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The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day 21: Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Dec. 21st, 2025 09:26 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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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
Dec. 21st, 2025 03:58 amscalziwhatever_feed
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
Two Homes For Christmas (Which Is To Say, Two Different Versions of the Same Christmas Song)
Dec. 21st, 2025 01:28 amscalziwhatever_feedI felt like trying my hand at a Christmas song, so I did “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” which was a big hit for Bing Crosby. First I did a pretty traditional version, and when I was done, I thought, why not mess with it a little? So I did a second version, with trap drums and lots of bass.
Here’s the traditional version:
And here’s the NOT traditional version:
I hope you enjoy one or both!
— JS
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Nineteen: The Big Short
Dec. 20th, 2025 04:17 amscalziwhatever_feed
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
And This Is Why We Don't ACTUALLY Boop the Snoot
Dec. 19th, 2025 11:25 amdaily_otter_feed
Via Wildlife Conservation Network - they write:
There’s something truly special about sea otters—their little paws, their vital role in our kelp forests, and their capacity for resilience 🦦
This year, we took a big leap and launched the Sea Otter Fund, our first-ever marine wildlife fund. It’s a dream come true for our team, but we can't do it alone. Right now, your kindness goes twice as far. Thanks to a generous $100k match, every dollar you give to otters before December 31 is doubled!
Help us protect these incredible creatures and start this new chapter strong 🌊
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Eighteen: Starship Troopers
Dec. 19th, 2025 02:41 amscalziwhatever_feed
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
Trying Out A New Recipe: Justine Dorion’s Sticky Ginger Bars
Dec. 18th, 2025 03:46 pmscalziwhatever_feed
When I opened Instagram yesterday, the first video to come up was from one of my favorite food content creators, Justine Dorion (perhaps better known as @justine_snacks). You may remember back in 2022 when I made her Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. Well, this time, she was making Sticky Ginger Bars, and I knew immediately that I was going to make them right then and there.
Wouldn’t you know it, though, I was lacking heavy cream and dates! Funny enough, I usually have both, but just happened to be out in this instance. So I grabbed them at the store and then made these bars right then and there.
So let’s talk about it!
First, the ingredients. We’ve got the basics: flour, sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, the usual suspects. Some of the more “oh I don’t have that in my pantry currently” type items are pecans, dates, and fresh ginger. At least those are pretty easily acquirable! Overall, I thought the ingredients were very normal things, and not overly expensive. Dates are definitely pricey (and so is my one true butter, Kerrygold) but otherwise it seems like a pretty standard, easy list of ingredients.
The first thing I made was the ginger cookie dough. I loved that in the steps of her recipe, she lists the measurements for the ingredient you’re using in that step. IT WAS SO HELPFUL. Thank you, Justine, for thinking of those of us who are tired of scrolling back up to the ingredients list to see the measurement again. Bless.
Mixing everything for the dough together was super easy, I just threw everything in my stand mixer and let it go until it was lighter in color like the recipe says. The real struggle came in trying to press the dough into a parchment lined baking dish.
In Justine’s photo on her blog, the dough looks so much more cooperative and less anger-inducingly sticky. Here’s how mine looked after I about had a meltdown about not being able to spread it evenly and get it into the corners well:
The dough, though very spiced and tasty, was difficult to work with and didn’t want to spread nicely. It just wanted to stick to itself and the rubber spatula. But I finally got it in there well enough that I moved onto the caramel.
I don’t like making caramel, I find it to a trifling process. I will say for this caramel, it was about as easy as a caramel can be. Butter and sugar (and in this case, honey!) and you melt it together until it boils and then once you take it off the heat after a few minutes you just add your dates and pecans and heavy cream and there you go. Not so bad! It really took no time at all to make the caramel, the thing that took forever was chopping the dates. Partially because I bought pitted and had to pit each one before chopping them.
