you want to read that story I wrote about Dartmouth’s Green Key Weekend, 34 years ago now, it’s here.)

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twenty-Three: Monsters, Inc

Posted on December 23, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      19 Comments

Because I am a nerd — no, really — every time I watch Monsters, Inc. I think about the biology and physiology of its monsters. As in, I very strongly believe that all the different monsters in the film are the same species, rather than separate species of monsters who have all decided to live together in harmony (a la Zootopia). I hypothesize the monster DNA does not strongly code for morphology, and so you get this wide range of body shapes, limb numbers, squish levels, etc, and just because the parents look one way doesn’t mean their offspring look similarly. You never know what you’re going to get until it comes out. So, like apples and dogs, every monster, as a phenotype, is a complete surprise.

Have I thought about this too much? Yes. Yes, I have. But if I have, it’s because Monsters, Inc. has encouraged me to do so. The filmmakers at Pixar, whose fourth film this was, went out of their way to build out a monster world so detailed and complete, and so full of little grace notes, details and Easter eggs, that one can’t help but follow their lead and build it out a little more in one’s head. Thus, the intriguing nature of monster DNA, and how it is (in my head canon, anyway) why you see so many weird and wonderful monster designs in this film.

The story you will know, especially if you were a kid at any point in the 21st century (or had a kid at any point in this time). The monsters under your bed exist, and they are using you for responsible renewable energy! Turns out that the screams of children are an extremely efficient source of clean power (this is not explained, nor should it be). The monster world has become equally efficient at scaring the ever-living crap out of kids, through a corps of professional scarers, who lurk and roar and flash their teeth and fangs and what have you. These scarers are not just municipal workers but the sports stars of the monster world, with other monsters having posters and trading cards of them.

This premise, I will note, could be played for absolute “R”-rated terror, and has been, several times — not necessarily an entire power plant apparatus, but surely the idea of horrifying creatures feeding off the fear of children. But as we all know, life is easy, comedy is hard. The real expert mode is taking this terrifying premise and wringing laughs out of it.

Monsters, Inc. does it by, essentially, being a workplace comedy. The monsters aren’t monsters when they’re off the clock — well, they are monsters, but they’re not scary. They’re just getting through their day like everyone else. Our two protagonists, James P. Sullivan (John Goodman) and Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) are your typical Mutt n’ Jeff pairing and workplace partners; Sully, who is big and blue and can roar with the best of them, is a champion scarer, and Mike is his sidekick and support staff, keeping him in shape and making sure they meet their scare quota and then some. Mike and Sully have great chemistry and it’s easy to overlook that they’re the reason you have to put a pee sheet on your kid’s bed.

The film also flips the script: Yes, the monsters’ job is to scare kids, but the fact is, the monsters are flat-out terrified of children — like a toxic game of tag, if one of the kids touches you, you could die. Even a sock brought back into the monster world is cause for a biological detoxification regimen not seen this side of a chemical spill. So naturally a toddler named Boo slips into the monster world and follows Mike and Sully home, and from there — well, things get squirrely. There is also some workplace espionage, and a subplot with Mike trying to get a girlfriend, and tales of energy extraction gone too far, but you hopefully get the point, which is that the filmmakers decided that the terror aspects of the film were the least interesting things to follow up on.

I love all of this. Also, it shouldn’t be a surprise — this is a Pixar film, and it is rated “G,” so the chance that this movie would go Full Thing were never exactly high to begin with. But anyone who has ever read my work knows that what I’m fascinated with is the mundane in the fantastic. Yes, it’s nice you’re a James Bond villain, but how are you making that work financially and logistically? Sure, there are 300-foot monsters that stomp about, but what is their actual ecology? And so on and so forth. It’s no great trick to make a monster. It is a trick to make a monster city where there is a logical reason for monsters to do what they’re famous for doing, and where doing that thing leads to very human complications.

The folks at Pixar are with me on this, overengineering their monster city with gags and bits and sly asides (the fanciest restaurant in town called Harryhausen’s? Chef’s kiss. The tribute to the Chuck Jones – Michael Maltese classic animated short “Feed the Kitty”? Two chef’s kisses! Two!), and giving us characters whose monstrous nature is a source of comedy. Having Sully voiced by John Goodman, an Actual Human Teddy Bear, is inspired, especially for his scenes with Boo. Meanwhile, Mike Wazowski is a literal ball of anxiety, and Billy Crystal has never been better cast. I would watch an entire movie of Mike and Sully just riffing, a fact which informs Monsters University, the movie’s sequel (well, prequel), which is not as good as the original but that hardly matters because we get more time with these two.

Monsters, Inc., is probably no one’s pick for the best film Pixar has ever made (that’s probably Toy Story 2, maybe Wall-E, with Coco being the dark horse candidate), but as I noted before, this series isn’t about the best movies, it’s about the movies I can settle in and rewatch over and over. Of all the Pixar films, Monsters, Inc., is this for me. You probably won’t weep watching this, like you might with those other Pixar films I mentioned. This one is thoroughly low-stakes. But low stakes is okay! I love looking at it, and keep wanting to be able to look around corners and go into shops and see how all the monsters are going ahead and living their lives.

There’s a whole world here I want to explore, and many things I want to speculate about. I want to tell the monsters my theory about their DNA. I’m sure that will go over super well.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twenty-Two: Notting Hill

Posted on December 22, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      21 Comments

So, a story. More than a decade ago, I was having lunch with Tom Hanks, because he read my work and was a fan, and since I was in town on tour, he asked if he could meet me and I said, sure (actually, what was said, to me from my manager as I was getting off a plane at LAX, was, “You’re going to the Chateau Marmont. You’re having lunch with Tom Hanks. Don’t fuck this up”).

Tom Hanks was lovely, the lunch was lovely, and when it was done, as he was waiting for the valet to retrieve his car, some absolutely random dude came up, pulled out a binder, and started pitching a movie idea to Tom Hanks. And Tom Hanks, because he is Tom Hanks, for all the values of being Tom Hanks that there are in this world, stood there being lovely and polite and endured this random person posting up in his space and trying to make him take a meeting.

I relate this anecdote not to impress you that I once had lunch with a famous person, but to make the point that famous people really are not like you and me, and more often than not, that’s because the world will not let them be people like you and me. People like you and me don’t get pitched business proposals waiting for our car. People like you and me are allowed not to be “on” when we step outside our door and into the world. People like you and me can go shopping at any random Safeway we want and not cause a scene simply by existing. People like you and me get to be people, and not celebrities all the time. Yes, celebrities get fame, and sometimes fortune, and occasionally nifty free goodie bags at award shows worth more than most households in the US make in a year. But it does come at a cost, which is, the ability to just be your own fucking self, at the times and places of your own choosing, and not have anyone who might recognize you wield veto power over that.

Notting Hill, in addition to being just a lovely little romantic comedy about two people from entirely mismatched stations in life, trying to negotiate a space in the world they might get to call their own, is one of the best films out there showing at least a little bit of what it’s like to be famous to everyone, everywhere, all the time, forever and ever, amen. The person in the film cursed with such a blessing is Anna Scott (Julia Roberts, who was in fact the most famous actress in the world at the time, so, typecasting), who has the sort of worldwide fame that means that every single thing she says, any thing she does, who she might date or who she might have a feud with, equals miles and miles of newsprint across six separate continents, and probably at least an email or two in Antarctica.

