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/2025/12/17/a-short-tale-about-me-getting-my-car-towed/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58748

Today, 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

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/a-short-tale-about-me-getting-my-car-towed/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58748

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/16/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-16-john-wick/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58729

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

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/16/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-16-john-wick/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58729