After mixing up the caramel, here’s what it looked like:
I burned myself very slightly eating more of this than would be considered just a taste test. It was so flippin’ good. Once I poured it on top of the cookie dough and put it in the oven, I licked that spatula spotless. Delish.
The recipe says to bake them for 25-30 minutes, so I just did 25 and hoped they weren’t underdone. It came out looking like this (I sprinkled flaky sea salt on before the photo):
Well, it’s certainly something. Mostly pecans, from the looks of it. It didn’t look all that glamorous, and I had to stop myself from being impatient and trying to cut into it while it was warm. It was pretty much straight goop. Not soupy, but definitely not solid, either. I was nervous I had messed up, or not baked it long enough. I started to get anxious that I’d wasted all that time and ingredients.
Turns out, it just needed to cool (like the recipe says)!
Okay that looks really yummy. And… it is! Molasses, pecans, vanilla, fresh ginger, what’s not to love? These bad boys are packed full of spicy goodness (not spicy like hot, spicy like warm Christmas-y spices) and they are sticky sweet ooey-gooey goodness that needs washed down with a swig of milk. They are a lot but they are quite delicious.
I will definitely be making these again for people for the holidays! It’s the perfect Christmas time treat.
Last but not least, I wanted to talk about how many dishes I used. I will start off by saying I definitely could’ve cut down on my dish total if I had thought things through a little better, but I’m the kind of person that will throw something in the sink and then think, “oh wait I still needed that.”
That being said, I used the stand mixer bowl and paddle attachment, two rubber spatulas, one baking pan, one pot for the caramel, a cutting board and knife for the dates and pecans, a grater for the fresh ginger, and several measuring cups and teaspoons. Not horrible, at least it’s all stuff that can go in the dishwasher (minus the knife).
Another thing I really love about this recipe is that Justine provides alternatives like just using more pecans if you don’t like dates, you can make it nut-free with toasted pumpkin seeds, and if you want to make it gluten free you can just use one to one gluten free flour (she has the same favorite brand of flour as I do, King Arthur). Whilst I was making these and adding the cinnamon, I thought that they would be good with cardamom in them, and she actually says you can add some to make it even more holiday-warmth-esque!
So, yeah, I like how she writes her recipes, and I like the result of making these. Thank you, Justine, for another great recipe! She’s actually one of the few food content creator’s cookbooks I have. I even preordered it.
How do you feel about these ginger bars? Do you like fresh ginger? Are you a fan of dates? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Seventeen: Pleasantville
Dec. 18th, 2025 03:30 amscalziwhatever_feed
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
A Short Tale About Me Getting My Car Towed
Dec. 18th, 2025 02:39 amscalziwhatever_feedToday, I went on a journey to far away. Southeast of Cincinnati, to be more specific. While these past few days have been filled with icy roads, single digit temperatures, and disgusting slush of dirty snow and salt, today produced a much warmer and sunnier day. Thus, the snow began to melt, and everything turned to mud.
I know, of course, that cars can get stuck in snow, but it didn’t really occur to me all that much that cars could get stuck in mud. Today, I learned that valuable lesson.
So there I was, driving through curvy, wooded roads in the middle of nowhere, going to a house that was selling a beautiful, absolutely huge floral oil painting. When I got to the estate, I pulled into the long driveway and saw that there were two cars parked in the yard. I immediately thought that these two cars must be other buyers of these people’s Facebook Marketplace goods, so I figured I’d just park alongside the other cars in the yard.
I went in to the lovely home, acquired my big ass painting, barely fit it in my minivan (with the middle row of seats down, even), and proceeded to go on my merry way. Just kidding, I was stuck as heck! My wheels were spinning round and round in the mud and I was tearing up their lawn somethin’ fierce.
I walked, full of shame, back to their front door and knocked again, telling them I was stuck and I was sorry to be in the hair for longer than anticipated. Them, being an elderly couple, expressed their apologies for not being able to push my car or really do much of anything to help, to which I of course replied they’re completely fine and have nothing to be sorry for.