One day, while in London doing publicity for her latest film, she wanders into a Notting Hill travel bookshop owned by one William Thacker, who is meant to be a self-effacing everyman but who is played by Hugh Grant, also at the height of his fame at the time, so at least the self-effacing part is there. William tries to be helpful to Anna as she browses, and she is having none of it, because she knows he knows who she is and thus her shields are up. Then later in the street there is an incident with an orange drink, William offers his flat, directly across the street, as a place for Anna to clean up, and the first spark is lit.

To say that there are going to be complications because Anna is famous on a level that is nearly beyond comprehension is not a spoiler; likewise that there will be complications because William underestimates, more than once, what a burden being that level of famous can be and how it can warp and distort friendships and relationships, even as the people involved try to compensate for them. Any relationship is hard, but being with a celebrity is like being in a throuple where the third partner is fame. And fame, well, it’s a fickle, fickle beast.

Nevertheless, it’s a delight to see everyone in the film give it a go. The film is scene after scene of either William trying to comprehend all of the everything that comes with the girl he likes being The Most Famous Person In The World, or Anna trying to be a normal person and not quite being able to do it because no matter what she does, her celebrity hangs all about her. This leads to delightful scenes like William trying to meet up with Anna at her request and unwittingly being dragooned into a press junket (a scene which I, as a former film writer who had been to dozens of such junkets, found deeply hilarious), or, one of my favorites, William taking Anna to his sister’s birthday party without telling a single one of his friends who the “new girl” he’s dating is, and watching them deal with it, with varying shades of success.

The dinner party scene is actually the heart of the film because it does so many things at once: It establishes Anna’s level of fame while at the same time giving her a little bit of time to escape it and be off the clock. It gives context to William by showing his friends and relations, and lets them all have the easy back and forth that comes from a lifetime of knowing each other. It also shows Anna watching it all, and, while not envying it, still noticing it and being able to compare it to her relatively lonely life.

And it shows that everyone in this scene is kind, and that others are noticing this kindness. This is the scene where we stop enjoying the utter mismatch of William and Anna, and start hoping the mismatch doesn’t keep them apart. Lord knows the film gives the two of them plenty of opportunities to mess things up, and they manage to do just that at least a couple of times.

Roger Michell directed Notting Hill, but it takes nothing from him and his skill as a director here to note this film is primarily a Richard Curtis film. Curtis is probably the most successful writer of British film comedy in the last 40 years, and most of these comedies have some sort of romantic bent. In addition to this film he wrote Four Weddings and Funeral (the film which made Hugh Grant a star, and which got Curtis his sole Oscar nomination), Love Actually, which he also directed, and two of the three Bridget Jones films. (He also wrote the Blackadder television series, beloved by Brits and US nerds, and also The Tall Guy, which is where I first encountered him, the vaccination scene of which I ripped off wholesale for my novel The Kaiju Preservation Society. I will send you a check, Mr. Curtis).

Of all of these films, I think Notting Hill shows Curtis at the height of his screenwriting powers. It’s extremely funny, which is great (especially when Rhys Ifans, as William’s daft roommate, is anywhere onscreen), but it’s also empathetic. It’s hard to do a really good job of making an audience feel sympathy for someone who is so famous that by all rights all that we should feel about her is envy, but Curtis does it. It helps that by this time he had been around famous people enough to understand that celebrity is cage. Gilded, yes, and with staff who will get you everything you want and need, but still a cage. He writes a good cage.

It also helps that this role could be thinly-veiled autobiography for Julia Roberts, who at the height of her celebrity was a media presence on par with Taylor Swift, for all the good and bad that comes with that level of fame, achievement and scrutiny. In 1999, there was literally no one else who could have understood Anna Scott better than Roberts. I have to think there are some parts of this movie that had to be cathartic for her, like the scene where, after a media scandal erupts and William is caught up in it, he suggests it will all just blow over in days. Anna knows better, and so does Julia Roberts, and I think it’s pretty clear both are making the rebuttal to William’s misinformed take.

The gilded cage of celebrity life in 2025 is, if anything, more solid than it was when this film came out. Miles of newsprint have been replaced with hours of celebscrolling on Instagram and Tik Tok, where famous people have to actively manage their online personas, or cede the management of it to a mob of influencers and bored social media mavens who are not their friends, no matter how close they imagine their parasocial relationships are. More people have wide fame (there are YouTube and Tik Tok celebrities who I’ve never heard of, but millions of Gen Z and Gen Alpha people have), but it’s harder than ever to make the money that used to be associated with fame. So all a lot of these newly-famous get is a grind to stay top of mind, and a lack of privacy, and, eventually, a very profound burnout.

It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. At least Notting Hill suggests that sometimes, if you’re lucky, and with the right people, you might get to slip out of that gilded cage, and, if only for a moment, be your own person again. Fame is nice. Love and community is nicer. May everyone, even the famous, get to have it.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day 21: Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Posted on December 21, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      15 Comments

There are better movies that Quentin Tarantino has written and directed than Kill Bill: Vol. 1, but I strongly believe there no other film of his that is more him than this one. Most of those other films — Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and of course Pulp Fiction, are about other things, ranging from a day in the life of various petty criminals, to rewriting history because it’s just so much cooler that way. And while those other films are very clearly done in a way that only Tarantino could or would choose to do them, this is the one film above all others (even and including Kill Bill: Vol. 2) where it is all about what Quentin Tarantino wants. His wants. His needs. His desires. This film, from the top of Lucy Liu’s head to the bottom of Uma Thurman’s feet, is a distilled cinematic trip through Tarantino’s id. And what a trip it is.

The plot, which is really just the thinnest of scaffoldings for Tarantino’s obsessions: Uma Thurman (whose character is not given a name in this film, and when and if anyone says it, it’s bleeped out) plays a super mega badass hot assassin chick who after years of, you know, killing the shit out of people, decides to leave it all behind when she finds out she’s pregnant. This does not thrill Bill (David Carradine), her boss and also boyfriend, and he makes that point known at her wedding, not to him, when he and the other members of the super mega badass hot assassins he fields into the world show up and shoot everyone and every thing at the venue, including the bride. When she wakes up from a coma a few years later, babyless, she naturally does what anyone in her position would do: Makes a list of everyone who tried to kill her with the goal of returning the favor.

That’s it! That’s the movie! Thank you and good night!

But of course that’s not actually the movie. The movie is not the plot, the movie is how the plot gets done. And for Tarantino, who is a pop culture magpie and has also fundamentally never stopped, in his heart, being a thirteen-year-old boy, how it gets done is by piling on every single movie and television genre he’s ever loved. Japanese anime and crime films? In here. Hong Kong action cinema? Absolutely one hundred percent on call. Spaghetti westerns and blacksploitation? Present in visuals, score and sound design. The actors from these genres that Tarantino idolized? They’re in the cast. From Michael Parks’ aping of Charlie Chan to Thurman wearing Bruce Lee’s yellow athletic apparel, this film is not just filled with cinematic Easter eggs, it’s a whole goddamned Easter parade.

Why did Tarantino do this? Because this is who he is, man. He is the first superstar Hollywood director to have come out of the video store era — he even worked in a video store for a while in Manhattan Beach before making a go of it in the film industry — and he’s a self-taught filmmaker. Not for him the hallowed halls of USC or NYU’s film schools; he just watched a boatload of movies, from classics to complete crap, and gave each of them equal weight in his weird little brain. It’s very clear that Tarantino does not have a bias against genre for agreed-upon “important films.” He likes what he likes, and fuck you if you don’t like it, too. It’s not his problem if you don’t.

