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The December Comfort Watches, Day Five: Invictus

Posted on December 5, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      5 Comments

For decades now, Clint Eastwood has had what appears to be the best production deal in Hollywood, in which Warner Bros. apparently lets him make any damn movie he wants, so long as he brings it in for a price, and, every third movie or so, deigns to appear in whatever he’s making. This has brought us numerous westerns, action films and occasional dramas where Eastwood’s increasingly craggy face scowls out from the screen, but it also has provided us a musical, an odd meditation on death, a maternal drama about a missing child, biopics of people both notable and obscure, and two films of the same battle, released in the same year, where the unexpected one ended up being nominated for Best Picture. Among many others! Why did Eastwood make them? Because he could, and he wanted to, and so he did.

In this strange grab bag of films is also Invictus, the story of the improbable 1995 South African Rugby World Cup win, told from the point of view of two men: Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), the captain of the formerly somewhat hapless South African team (known as the Springboks), and Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, absolute typecasting), who was President of South Africa at the time, and saw in the World Cup the chance to unite a fractious country, so recently under the rule of apartheid, in a common interest of sport.

No one, I think, would declare Invictus one of the great films of Eastwood’s oeuvre, but it is a pleasant and competent entry, and for me it delved into a bit of recent history I knew nothing about, both in the micro (South African rugby) and in the macro (South Africa, period). I have always warned people about the danger of getting one’s history from film, and certainly Invictus does its own share of trims, elisions and pump-ups to stuff the story into a movie. With that said, the film had the sign-off of Mandela himself (who appeared to hope Freeman would end up portraying him, as indeed he did), and of Pienaar as well. If this is a fictionalized version of history — and it is — then at least the protagonists were on board for it.

Of the two protagonists, it is naturally Mandela who draws our attention, because he is a world historical figure, and because he being played by Morgan Freeman. Freeman doesn’t look all that much like Mandela, but he has a similar magnetism, which is what the part needs. When Mandela goes to a meeting where a new national sports council has voted to rename the rugby team from the “Springboks” and strip them of their colors — both emblems of apartheid oppression — and prevails upon them to change their vote, well, that’s a scene where the only thing that is going to persuade is personal authority and charisma. Mandela could pull it off. So can Freeman.

Pienaar is less important and less compelling, which is an unfair comparison both for the actual man and for Matt Damon, who are implicitly contrasted with Mandela and Freeman, respectively. But as it happens, that’s exactly what this character needs to be. Pienaar’s story is one of a man who has done well enough — he is captain of the Springboks, after all, even if they are kind of terrible — who is asked to do far better by a great man, in the service of an even greater cause: the unity of a nation. I don’t know the quality of existential terror that exists in being asked by a great man to literally step up your game, but I know that it exists, and that Pienaar felt it, and that Damon is being asked here to portray it. In the course of the film, we get to see him and his teammates try to do what is asked of them.

I can’t say whether the Springboks’ 1995 win actually changed South Africa, since I am not a South African, and because 28 years is a long time, and many things have happened since then, both good and bad, in that country — including, as it happens, South Africa winning the Rugby World Cup an additional three times, the latest time just this year. I can say that I like watching a film that seems to believe it could do that, and that sport matters more than just as a distraction or pacifying diversion; that it could help to heal a decades-long wound close to the heart of a nation.

There is a phrase attributed to the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray: “Work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation.” In Invictus, Mandela and Pienaar are doing just that, each using their talents to the best of their ability to make a nation better than the one they had been born into. As I noted before, this film is not the best film Eastwood ever directed, but it might be the one with the most uplifting sentiment. I am glad he has the deal with Warner Bros. that allowed him to make this movie, because he wanted to, and because he could.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day Four: While You Were Sleeping

Posted on December 4, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      23 Comments

Here’s a kind of fun personal fact about me and While You Were Sleeping: I was a working film critic when this came out in 1995, and I remember giving it a B minus; I thought it was a cute little romantic comedy but that there was really not much more to it than that. Two weeks later, the romantic comedy French Kiss, starring Kevin Kline and Meg Ryan, came out, and I liked that one a bit better: I gave it a B plus. In the nearly 30 years since, I have watched Sleeping at least a couple dozen times. By contrast I have not ever rewatched French Kiss, and moreover, have no real interest in watching it again. I may have liked French Kiss a little more in 1995, but whatever its other qualities, it was a “one and done” sort of film, which, once watched, did not recommend itself to be seen again. Sleeping, on the other hand, you just want to revisit, over and over.