Funny enough, I had a ton of flat, broken down cardboard in the back of my van (that the painting was resting on). I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this before, but I remember a number of times where my mom was stuck in the snow and wedged cardboard under the wheels to gain traction and get unstuck. I thought I could do the same, but it simply was not working, and I was just making a mess.
So, I called a tow truck place. They said they couldn’t do it. I called a second place, but the number didn’t work. Finally, I called a third place, and they said they could be there within half an hour, and the minimum cost was $150.
I sat and waited in my car the half hour until they got there, got towed out, and then finally started the two hour drive back home. I was now about an hour behind schedule in my relatively packed day.
All this being said, my very exciting story of getting towed FIVE FEET ONTO THE ASPHALT is not why I wanted to talk about this incident. I wanted to tell you about this because I had an interesting realization once the situation was all said and done.
I was not mad. Like, at all. I got stuck in the mud, got my boots and car filthy, had to pay $150 just to get towed back onto the driveway, was behind schedule, and still had to drive two hours home. And yet, I was extremely and utterly unbothered.
Though I wouldn’t consider myself an angry or aggressive person by any means, I do have a very bad habit of letting very common or small issues completely ruin my mood and affect my entire day. And usually when something (such as getting my car towed) happens, it would make me think self-pitying, woe-is-me type thoughts like “of course this would happen, just my luck, fuck my life.”
(These thoughts, by the way, are extremely invalid because it is literally not my luck at all, I actually have pretty good luck and usually bad things don’t happen to me regularly.)
However, this time around, I did not have any negative thoughts like that, or feel stressed out at all. Truly, my brain was just like, “ah shucks, I’m stuck, that’s a little unfortunate, but no big deal, I’ll just call a tow truck and that’ll be that, and everything is fine!”
THAT NEVER HAPPENS IN MY BRAIN.
To go beyond feeling unbothered and not stressed, I felt grateful that I have the ability to call a tow truck, get unstuck within half an hour, and drop $150 on it without a second thought. My day is not even remotely affected by that money. I can still get groceries, I can still pay my bills, and in fact after that I got a full tank of gas, got a sandwich and coffee, and went to Kohl’s and spent like $250. It literally didn’t matter. I was more concerned by the fact I was an hour behind schedule than that I had to spend money on towing.
How lucky am I that I got a kick-ass painting, am able to get help when I need it without worry, and now I have a small story out of it.
Long story short, for what feels like the first time in a very, very long time. I didn’t melt down over an issue. I didn’t hate my entire existence because of a fixable problem. I didn’t feel like exploding just because something went wrong. I was fine! I wasn’t even mad or annoyed. I was perfectly okay. That feels so much better than getting angry.
Now I just need to go wash the mud off my boots.
-AMS
I Let My Email Go For a Month and Now It Is Crushing My Will To Live: The John Scalzi Story
Dec. 17th, 2025 06:21 pmscalziwhatever_feedTwo things:
One, if you sent me an email in the last month and I have not responded to it, I will be attempting to respond to it in the next couple of days. Sorry for the delay, I was busy doing secret things, and by “secret things” I mean “nothing actually, just avoiding email.”
Two, if you sent an email in the last month and you don’t get a response to it by Friday close of business, you can assume you’re not getting a response to it, not because I hate you and I want you to die, but because I might have accidentally archived it. If you want, and if it is actually important you get a response from me, send it again on that Monday.
— JS
Who's Who in Sea Otter Pup's First Examination?
Dec. 17th, 2025 11:39 amdaily_otter_feed
Last we we showed you a peek inside a sea otter pup admission exam, and here’s a little more info on the process! This comes from the Alaska SeaLife Center, which writes:
Who’s who in a wildlife response patient exam?
When a new patient arrives at the Alaska SeaLife Center, it takes a skilled team to make sure that the first exam is safe and thorough. In EL2526’s admit exam, our veterinary fellow, Dr. Josie, is the one performing the medical assessment, while Wildlife Rescue and Animal Care Specialist Savannah is handling the pup.