Which I think is fine! At the end of the day, there is no high culture or low culture, there’s just the culture that sticks, and that’s what’s used as the building blocks in the next round of creation. One era’s pop culture is another era’s “classic” culture — and here we haul Shakespeare and Dickens onto the stage to wave before unceremoniously shoving them into the orchestra pit with a crash — and ultimately what sticks, what makes it through the sieve of time and the sheer mass of creative output, is what the new generation of creative people love, champion, reference, combine and in some cases just flat out imitate.

What’s in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is everything that made Tarantino. At this point, he’s made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, won an Oscar and is a reliable (if not staggering) box office draw, and was responsible, directly and indirectly, for a whole cottage industry of mostly violent, mostly indie, mostly dude-centric films in the 90s. If anyone is at this point allowed to make a film that is basically them playing with all their favorite cinematic toys, it’s going to be Tarantino.

There’s one other thing, not to be discounted: Tarantino may be crawling both into his mind, a bit up his own ass, with Kill Bill: Vol.1, but he also remembers that he’s got to make the film actually entertaining to the people who are not him. Kill Bill was originally written and shot as a single film, but during the assembly process, Miramax studio head Harvey Weinstein (in the days when the only way women got told he was a raping creep was through whisper networks) suggested making two films out of the material. Weinstein is criminal scum who will hopefully die in jail, but his film instincts here were correct; it allowed Tarantino to overweight the really cool action stuff into Vol. 1, while letting the more somber and emotional aspects of the tale carry Vol. 2, i.e., the one everyone saw because they had bought into the first film and were left high and dry by one of the best cliffhangers in cinematic history.

(There is now a Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which unifies the two volumes into a single long film, with a couple scenes added, some amended, and some others dropped, including that banger of a cliffhanger. I have not seen this version yet but this will not stop me from suggesting that a more-than-four-and-a-half hour version of the film is not what Tarantino would have been able to get away with had Weinstein not allowed his film to be split into two. I for one would be curious to see what a no-longer-than-three-hours edit of Kill Bill would have been, using footage from both volumes, as it would have had to have been. We will never get that, though, and in any event I think the film was best served being twain.)

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is about Tarantino and all the things that make him tick, but it’s Uma Thurman who is in it the whole damn time, save for a few interludes and reaction shots. Thurman was not a passive vessel for this film — the story is credited to “Q & U,” meaning both her and Tarantino — and the whole thing rides on her shoulders. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this film is the defining one in her career, the one where Thurman gets to do it all: Be aggressive, be vulnerable, be a badass, be scared, play tough and play vulnerable. And, also, hack through literally dozens of people with a samurai sword, which is the dream of so many people, regardless of gender. None of the world of Kill Bill is real, none of it can be real (see John Wick for another example of this). But it doesn’t matter if it’s real, it matters if we believe in it while it’s happening. It’s up to Thurman to make us see it. She does.

I’ve noted above that this film is clearly Tarantino’s most personal project, and I would like to point out how absolutely weird it is that this is the man’s statement of being — until, that is, you think about it. If you’re, say, Steven Spielberg, you make The Fabelmans. If you’re Ingmar Bergman, you make Fanny and Alexander. If you’re John Boorman you make Hope & Glory. All semi-autobiographical movies about the early days of the filmmaker in question, or at least, about a stand-in who represents the filmmaker.

The thing is, Kill Bill: Vol 1 is exactly that thing. This movie is all about Tarantino’s early days, all the things, cinematically, that he imprinted upon. And while Thurman’s character cannot be separated from the actress and should not be, a idea of a secret badass in a desperate battle against the legions who want them dead? Oh, that’s absolutely the sort of power fantasy that kept young Quentin up at night, the wheels of his imagination turning.

This is Tarantino. You want to understand him, watch this film. He’s put himself out there for you to see. All you have to do is look.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twenty: A Fish Called Wanda

Posted on December 20, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      40 Comments

I have thought a number of films have been riotously funny, but only A Fish Called Wanda made me laugh so hard that I was in very real danger of pissing myself right there in the movie theater. It was 1988, I went to see this movie with my friend Marty Glomski, and — to be fair — I did buy myself a soda to enjoy while I watched the film. Normally such a thing would not be a fraught action, but then there were scenes involving inept assassination attempts, and I ended up laughing so hard and so long that my bladder very nearly couldn’t take it any more. I swear to you I was two seconds from peeing my jeans. I wanted to stop laughing so I could stop spotting. I could not. It was mortifying, and delightful.

I cannot guarantee you will laugh as hard at A Fish Called Wanda. If you did, however, and you fell victim to laugh-related involuntary micturition, just know that you are not alone. There are probably legions of us. John Cleese should have invested in adult diapers before writing this film.

The story of how A Fish Called Wanda came to be is interesting in itself. Back in the 1970s and 80s, when John Cleese wasn’t busy with Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, he had co-founded a company called Video Arts, which created training videos for corporate clients (they were allegedly funny corporate training videos. I’ve not seen any, I can’t say). One of the directors for these corporate videos was Charles Crichton. Having Crichton directing corporate training videos was a little like having Scotty Pippen on your basketball team at the Y. In a past life, he directed films at Ealing Studios, including the Academy Award-winning The Lavender Hill Mob, generally regarded as one of the best British comedies of all time.

What was Crichton doing making training films? Well, look, folks, show business is a tough gig. You’re on top one day and the next you’re trying to spice up a video on how to file reports.

That said, John Cleese was certainly aware who he had on staff, and eventually he and Crichton started scheduling time to think up a comedy crime caper, which would eventually become A Fish Called Wanda. The plan was for Cleese to star and Crichton to direct. One catch: When the film was being pitched, Crichton was well into his middle 70s, which worried the money guys. In order to get the film made, Cleese agreed to be co-director. What did that mean for Cleese? Apparently not much! Cleese was open about not having any experience in feature film directing. He was basically there if Crichton keeled over during filming.

Crichton did not keel over. In fact, for the film Crichton (and only Crichton, not Cleese) was nominated for an Academy Award for best director. Don’t feel too bad for Cleese, he got nominated (along with Crichton) for an Oscar in the screenwriting category. Having landed on top again after years in the corporate training video wilderness, Crichton promptly retired and spent the rest of his life fishing. Good for him.

Plotwise, Wanda is a tale of heists and con-men and women, crosses and double-crosses and one barrister who somewhat befuddledly finds himself in the middle of it all. That could be Cleese’s character, Archibald Leach (film fans will recognize this name, and if you don’t, look it up), a bland tall legal type whose life is lower-wealthy-class boredom. That is, until he meets Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is not a fish, but is an associate of George Thomason, Archie’s client, who has been recently accused of a bank robbery involving quite a lot of diamonds. Wanda enchants Archie, because she is smart and looks exactly like Jamie Lee Curtis at her hottest. But, I think it should be obvious, Wanda has something on her mind other than climbing Cleese.

That’s enough of the plot. You just need to know that the people involved in the heist are all trying to screw each other, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally. There is no honor among thieves, which is not great for any of them but is fabulous for us, because Cleese and Crichton, as screenwriters, put absolutely fantastic words into their mouths, and make them to grand and ridiculous things. For a movie that at least initially comes off as a small and maybe kinda square bit of British japery, things get weird fast.