Why? Because while the heart of While You Were Sleeping is a love story, it’s not the love story of Chicago El Train token counter Lucy (Sandra Bullock) and Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher), the businessman she fantasizes about and then rescues from the tracks after he’s mugged. It’s not even the love story of Lucy and Jack (Bill Pullman), Peter’s brother, who is suspicious about the sudden appearance of Lucy, even as he’s undeniably attracted to her and she to him. It’s the love story of Lucy and the Callaghan family: Peter’s mom and dad and sister and godfather (and Jack, too), who, after a hospital mix-up where she’s mistakenly identified as Peter’s fiancée, open their hearts and home to her even though Peter is in a coma at the hospital. In their mind, she’s already family, and is meant to be there anyway.

Lucy, who is alone in the world except for a cat, reluctantly accepts the first invitation and then keeps on accepting the later ones, and thus we get the scenes that make this whole movie so rewatchable: the little moments of the Callaghan family opening Christmas gifts and chatting, or talking about how the mashed potatoes are so creamy, and what Argentina’s best known for, during dinner. They are, literally, quotidian scenes, nothing that should be of note, nor would be except that we know how genuinely starved for them Lucy is. We see them through her eyes, and she makes them extraordinary. She loves being there, even though she knows she shouldn’t be, and comes to love the Callaghans, even as she knows that sooner or later, Peter will wake up and reveal her as the cuckoo in the nest.

And then, of course, Peter wakes up, and while everything doesn’t exactly go to hell (this is a romantic comedy, and an exceedingly gentle one at that), it does mean that Lucy has to answer for herself the question of whether she joins the Callaghan family for the wrong reasons, or separates herself from them for the right ones.

This is a movie that lives or dies on the character work. If the Callaghans weren’t a family you wanted to spend the holidays, and maybe the rest of your life, with, Lucy’s being enamored with them would fall flat. The film wisely packs it with character actors — Peter Boyle, Glynis Johns, Jack Warden — who have read the assignment and execute perfectly. Peter, the self-absorbed object of desire, wouldn’t work if he didn’t have an absurd edge to shave off the self-possession, and Peter Gallagher is happy to provide that (Gallagher is, in fact, absurdly handsome, and his eyebrows qualify as a character all their own, with as much work as they put in here). Top to bottom, this cast is a delight.

But none of it works without Bullock. In 1995 she was a newly-minted film presence thanks to the previous year’s Speed, but this was one of her first leading roles, and she nailed it. Bullock personifies an “everygirl” sort of vibe, smart but alone, wistful and with an understanding that this good thing she’s fallen into probably can’t last, and maybe shouldn’t. Apparently the role of Lucy was offered to Demi Moore and Julia Roberts before it was given to Bullock. While Moore and Roberts certainly would have made sense from an economic point of view (they were both at the height of their fame then), they couldn’t have done what Bullock did here. They were already stars. They would have brought that stardom to the role, and overwhelmed it. Bullock brought herself to the role, and it helped make her a star.

Also, aside from all of this, this movie has a small, incidental, and entirely throw-away shot that makes me laugh every single time I see it, without fail, always. It involves a kid on a bicycle. You will know it when you see it.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day Three: Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World

Posted on December 3, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      17 Comments

The first thing to know about this film is that the protagonist, the 22-year-old Scott Pilgrim, starts off the film as an actual and verifiably shitty person. Does he know it? Really, not at all, partly because he’s 22 and that’s not a quality age for self-introspection, despite being a quality age for self-absorption. His friends are no help because they are also in that age group; only two of them — notably, both women — bother to let him know he’s trash. He absolutely unsurprisingly chooses not to acknowledge their pronouncements.

This would be the part where a movie marketing person might say that Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is the story of Scott going from a shitty person to a good person. This would be incorrect. When the movie ends, Scott is not a good person. He is, however, a better person, with the potential to be good person somewhere down the road, probably in his mid-thirties or something, which in my experience is the time of life where the “decent human or awful shitbowl” question is finally sorted out and you go through the rest of your life being one or the other. You can still change in your 40 or 50s or whatever, but something like 99% of us don’t. If you’re an awful shitbowl at 36, you’ve committed to the bit in the way you probably hadn’t yet at 22. It’s a long way back from there.