The handler plays a critical role. Savannah’s focus is on protecting both the veterinarian and the wild animal by staying in just the right position to prevent potential bites while also not stressing or applying too much pressure to the animal. You may also notice the gear. Savannah is in heavy bite gloves, and Dr. Josie is in nitrile exam gloves.
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day 16: John Wick
Dec. 17th, 2025 03:41 amscalziwhatever_feed
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
A Small Book Haul From Pegasus Books
Dec. 16th, 2025 02:38 pmscalziwhatever_feedSomeone commented on my last post that one thing that helps them feel like a home is a home is putting books into bookshelves, and I must say they were totally right! A beautifully arranged and well stocked bookshelf makes a world of difference, and I thought now would be a perfect time to show off some books I got recently. (Also, thank you to everyone that commented such supp0rtive, nice messages! It really helped a lot and I appreciate all of you.)
When I was in San Francisco last month, I stopped by Pegasus Books, a bookstore that sells tons of used and new books, as well as lots of book adjacent goods like notebooks, puzzles, and greetings cards.
Though I was tempted to go wild, I knew whatever I bought I had to put in my suitcase, and by the time I made that realization I had already picked up two very bulky and heavy books, so I started to consider my choices more carefully.
That being said, here’s the books I ended up with:
And for the non-books:
Not pictured is a small, floral embroidered notebook I picked up for a friend, and a soft-bound notebook with “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” that I also sent to a friend (with an accompanying Great Wave notecard from that box of Hokusai notecards!). Also not pictured is the book I bought for The Prisoners Literature Project, an organization that believes everyone has the right to read, and you can buy books for incarcerated people at Pegasus Books! I don’t remember the name of what I bought, but it was just a paperback of forty classic short stories. Variety is the spice of life, after all.
So let’s talk about what is pictured. The only new book I bought was Something From Nothing, which is a book that literally just released last month and was something on my birthday and Christmas list. It’s a book that focuses on using pantry staples and making good, home cooked meals from simple ingredients. I figured I could use it since I’m about to cooking at home a lot more often than I have in the past.
Next up is The Foreign Cinema Cookbook: Recipes and Stories Under the Stars. I had no idea what The Foreign Cinema is, but it was the sheer size and heftiness of this book that caught my eye. It’s definitely poking into coffee-table-book size, and it was only eighteen dollars despite the inside of the book saying it was $40.
I ended up looking up the Foreign Cinema and finding out that it’s a restaurant in the area that also screens movies that opened in 1999! The book is written by the owners who are also the chefs, and has 125 of their signature recipes from the movie-focused restaurant. I love how beautiful this book is, it has some seriously stunning photos and extremely intriguing recipes in it. It was a steal, for sure.
Palestine on a Plate was prominently displayed right in front of the cookbook section, and there were actually two copies of it. I can honestly say I have never had Palestinian food, and even worse than that I realized I probably couldn’t name any dishes the country is known for. I feel like there’s no better time to invest in and learn about Palestinian culture, food, and history. It’s also a beautifully photographed book with absolutely incredible sounding recipes. I am looking forward to making recipes from such a rich and incredible culture.
If you’re curious about the non-books, I honestly can’t tell you why I was so interested in chili pepper notecards. I just thought the art was so cool and fun, and I’m always in the market for more cards to send to people (I say that as I have neglected my pen pals for uhh two years now). The pickleball notebook is actually for my cousin who loves pickleball, but don’t tell her because it’s supposed to be a Christmas gift! As for the Hokusai print notecards, again I always want more cards with cool art, and honestly I just think he has such an awesome style.
So there you have it! I’m not even remotely surprised that basically the only thing I left with was cookbooks and notecards. If I ever walk into a bookstore and don’t buy a cookbook, just know I’ve been replaced by a robot or alien.
Have you been to Pegasus Books before? Have you heard of Foreign Cinema? Do you like Hokusai art? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS