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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/21/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-21-kill-bill-vol-1/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58819

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

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/21/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-21-kill-bill-vol-1/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58819

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/20/two-homes-for-christmas-which-is-to-say-two-different-versions-of-the-same-christmas-song/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58807

I 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

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/20/two-homes-for-christmas-which-is-to-say-two-different-versions-of-the-same-christmas-song/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58807

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/19/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-nineteen-the-big-short/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58795

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

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/19/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-nineteen-the-big-short/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58795

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/18/trying-out-a-new-recipe-justine-dorions-sticky-ginger-bars/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58761

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

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/18/trying-out-a-new-recipe-justine-dorions-sticky-ginger-bars/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58761

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seventeen-pleasantville/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58743

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

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seventeen-pleasantville/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58743

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/16/a-small-book-haul-from-pegasus-books/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58718

Someone 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

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/16/a-small-book-haul-from-pegasus-books/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58718