Scott Pilgrim still being obviously a work in progress at the end of the movie (implied extremely heavily by the last images before we cut to the credits) is one of the reasons I love this film. It’s easy to miss it in all the surface anarchy, clever humorous bits and videogame and comic book callouts, but in this matter — and kind of in this matter only — it’s one of the more realistic films about being in one’s early 20s, being full of inertia and yourself, and figuring out that maybe you can improve on yourself, if for no other reason than to be the person who still has a partner and friends five years down the road.

Which is not to say I don’t also enjoy the surface anarchy, clever humorous bits and videogame and comic book callouts . I certainly do. In fact, this is the first film by director Edgar Wright that I can say I really connected with. Wright was already beloved in comedy nerd circles for films like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (both featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), and while those films worked just fine for me, they weren’t ones that hugely moved my needle in terms of needing to seek out everything Edgar Wright did. Wright was clever! Clever is good! (Well, mostly.) But it took this source material to get me to see that what Wright was doing also could punch you in the face with a narrative. All the absurdity and chaos works, because, let’s face it, one’s early 20s are mostly absurdity and chaos anyway.

Everyone is a mess in this film. Scott’s a mess, as mentioned before, and Michael Cera does a very fine job personifying that mess, but he is hardly alone. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, perfect casting), with whom he falls in love, thus precipitating the narrative crisis that drives the film, is no less a mess than Scott. She’s just a different mess — and tellingly, she’s well aware of the fact she’s a mess, even if she has no idea how to stop being a mess, except by running away, which I shouldn’t have to tell you doesn’t stop you from being a mess, it just means you have more time alone with your messy thoughts. I’ve seen Ramona Flowers categorized as a “manic pixie dreamgirl,” but that’s two-thirds wrong. Scott does see her in dreams, so fair call there, but in the film at least she’s not a pixie, and she’s definitely not manic; she’s Daria with curves. She’s a work in progress too.

So are Scott’s friends, and so are the people he fights for Ramona’s affections, and so are even the bit characters in the film. Everything in the film is heightened and funnier than it is in real life, and also, anyone who was ever in their early 20s probably had an “oh shit I did that” moment of recognition watching the characters in this film. We were all a mess! Hopefully less so now! But even so! I have affection for nearly everyone in this film, even six of the seven “evil exes” Scott is obliged to battle, because all of them are clearly having a struggle I understand or at least can empathize with.

(Jason Schwartzman’s character, on the other hand, can go fuck himself. But then he is clearly meant to be older than the rest of the characters, and has enthusiastically self-sorted into the “shitbowl” category, so).

The other thing that rings for me in this movie is how very specifically run down and spare everything about it is, not because the film is cheap (it cost $60 million, which for its own financial well-being was probably $30 million too many; it was a bit of a flop on release), but because when you’re in your early 20s and you don’t have anything approaching a livable amount of money to your name, you decorate in Dorm Room Cast Off style, your clothes are Goodwill Whatever, and you subsist off pizza and air. When you’re in your early 20s, this is fine! Try not to be caught doing it after 28. I certainly remember living in that mode when I was in my early 20s, loitering in that summer between college and my first real job.

All of which is to say that despite the substantial and literally fantastic artifice of Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, and aside the humor and style, what brings me back to it over and over is its accuracy of the mode of being in one’s early 20s, not quite knowing who you are, much less who you are meant to become, and flailing about until you figure at least some of it out. In Scott’s case, it helps that he has Ramona to focus his attention on.

It’s been 13 years since the movie came out, Scott would be 35 now. I hope he’s mostly figured himself out. I hope Ramona has, too. I know where I want both of them to sort out.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day Two: The Emperor’s New Groove

Posted on December 2, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      33 Comments

I’ve loved The Emperor’s New Groove since the first time I saw it, because of all the Disney animated movies that have ever come out, it’s probably the one closest to my own comedic and storytelling sensibilities (although others come close, and, no surprise, some of them will show up later in the month). I love its anarchic-for-Disney spirit. But in the last couple of years I’ve felt an additional sort of kinship with it.

It’s well known in movie nerd circles that The Emperor’s New Groove is something of a last-minute, hail-Mary attempt to save the production of the film when an earlier and much more earnest version, called Kingdom of the Sun, crashed and burned. This saga has been extensively detailed in all sorts of articles and YouTube videos and such (this is one of my favorites for that), so I won’t go into detail about it here. Suffice to say, The Emperor’s New Groove was a real shitshow production, until it wasn’t, and then suddenly a totally unexpected comedy gem surfaced out of the mess.