A lot of that weirdness comes in the form of Otto, played by Kevin Klein in a bit of ego annihilation so complete that he won an Oscar for it. When I say ego annihilation, I mean no one who was concerned about their ego in any way could have played Otto as he did, as the ugliest of all possible ugly Americans and the platonic ideal of Dunning-Kruger. The first time I saw this performance, I just thought it was funny; in subsequent watches it becomes obvious just how much good work Kline is doing here. The scene where Wanda chews him out for messing up her assignation with Archie is a masterclass of facial acting. His words in the scene are good. What his face is doing got him that statuette.

Be assured, however, that Kevin Kline is not the only one engaging in ego annihilation here. None of the principals, who aside from Cleese, Curtis and Kline also includes Michael Palin, get out of this film with their dignity intact. Short of Melissa McCarthy shitting in a sink, I’m not sure another film has put so many of their actors through the wringer for a pile of laughs. It’s not about gross-out comedy (speaking of that McCarthy scene), it’s about the humiliation of their characters, unstiffening that stiff upper lip, in the case of Cleese’s character especially.

Which — confession time — is not the kind of humor I usually like! Cringe humor (the kind of humor that makes you cringe in sympathy for the embarrassment the characters are going through, not the kind of humor that is eye-rollingly corny) is actually one of my least favorite forms of humor. I think my sympathetic response for people making fools of themselves is too strong for me to enjoy the comedy of it. It mostly just makes me want to leave the room until the embarrassing parts are over. Not here, though, and I think it’s both the skill of the writing from Cleese and Crichton, and actual abandon to which the actors give themselves, that simply overrides my desire to curl up into a ball at their misfortunes. Wanda isn’t exactly farce but it’s near enough to it that, for me, at least, it’s inoculated against cringe.

Wanda remains one of the funniest films of all time, but it’s okay to note that 80s films are gonna 80s, and this film does that. The plot line about a character’s stutter was at the time and now continues to be the least successful attempt at humor in the film, and there’s a bit that Otto does that straddles the line for casual homophobia. Also, truly, if animal endangerment bothers you, go ahead and skip this one. You won’t be happy, even if I find at least one of those scenes one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a theater. What can I say, I’m a terrible human.

I keep coming back to why it was this film made me almost pee myself in public. I think it comes down to the simple fact that very little about this film was what I had expected when I sat down to watch it. I figured it was going to be funny; after all it had a third of Monty Python in it. But I think I went in expecting to chuckle. This wasn’t Monty Python, it was by all indications just a standard issue mid-80s comedy, and again the first several minutes of the film gave the impression that was where things were going.

But then. And then. And then after that. It kept laughing in the face of my expectations, and I kept laughing in surprise. I just did not see it coming.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Nineteen: The Big Short

Posted on December 19, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      30 Comments

There was, to be clear, nothing very comforting at all about the 2008 global economic crisis. It was a deeply messed-up time, and even if one was not in danger of losing one’s home in the mess, the reverberations of the collapse of the US housing market echoed through people’s lives in strange and unexpected ways. In my own, there is a line of dominos that goes from the collapse of the housing market to me walking away from a contract for a five-book YA series in early 2009. I was pissed about that, I want you to know. But I assure you that what I experiences was a glancing blow compared to the very real hits lots of other people took. People lost houses. People lost jobs. People’s lives were ruined. And, apparently, no one saw any of this coming.

No, one, that is, but a few finance dudes who, in the mid-2000s, looked at how mortgage-backed securities were being put together by banks and financial companies, realized they were a time bomb waiting to happen, and did what finance dudes do — figured out a way to make a shitload of money when the timebomb went off. These men (and they were all men) were not heroes or good guys. They made money when everyone else had the ground beneath their feet crumble into dust. They did by betting on the misfortunes of others. But no matter what else happened, they did see it coming when no one else could see it, or, more to the point, wanted to see it.

The Big Short is based on the book of the same name by financial journalist Michael Lewis, who, it must be said, has had enviable success in getting his books turned into films; aside from this, his books Moneyball and The Blind Side found their way to the big screen as well. Those books had an approachable hook in that they were about sports as much as they were about money, and everyone (in the US, at least) knows about baseball and football. For The Big Short, the question was: was there actually an audience for a movie about mortgage-backed securities? And how would you find that audience if there were?

Director Adam McKay, who previous to this movie was best known for a series of funny-but-not-precisely-sophisticated films with Will Ferrell, including Anchorman and Step-Brothers, had a two-step solution for the problem of making trading interesting. First, he absolutely packed the film with big names: Brad Pitt. Steve Carell. Christian Bale. Ryan Gosling. That’s a pretty stacked cast right there. Second, any time he had to explain an abstruse financial concept, he gleefully broke the fourth wall and had some other incredibly famous people tell you what the concept was, in a way that didn’t sound like a bunch of boring exposition. So: Anthony Bourdain using fish soup to explain collateral debt organization, Selena Gomez making bets in Las Vegas to elucidate credit default swaps, and, most memorably, Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, explaining how mortgage-backed securities worked in the first place.

Yes! It’s a gimmick! But it’s a gimmick that works to give everybody watching the information they need to know to keep watching and understanding what happens next. McKay has the characters in the main story break the fourth wall every now and again as well, to let the audience know when the story on the screen deviates from what happened in real life, or, in the case of Ryan Gosling, to act as the narrator for the story. This could be obnoxious but it mostly works, largely because the story being told is, actually, gripping.

Why? Because it’s about the end of the world, economically speaking — a financial collapse so big that the only other economic collapse in living memory to compare it to was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Financial folks were taking mortgages, the unsexiest and presumably most stable of financial instruments, and finding new and ever-more-risky ways to repackage them as investment properties, aided by greed and a regulatory system that either didn’t know how to evaluate these risky securities, or, equally likely, simply didn’t care to look. By the time we enter the picture, a few years before the collapse, the downsides are there if someone wanted to look.

The people who looked were Michael Burry (Bale), a clearly autistic nerd running a hedge fund who pored through the numbers and saw the inevitable; Jared Vennett (Gosling), one of the first bankers to look at Burry’s numbers and figure he was right; and Mark Baum (Carrell), who takes a meeting with Vennett, hears his pitch about the collapse, and decides to see how far down this mortgage-backed securities hole goes. Later on we meet Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley (John Magaro and Finn Witrock) two small-fry fund managers who stumble upon Vennett’s pitch and then recruit Ben Rickert (Pitt) to get them the access they need to make their own short bets. All of these folks with the exception of Vennett are total outsiders, and when all of them come around to buy their shorts, every bank and financial firm is happy to take their money, because they think they are fools.

The thing is, none of these people were just working on a hunch. Burry looked deep into the numbers, while Baum had his people go down to places like Florida, where extremely risky mortgages were being written up, specifically so they could be shoved into, and hidden by, these securities that were allegedly low-risk investment opportunities. These scenes in the movie, where exotic dancers own five homes and are unaware how much risk they’ve exposed themselves to, renters are shocked to find their landlords aren’t keeping up with their mortgage payments, and mortgage underwriters simply do not give a shit who they give a loan to, are like a punch in the face. We see what Baum and his people see: all these people are screwed and there’s no way out of an economic slide into the abyss.

Mind you, not everyone understands it in the same way. When Geller and Shipley manage to wrangle a series of shorts on some exceptionally risky loans, they start dancing and pumping their fists thinking about their little victory — until Ricket makes it extremely clear to them what the cost of their being right is going to be. What? Consequences? Yes. Consequences.

We all know how this ends: The housing bubble collapses, century-old banks go under, foreclosures shoot through the roof, and the Great Recession misses becoming the Second Great Depression only by the smallest of margins. There is wreckage, and all of the main characters in this movie get their payday, although in some cases, it’s a near thing indeed. They get what they wanted, and not a single one of them is happy about it.

Damn it, Scalzi! I hear you say. This movie is depressing as hell! How can you say it’s a comfort movie? Because ultimately it’s about smart people doing smart things. These people don’t get where they end up in the movie because they’re lucky, they get where they end up because they of all people are willing to actually pay attention to what’s directly in front of them. They’re not just going with the flow; they understand the flow is actually an undertow, and it’s going to take everything down with it. And because no one else in the world wants to or is willing to see, then they’re going to do what’s available to them: Make some money off it.

Again: This does not make them good people. It makes them opportunists. Baum, at the very least, seems to be appalled by it all, not that the opportunity exists, but that it exists because other people can’t see the disaster they’re helping to make. He seems genuinely angry that people really are just this stupid. He still shoves his chips onto “collapse,” like everyone else in this film.

Here is the film’s implicit question: Even if any of these guys had screamed to high heaven about the risk of collapse, who would have listened? They weren’t going to do that — these are not those guys — but if they did, would it have mattered? The banks and the regulators and the financial gurus were all on board for everything being great. And there were Cassandras, people who pointed out that these securities were primed to explode, and just like the actual Cassandra, no one listened. If you could yell at the top of your lungs and still no one would give a shit, what’s left? As an investor, either find some part of the market that’s going to weather a global collapse, or short the crap out of it and fiddle while everything burns. We know what these guys did. What would you do?

The Big Short changed the career of Adam McKay, who walked away from this film with an Oscar for screenwriting and a license to make movies that aren’t just goofy (his films in the aftermath of this one: Vice, about Dick Cheney, and Don’t Look Up, about the actual end of the world). Good for him. I would like to say this movie also served as a warning about the dangers of blind and heedless capitalism, but look at the AI Bubble, where seven tech companies, all besotted by “AI,” are 40% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, and are sucking the US dry of energy and water. The look at the current state of the housing market in the US, where in most states buying a home is unaffordable on the average income, and tell me what we’ve learned. The tell me whether the people running the country right now are equipped to handle the collapse when it happens, or will just try to short it themselves.

This movie isn’t a comfort movie because it has good people or a happy ending. It’s a comfort movie for one reason: Some people actually can see what is going to happen before it all goes off the rails. It’s comforting to know that in this, one is not alone.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Eighteen: Starship Troopers

Posted on December 18, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      61 Comments

If you should ever want to wind up an old-school Robert Heinlein fan — which, by the way, you shouldn’t do, they’re all clocking seventy-plus years now, and you should respect your elders — tell them you enjoy the movie version of Starship Troopers more than the Heinlein novel on which it was (somewhat loosely) based. Then move fast, because if you don’t, you’re gonna get whacked upside the head with a cane. Those OG Heinlein fans may be older now, but they’re spry, and if there is one heresy remaining for them, a preference for the film over the novel would be it.

And in many respects they are not wrong. The movie version of Starship Troopers wasn’t originally based (directly) on the novel; screenwriter Ed Neumeier wrote up a sci-fi action movie treatment called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7 that did not reference the novel at all. It was only later in the development process that Neumeier and producer Jon Davidson learned the rights to the novel were available and optioned them, and started grafting elements of Heinlein’s tale onto the spine of Outpost 7. Add in director Paul Verhoeven, who legend has it couldn’t even get through the novel but knew he wanted to satirize fascism in the film, and you end up a final cinematic product that is to Heinlein’s novel like grape soda is to an actual grape.

As it turns out, however, a lot of people like the taste of grape soda. I happen to be one of them.

Nor do I think it’s a particular heresy to enjoy the movie, even if one prefers the novel. Very few movies adapted from novels are scrupulously faithful to their source material, and the few that are, are usually weirdly paced and unwieldly (looking at you, Watchmen, and even that changed the ending). The things that make for a great novel are not often the things that make for a great cinematic experience, and vice-versa, as some of the greatest films in history are made from mediocre books (looking at you, The Godfather).

Whenever I mention to people that my novel Old Man’s War is under option, there’s someone who inevitably tells me, I hope they keep it true to the novel. I can assure you they probably will not. As just one example, at one point Chris Hemsworth was attached to star in the movie. Do you think they would pay Hemsworth $20 million (or whatever) to be in the movie, and then paint him green, to match the description of his character in the novel? I do not. Nor do I think a star on the level of Hemsworth would have wanted to be that color. It’s not easy being green, by which I mean that he (and many many other characters) would have to spend hours in makeup every morning. They’d save time and money letting him be his original hue.

I was a movie critic for years and now for years I’ve been having works optioned for film and television. So I am here to tell you, with some authority: Movies always deviate from the novels. The question is less, why aren’t they being faithful to the source material. The question: Is what they’re doing to the source material interesting? That’s the question I ask when I watch a movie based on a novel.

What Paul Verhoeven is doing inStarship Troopers is very interesting. No one was asking for a pop art scifi movie that was ostensibly about shooting big damn alien bugs but was really a mediation about the quiet mainstreaming of fascistic thought and imagery into everyday life, and how all that glossy, idealized ubermensch aesthetic and thinking falls apart once it meets the chaos of war. But surprise! Here it is! Would you like to know more?

The story at least initially follows the novel’s outline: Johnny Rico (the impossibly square-jawed Casper Van Dien) is a callow, rich pretty boy who is not too smart, but is also vaguely dissatisfied with the cushy life being laid out for him. So when his pals Carmen (Denise Richards) and Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) sign up for Federal Service to fight against a bug-like alien race called the Arachnids, he sort of goes along, too, annoying his parents in the process. Boot camp is hard for Johnny, and he almost calls it quits, but then his home town of Buenos Aires gets smooshed by an Arachnid-guided meteorite, and then, well, it is on.

Nearly everything up to this point in the film, save for a brief intro battle sequence, has the flat and brightly-lit affect of 90s teen television: it all looks like Starship Troopers 90210, up to and including absolutely beautiful “teenagers” who are clearly well into their 20s, if not older (of the main trio Van Dien was 27 when filming started, Richards was 24 and Harris was the baby at 22). And this is the point: Verhoeven wants to seduce you with hot kids in a nice clean world that seems great as long as you ignore the public executions, the denial of voting status for most people, the military dictatorship, and, you know, the war out there in space.

But then you get to that war out in space, and you know what happens to all those really hot kids? Nothing good! And that’s where Verhoeven springs his trap. All the physical beauty in the world won’t save you in battle! All those really cool, vaguely-nazi-looking uniforms don’t look nearly as good shredded and covered in blood! And all the training and/or indoctrination you might get means nothing when the military command tells you little and sends you to die by the shipload. Verhoeven, who has never been shy about gouts of blood, severed limbs and gore, paints his masterpiece here in the viscera of the young, who ten seconds before looked like they should be in a Gap ad. The director holds up the fascistic perfection of a Leni Riefenstahl film, specifically to gleefully dash, slash, and splash it into the dirt.

Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically, because this is the US and we don’t do irony especially well), lots of folks didn’t clue into what Verhoeven was up to, accusing the famously anti-fascist director of glorifying Nazism, an accusation which Verhoeven was flabbergasted by. It would take years, long after the movie was out of the theaters and into home video, for most people to fully get what he was up to. Some people still don’t like it; many old school Heinlein fans continue to be enraged that Verhoeven’s lardering his story with fascistic imagery painted their favorite writer with the authoritarian brush.

I don’t think Heinlein ever landed on the “fascist” square at any point in his life. It’s certainly true, however, that Heinlein was moving target, politics-wise; how else can you describe someone who worked on the campaigns of both Upton Sinclair, a socialist and Democrat (who ran for governor of California in the 1930s) and the uberconservative Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964? Heinlein’s politics started left and sauntered right and added in a dollop of free-love weirdness (to, uhhhhh, say the least) in there to confuse everybody. The dynamic range of his politics over his life (and how that leaked into his fiction) means that if one wants to, one can cobble together an image of him through his work that these days gives off an authoritarian odor. Starship Troopers, the novel, is the prime source for that. The blatantly fascist imagery of the movie, satire or not, doesn’t help his fans make an argument against that.

I’ve gone into the weeds with the politics of Starship Troopers, so let me note that aside from the design of the movie, it’s also a sharply-paced action film, where the bug-killin’s both varied and plentiful: if you’re looking to see a bunch of alien bugs get ripped up by humans as much as the humans get ripped up by the aliens, this is your film. The CGI in film remains immaculate; thirty years on, it’s wild how good and how threatening the arachnids look. This film doesn’t have just one or two of them, sneaking about ala the Alien films; no, it piles them on in the hundreds, and they very much look like they are going to fuck everyone up. As Carl points out, “It’s a numbers game. They have more.” Boy, do they ever. There are very few scenes in the film where it ever feels like the humans have the upper hand, and even when they do, they’re as likely to lose a few fingers than not. Whatever else this movie is, it’s a good action-adventure film, if not, exactly, a feel-good action-adventure film.

Like so many other Paul Verhoeven films, Starship Troopers is a chaotic mess of tones; all those action scenes and pointed imagery and pretty, pretty people, tossed into a stylistic blender and sent a-whirlin’ at the highest speed setting. Almost thirty years ago now I wrote a review of this film that started with “Paul Verhoeven is a director who can give you everything you want in a movie, as long as you want too much of it.” You know what? I stand behind that sentence. Verhoeven thinks subtlety is for cowards, and he’s having none of it here, and you’re not getting of it, either. You either accept this is going to be a firehose of a movie, or you get out of the way.

To get back to those old school Heinlein fans, many of whom I like very much as humans, I can only offer the following advice to them, in terms of how to think about their beloved book, and this heretical film Hey! There’s a novel called Starship Troopers! It’s pretty good! Coincidentally and unrelated, there’s a movie called Starship Troopers! It’s also pretty good! Not the same, but pretty good. You can’t copyright titles, you know. It was inevitable there would be a movie and novel with the same name, otherwise having little to do with each other. These things happen. And that’s okay.

Also, wait until I tell you about the remarkable coincidence that happened with I, Robot.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Seventeen: Pleasantville

Posted on December 17, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      21 Comments

Nostalgia is a trap. The people who indulge in it do so with selective memory, either their own or someone else’s. When I was a kid in the 80s, people looked back yearningly at the 50s as a simpler and better time, when families were nuclear, entertainment was wholesome and a slice of pie was just a nickel, conveniently eliding the segregation of black citizens, the communist witch hunts, and the fact that women couldn’t get things like credit cards or mortgages without a husband or some other male authority. Later people started looking at the 80s the way the 80s looked at the 50s, and they enjoyed the dayglo colors and the cheeky music and forgot apartheid, the cold war, leaded gas and smoking everywhere, or the fact that gay men were dying of AIDS and the US government (for one) couldn’t be persuaded to give a shit. I don’t feel nostalgia for the 80s; I lived in it. A whole lot of things about it were better left behind.

And still, nostalgia persists, because being an adult is complicated, and that time when you were a kid (or frankly, didn’t even exist yet) was uncomplicated. You didn’t have make any decisions yet, and all the awful things about the era existed in a realm you didn’t really have to consider. The golden age of anything is twelve, old enough to see what’s going on and not old enough to understand it.

Pleasantville is all about the trap of nostalgia and how its surface pleasures require an unexamined life. Tobey Maguire, in one of his first big roles, plays David, a high school student with a sucky home life who is obsessed with the 50s TV show Pleasantville, a sort of Father Knows Best knock-off where there patriarchy is swell and there is no problem that can’t be resolved in a half hour. For a kid from a broken home, whose mom is about to sneak off for a weekend assignation in a moderately-priced hotel, Pleasantville sounds like paradise.

That is, until David and his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are, by way of a magical remote control, whisked away to Pleasantville itself, in all its monochromatic 50s glory, and forced to take on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue Parker, the two kids of the series’ main family. For Jennifer, who is a Thoroughly Modern Millennial, this is a fate worse than death; she had plans for the weekend, and they didn’t involve dressing up like a square. David, on the other hand, is initially delighted. He knows the series inside and out, is excited to be in the highly delineated world of his favorite show, and assures his perturbed sister that as long as they play the roles assigned to them, everything will be fine until they find their way back to the 90s.

You don’t have to be a devotee of 50s sitcoms to guess how long it takes until things start going awry. David and Jennifer, whether they intend to or not, are now the proverbial snakes in the garden, bringing knowledge into a formerly innocent world, sometimes literally (David tells other teens what’s in the formerly blank library books, and the words magically fill in) and sometimes also literally, but not using words (Jennifer introduces the concept of orgasms, and boy howdy, is that a game changer). As things get more complicated, some people get unhappy. And when some people get unhappy, they start looking for someone to blame.

Pleasantville is not a subtle film by any stretch: when people start deviating from their assigned roles, they change from monochrome to color, which allows the film to label part of its uniformly Caucasian cast as “colored,” which… well, I know what extremely obvious allusion writer/director Gary Ross was trying to make here, and the best I can say about it is that it is not how I would have done it. Also, any film where a nice girl character offers a nice boy character an apple right off the tree is not trying to sneak anything past you. The movie wears its lessons and motivations right on its sleeve, and in neon.

What are subtle, though, are the performances. With the exception of J.T. Walsh, who plays the mayor of Pleasantville with big smiling back-slapping friendly menace, no one in this movie is overplaying their hand. We notice this first with David/Bud and Maguire’s bemused way of getting both of them through the world, both ours and Pleasantville’s. But then there’s Bill Johnson, the owner of the malt shop Bud works in, who is initially befuddled when things are out of sequence, but gets progressively delighted the more improvisation gets added into his life. Bud’s dad George (William H. Macy) finds his role as paterfamilias slipping away and is befuddled rather than angry about it. Even Jennifer, who initially comes in as a wrecking ball, finds a lower gear.

But the true heart of Pleasantville is Betty, Bud and Mary Sue’s mom, played by the always tremendous Joan Allen. Like everyone else in Pleasantville, Betty starts off as a naïf, who only knows what’s been written for her. But the more she strays from what she’s supposed to be doing and saying, the more she understands that what she’s “supposed” to be doing and saying stands in total opposition to what she actually needs — when, that is, she finds the wherewithal to both understand and act on those needs. Her transformation is bumpy, not without backtracks, and deeply affecting. Joan Allen did not get any awards for this film, but it is an award-worthy performance.

(Also award-worthy: Randy Newman’s score, which was in fact nominated for an Oscar.)

It’s this dichotomy — high concept, deeply ridiculous premise, and heartfelt, committed character performances — that fuels Pleasantville and makes it work better than it has any right to. It would have been so easy just to play this film as farce, and you know what? If the film had been played as farce, it would have been perfectly entertaining. Watch the latter-day Jumanji films, the ones with Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black (and Karen Gillan! Whose comedic talents are underrated!) and you’ll see how playing a ridiculous concept almost purely as farce can be both amusing and profitable. There is a world where Pleasantville is one of those 90s comedy movies whose titles on the movie posters were big chunky red letters. It’s just not this world, and the film is better for it.

By now at least some of you may have figured out why I find Pleasantville so compelling and watchable. What Ross is doing in this movie is the same sort of thing I do in a lot of my writing: Take a truly ridiculous, almost risibly farcical concept, and then make characters have real lives in the middle of it. You’ll see me doing it in Redshirts and Starter Villain and especially in When the Moon Hits Your Eye, in which, you’ll recall, I turned the moon into cheese. A lot of people think doing this sort of thing is easy, which, one, good, I try to make it look like that, and two, if you actually think it’s easy to do, try it. It takes skill, and not everyone has it, and not every book or play or TV show or movie that attempts it gets it right.

Pleasantville gets it right. It looks at the pleasures of nostalgia and says, you know what, it’s not actually all that great when you think about it. It’s no better than the real world and the modern day.

It’s hard to believe it just now, but there will come a time when someone looks back at 2025 and thinks, what a simpler, better time that was. Not because their world is that much worse (I mean, shit, I hope not), but because by then all of this will be rubbed smooth and easy and someone who is twelve now will remember it as carefree. Those of us over twelve will know better what lies underneath pleasant nostalgia. So does this film. Nostalgia is never as great as you remember it.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day 16: John Wick

Posted on December 16, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      19 Comments

John Wick didn’t have to go so hard. It could have just been about what it says it’s about: A retired bad guy named John Wick (Keanu Reeves), who left the life for the simple pleasures of marriage, embarks on a path of revenge against those who defiled the memory and final gift of his wife. Simple! Easy! It could be a character piece, really, a sort of latter-day companion to films like Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey or even Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

Had it gone that route, maybe we’d be talking about how the film was a dramatic breakthrough for Reeves, whose quiet and mournful face speaks few words but makes them count, and how the story is a metaphor for, oh, I don’t know, how the struggle for personal peace in this world is a struggle against what makes us all so regrettably human. Yeah. Something like that.

John Wick could have been one of those solemn respected-but-neglected indie movies that makes, like, $6 million in the theaters and then get buried in the carousel of whatever streaming service it lands on, and no one would ever much think of it again. And you know what? That would have been fine. Just fine.

But, no. NotJohn Wick. John Wick did what it said it was about, for about fifteen minutes, and then it goes fully, completely, absolutely apeshit bonkers. John Wick a retired bad guy? No. Not good enough. He is the retired bad guy, the bad guy who is such a myth and legend that all the other bad guys lose bladder control at the mere mention of his name. John Wick handy with a gun? Motherfucker, he can kill you and two of your closest friends with a single No. 2 pencil. John Wick a part of the mob? The mob wishes. He’s an A-lister in a whole clandestine world of assassins, who have their own special hotels and pay for everything with gold coins.

Also: He looks like Keanu Reeves. That shit’s just unfair.

None of the side trappings of John Wick make any sort of sense, and they make even less sense as the series of films this one started goes along. The assassination service industry as represented in these films is ridiculously outsized; there can’t possibly be that much demand, and if there was, then a whole list of really prominent people would be dead already (and not just the people you wish were dead, but also all the people that all the people you hate wish were dead too). An entire hotel that caters only to assassins? That in later movies we see is actually a chain, like a Murder Marriot? The old-fashioned assassin telephone exchange, staffed entirely by tattooed ladies dressed like sassy 50s diner waitresses? I mean, I don’t get me wrong, I love all of it, it is totally a scene. But you have to know I have questions.

These questions don’t get answers. Indeed, these questions don’t have answers. We will never get a coherent explanation of the Economics of the Wickiverse, no matter how many YouTube videos might get made on the subject. This universe is not designed to make sense, except in one highly-focused way: To put John Wick in the center of it, and make him fight his way out, and to let us watch, intently, as he does.

Make no mistake: It’s the gun-fu that makes these movies go. John Wick’s director is Chad Stahelski, who made his cinematic bones as a stunt coordinator on dozens of films, and was also Keanu Reeves’ stunt double on The Matrix, which is where, if memory serves, the two of them first connected. The film’s producer and co-creator, David Leitch, has a similar and often overlapping stunt pedigree with Stahelski. Given this, it was never going to be in the cards that John Wick was actually going to be a quiet character drama. It was always going to be an all-shooting, all-punching, all-stabbing fight-fest from the word go, with just barely enough character development in those first few minutes to make it all make sense — or, if not make sense, at least give you the ostensible reasons why John Wick shoots the ever-living hell out of New York City, and most of the bad dudes in it.

It has to be said that Keanu Reeves is so very perfectly cast. There is these days a bit of a Cult of Keanu, and not without reason: Reeves is by every indication a genuinely stand-up guy, the sort of fellow who will give his bonuses for the Matrix movies to its crew so that they know how much he appreciates them, who dates and seems to be in love with an age-appropriate partner, who is willing to make fun of himself and not take himself too seriously, and who quietly donates millions to charity, and so on. He’s a good man, not just a good meme. He is all of these things (at least, apparently)! But he is not an actor with a huge amount of range. In that range: Excellent! Out of that range: a bit bogus, alas.

What he is, however, is a presence. Let him just be on a screen, and you can’t take your eyes off him.

Which is what John Wick does. The movie rarely asks him to speak more than one sentence at a time, one perfectly serviceable monologue excepted. All the rest of the time he is either glowering mournfully, or balletically slaughtering an entire stunt crew. Reeves 100% put in the work for the John Wick films; the internet is replete with videos of him practicing with live ammunition and being a hell of a shot. These films look like they actually hurt, and even though Reeves has a stunt double for this film (Jackson Spidell, take a bow, that is, if you can still move), he’s still pretty clearly getting banged up a bit as things go along. His character is described as an unstoppable force, and Reeves’ presence can absolutely sell that. This is not an action film where you feel the lead actor would wilt at an ingrown toenail, or where you can see the cut where the star is replaced by the stunt double. The cut is there, sure; Reeves makes it feel like it is not.

Reeves’ career was revitalized byJohn Wick; between the Matrix movies and this was a bit of a career fallow period, where things either didn’t quite work at the time (Constantine, which needed home viewing to buff its reputation) or were just, uhhhh, kind of quirky and seen by dozens. If Reeves ever worried about this I didn’t hear about it; he seems a little too copacetic to get worked up about such things. But as someone who’s enjoyed his screen presence since the days of Parenthood and, of course, the Bill and Ted movies, it was nice to see him ride yet another wave of popularity. It seems like everyone else in the world basically feels the same way.