As it turns out, roughly twenty years after The Emperor’s New Groove hit theaters, I had the same sort of thing happen to me: I was trying to write a (for me) dark and gritty story that I had pitched to my editors as “Das Boot in space,” but it was 2020 when I was trying to write it, which was the wrong year — for all sorts of reasons — to try to write that sort of story. I fumbled the novel for most of a year and finally had to admit defeat to my editor, who pulled the novel out of the release schedule… and then literally an hour after it was pulled, the entire plot of The Kaiju Preservation Society downloaded into my brain. I banged out that novel in a few weeks, it slid into the publication slot of that previous, failed novel, and, you know what? It did juuuuuust fine, and is generally hailed as one of my funnier novels.

So now, when I watch The Emperor’s New Groove, aside from enjoying it as a completely bonkers viewing experience, there’s also an added layer of empathy for the filmmakers, who scrambled to salvage something out of wreckage. On a much, much smaller scale (just me instead of hundreds of animators and other filmmakers), I’ve been there. Is what came out of it as good as what had originally been intended? We can never know that. But it’s more than good enough, and that’s gonna work for me.

The plot of The Emperor’s New Groove is just your usual callow-emperor-is-a-jerk, emperor-is-turned-into-llama-by-enemies, emperor-defeats-enemies-with-the-power-of-friendship story, just, you know, funny. The filmmakers, after Kingdom of the Sun was overthrown, admitted they leaned heavily on the Chuck Jones, Looney Tunes sort of humor and sensibility. It shows, and it was a very smart call on their part. Other Disney films had dipped their toes into this sort of thing (Aladdin is the most obvious, with Robin Williams being his own trickster spirit), but Emperor does a cannonball into the deep end, doing the sort of slapstick that keeps hitting you with pies to the face. If you don’t like the flavor of the pie, don’t worry, the next pie will hit your face in three seconds. It can be exhausting! But it’s my kind of exhausting.

Also — and I’m speaking here for comedic purposes and not as a matter of cultural sensitivity, hold that thought for a second — this is one of the most perfectly cast animated comedies in the history of the world. David Spade as the bratty emperor Kuzco? Well, that’s just typecasting. Eartha Kitt as Yzma, the deliciously conniving villain? Purrrrfect (those of you who have watched the movie will see what I did there). John Goodman as the decent soul put to use as the straight man? No one better.

But the best casting is Patrick Warburton as Kronk, Yzma’s boy-toy-slash-henchman. Unlike Yzma, Kronk is not evil, he’s a good soul who fell in with the wrong crowd and is making the best of his circumstances in a slightly oblivious, slightly overwhemed way. He’s dimwitted, yet a font of very specific information (can you speak Squirrel?), and just wants to be helpful regardless of circumstances. The moment when Yzma finally turns on him you can genuinely feel his heart break, not because he’s been rebuked but because is his mechanism of care for others (spinach puffs!) has been rejected. His expression is exactly what a golden retriever’s is when he figures out that you, in fact, did not throw the ball. You want to reach right into the screen and give Kronk a hug.

(Should a film about Incans have been made with a cast that has absolutely no relation to that area, culture and history? No, but this was 2000, i.e., the tail end of Disney’s “just cast famous mostly white people, it’s fine” era, and this is what they went with. When the inevitable-yet-absofuckinglutely-unneeded live action version of this film comes to Disney Plus, no doubt The Mouse will rectify this, and the cast will be fine and show the animated version could have absolutely found appropriate actors at the time, even as the live action version itself will feel like two hours of nails dragged across chalkboards, like every other “live action” version of an animated Disney movie. Sorry, I got carried away. Moving on. PS: Watch Coco, it will rip your heart out.)

(Oh, and, I’m not in love with the film’s agism regarding Yzma, even if it’s mostly there to point out the jerkiness of Kuzco. Point taken, but it didn’t work 20 years ago, and it works even less now. A flaw in otherwise delightful patter.)

What makes Emperor work is that, exceptions above aside, all the jokes still land. No matter how many times I see them, I giggle at them. That’s down to the character work of the voice actors and animators, and the wham-wham-WHAM timing of the film. It’s one hour and eighteen minutes and it packs three hours of jokes into those 78 minutes. It never drags. That’s a minor miracle for any film. I have a feeling the Kingdom of the Sun may not have been able to say otherwise, which is why it’s not here and this film is.

I appreciate The Emperor’s New Groove, for the fact it’s a delight, and for the fact that making it was nothing approaching delightful. There’s something about a work that survives despite itself. The people who made it no doubt have stories about the whole ride. I can honestly say I know how they feel.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day One: The Holiday

Posted on December 1, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      32 Comments

I don’t know about the rest of you, but with the advent of the holiday season, and the fact by the second week of December everyone collectively decides, well, that’s all the work that needs to be done this year, I spend a lot of my time this month camped out on my couch, watching a bunch of movies that I’ve seen before many times but pretty much only watch in December, for the reasons noted above. Some of them are holiday-related! But others are just, oh, I like this movie, I can watch it with my brain turned off. The December Comfort Watches.

This month, because I thought it would be fun, I’ve decided I will share a list of some of my favorite December Comfort Watches, once a day until the end of the month, or until I get bored and wander off to, you guessed it, watch some films. I want to be clear that I am not staking a claim to these films being the best films ever made, or in some cases that they are even good films; they are just the ones that I’m happy to put on, wrap a blanket around myself, and then do nothing else until I get to the credits. “Intensely watchable during seasonal torpor” is perhaps how I might put it.

And to start us off, let’s do one that is in fact seasonal: The Holiday, the 2006 trifle written and directed by Nancy Meyers. As a director and writer, Meyer is known as a bit of a specialist in the amusing misadventures of the sort of well-off white women who have both immaculate kitchens and the staff to keep them so. The Holiday certainly doesn’t break from that mold: One of her film’s two protagonists, played by Cameron Diaz, makes film trailers and lives in the sort of fenced-off Beverly Hills house that usually quarters movie stars or producers, or their plastic surgeons. The other protagonist, played by Kate Winslet, is a journalist who lives in a rather more modest cottage in Surrey, England, but even that is picturesque in a way that clearly belies the hand of a set designer.

These respective houses are important because our two characters swap them over a Christmas holiday, both trying to get away from heartbreak: Amanda (Diaz) because her composer boyfriend is boinking a staffer and Iris (Winslet) because her longtime newsroom fling is getting married to a blandly respectable woman from — horrors! — the circulation department. Amanda, who has the money for impulsive behavior, sees Iris’ cottage on a vacation home site and wonders if it’s available for an escape; Iris, who does not have the money for any of this but needs her own escape, proposes a house swap. Presto, Iris is on her way to LA, and Amanda is headed for Surrey.

Other than this scene and two other very short moments, Amanda and Iris have nothing to do with each other the entire film; instead we get to watch them be fish out of their respective waters. Amanda is hating England until Iris’ brother Graham (Jude Law, extremely charming) drunkenly shows up and she shags him like a rug; Iris, on the other hand, is like a kid in the California candy store, running screaming with delight through Amanda’s house, making friends with everyone from the gardener to the befuddled old neighbor who happens to be a famous screenwriter, and meeting Miles (Jack Black), a schlubby but kind and funny composer who is happy to see what might transpire with this charming itinerant Englishwoman.

None of it has much relation to reality — the timelines in this film are all kinds of screwy — but this really isn’t the sort of movie you watch for gritty adhesion to the real world. It’s a fairy tale about two really attractive women inconvenienced by terrible men who solve their problems with the application of travel and other, presumably better, men. Along the way there’s some amusing dialogue, a couple of nice b-stories (Iris with the screenwriter, Amanda figuring out who is texting Graham and why), and lovely shots of film executive Los Angeles and postcard England.

Of the two main stories in this film, it’s probably no surprise that I enjoy the one with Kate Winslet more, being as I am a former journalist, and having as I do the belief that any storyline that has Jack Black as a surprisingly credible romantic lead is one that speaks to me as a fellow who also needs to get by more on funny than with looks. By contrast, Diaz and Law are merely two pretty people having pretty problems prettily. But even there, there’s quite a bit of charm. I don’t mind watching them come to their inevitable happy ending.

As a final note I will say that for a reasonably contemporary film, The Holiday absolutely takes place in the very year it happens and not one second later; the golden-era screenwriter could not be realistically be any older than he is in the film, and one pivotal scene takes place in a video store (not to mention, you know, newspapers being reasonably healthy entities). It’s just before Twitter, before Facebook, before Brexit and MAGA, before a whole bunch of nonsense, which makes it even more of a comforting escape in 2023. Who knew 2006 qualifies as the good old days?

— JS