There are four John Wick films, each more unhinged than the one before (and rumors of a fifth, even if it would make no sense whatsoever to do it, other than the usual “for money”). As stunt-filled gunstravaganzas, they are all state of the art, and as good as it gets. But it’s this first one that’s the one I like to rewatch. It’s tight, it’s fast, it knows what it’s about, and it doesn’t get too far up its own ass about its mythos and means. It’s a guy, getting back at another a guy, for messing up his peace. And blasting a few dozen other guys on the way to do that.

Hey, sometimes it’s like that. And John Wick really is the best version of that. As I said, this movie didn’t have to go so hard. But I’m pretty happy it did.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Fifteen: This is Spinal Tap

Posted on December 15, 2025    Posted by John Scalzi      24 Comments

For more than two weeks, I had it on my schedule to write about This is Spinal Tap today, December 15, 2025. The day before this, director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer were (allegedly) murdered in their home. I sat in my office a lot of the day trying to decide whether to keep this on the schedule, whether to delay it, or whether to remove it from the list of comfort watches entirely, to be replaced by some other movie. I can’t pretend that Reiner’s death isn’t on my mind right now. I can’t pretend that it doesn’t make me terribly sad. I can’t pretend that a vast number of other people feel similarly, not even counting those who knew and loved him personally.

Here’s the thing. A day like this is exactly the day for a comfort watch, a movie that can give you joy at the lowest of times. This is Spinal Tap offers a lot of joy. It is one of the funniest movies ever made, a movie that can make you laugh until you cry, and also, make you laugh even if you have been crying. It is a film for a moment like this, when one feels bereft and out to sea and nothing makes sense.

So, you know what, fuck it. Whaddya say, let’s boogie.

Rob Reiner, it should be noted, was a master of comfort watch genre. When Harry Met Sally? Total romantic comfort watch. The American President? Total political comfort watch (although harder to get into at the moment, given the state of the White House). Stand By Me? Absolute “coming of age” comfort watch. And, of course, The Princess Bride, arguably the Greatest Comfort Watch of All Time, as I have essayed elsewhere. There’s probably no other single filmmaker whose entire canon is so damn rewatchable. This is not a skill that necessarily wins awards (Reiner was nominated for the Oscar only once, for A Few Good Men, a true legal comfort watch), but it is a skill that endears a filmmaker to their audience and peers. Rob Reiner is beloved, by fans and colleagues, like few modern filmmakers are.

It all had to start somewhere, cinematically speaking, and Spinal Tap was where it began, Reiner’s first feature film as director. It was not the first “mockumentary” ever made, or even the first rock-themed mockumentary: Eric Idle’s All You Need is Cash, which followed a Beatles knockoff band called The Rutles, for one, precedes it by six years. But it’s the one that really seemed to stick in the public consciousness. Riffing off the Beatles is one thing; that’s a known quantity. Spinal Tap, now. No one quite knew what they were getting into with this one.

The premise: Filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Reiner himself) documents the 1982 US tour of Spinal Tap, a British hard rock band, whose new album, Smell the Glove, is on the verge of release. The band consists of singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), plus touring keyboardist Viv Savage (David Kaff) and drummer Mick Shrimpton (RJ Parnell), to whom one should not get too attached. As the film starts, there’s a big launch party and a mostly successful concert, and everything seems to be going well. And then…

Well, and then everything that can goes wrong starts to go wrong, and in truly awful ways: Cover art controversies, dropped tour dates, venue navigation issues, technical problems involving Stonehenge, the list goes on. The band and their manager Ian (Tony Hendra) try to weather this all while DiBergi gets it on film, interspersed with archival footage and interview scenes in which the band are asked to explain, among other things, what’s happened to all those drummers over the years.

The movie is famously almost entirely improvised, mostly Reiner, McKean, Guest and Shearer but also, one assumes, by the supporting cast as well, who are (generally) not saying as many funny things, but are certainly giving the band members things to play off of. What are not improvised are the songs, both the “in concert” and archival numbers, in which the members of the band, their actors all also actual musicians, are playing their parts. The “live” song as the full-fledged Spinal Tap are indeed loud and ridiculous, in a way that’s only a smidge off from actual early 80s hard rock and heavy metal. But for my money the real gold is in the archival bits, where Spinal Tap, with earlier members and earlier names, surf through whichever rock genres are of the moment, from Merseybeat to psychedelia.

In one beautiful bit, David and Nigel talk about the the first song they ever wrote together, and even sing a bit of it, a little snippet of skiffle called “All the Way Home.” It is, unreservedly, lovely, and the best song in the film. In that one moment, we learn something really important about David and Nigel (and by extension, the band): They in fact have the capacity to be really good musicians, and have had that capacity right from the start. But then rock n’ roll kind of got in the way.

Spinal Tap is about a lot of mostly small things, but what it is mostly about is the relationship of David and Nigel (with Derek, who in another life would be a weird mead-swilling druid lurking in a valley, there for non-sequitur pseudo-philosophy). David and Nigel are two blokes who knew each other since childhood, trying to stay friends when everything is falling apart around them. Hilariously so, sure, which is great for us. But for them, it’s their lives, and while other things are played for laughs, the way these two feel about each other is the film’s unexpectedly serious emotional core. You might not notice that, the first two or three or eleven times you watch the movie. But look for it the next time you watch it. It’s there.

This film is beloved of cinema fans and lovers of comedy, but the people who really seem to love it are musicians, particularly of the 70s and 80s rock era, many of whom experienced in real life the various mishaps Spinal Tap have fictionally. Ozzy Osbourne is legendarily supposed have thought the film was an actual documentary the first time he watched it, and honestly, if anyone was like to have these sort of touring misfortunes befall him, it would be Ozzy.

Far from being offended that McKean, Guest and Shearer were taking the piss at rock, hard rock musicians embraced the trio and the band — in 1985, in the midst of the “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and “We Are The World” era of charity singles, heavy metal and hard rock bands came together as Hear N’ Aid to make their own charity single, “Stars.” Who was there alongside members of Dio, Judas Priest, Motley Crue and Quiet Riot? Why, Spinal Tap, of course!

For a fictional band, Spinal Tap has been prolific, with four albums in total, two of which are independent of a film. There were few actual tours in there as well, with McKean, Guest and Shearer playing their respective characters to much acclaim. There have been other successful fictional bands, from the Monkees to Huntr/x, but no one else has so successfully made the leap into being beloved after being portrayed as so, well, stupid. Spinal Tap is the best proof out there that hard rock and heavy metal fans are in on the joke, and love it.

Four decades (and one year) after This is Spinal Tap, Reiner, McKean, Guest and Shearer reunited for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which was about the hapless-yet-storied band reuniting for one last (contractually obliged) show. We know now that this is the last feature film Reiner would ever make, although there is apparently a Spinal Tap concert film film completed as well (Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale). Either way, Reiner’s film career is bookended by this fabulous, ridiculous band, doing their thing to the delight, confusion and hearing damage of fans.

It’s bittersweet and also unexpectedly lovely. How many of us get to go back to where we began? How many of us truly get to come full circle in our careers? Rob Reiner, who created some of the best, most entertaining and enduring films in his era of Hollywood, has done what David and Nigel sang first and best. He has come, truly, all the way home.

— JS