Friends

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/12/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twelve-ferris-buellers-day-off/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58638

About a decade ago there was some noise made about trying to figure out what day on the calendar Ferris Bueller’s Day Off took place. The day that was decided on by the nerds who think too much about this sort of thing was June 5, 1985. This was decided largely by the fact that the Cubs game Ferris, Cameron and Sloane were seen attending happened on that day, and apparently you can’t argue with the baseball schedule.

I can argue with the baseball schedule, and I will tell you that June 5, 1985 is not Ferris Bueller’s day off. For one thing, anyone who knows Midwest school schedules knows that by June 5th, all the kids are out of school. For another thing, asserting that the Cubs game, which our trio only attend, is definitive, when the Von Steuben Day parade, which Ferris actually inserts himself into, is disregarded, is nonsensical cherry picking of the highest order. The Von Steuben Day parade was as real as the Cubs game, and took place on September 28, 1985. If any real world day has to be picked, I would pick that one.

Except that one won’t work either. September 28, 1985 was a Saturday, for one, and it’s too early in the school year for Ferris’ hijinks, for another. We know Ferris has skipped school nine times by the time The Day Off rolls around, and missing nine days when school has been in for barely a month is a lot, even for Ferris. Ferris is a free spirit, not a chronic truant.

If one must pick a specific day — a questionable assertion, as I will relate momentarily — it would most likely be a day in late April, when Baseball is in season, the kids are not quite yet attuned to things like prom and graduation (and for the seniors, college), spring has sprung in the Chicagoland area, and Ferris would decide that that the day is too great to spend all cooped up in class.

But ultimately, trying to pin The Day Off to an actual calendar day is folly — and not only folly but absolutely antithetical to the point of The Day Off. The point of The Day Off is freedom and possibility, not to pin it down with facts and schedules. Facts and schedules are for classes! The Day Off doesn’t ask for any of that. It only asks: What will you do, if you can do whatever you want?

What Ferris wants is to have a day in Chicago with his best friend Cameron and girlfriend Sloane. Inconveniently that is a school day, and while Ferris has bucked the system before (nine times!), as he says to the camera — Ferris breaks the fourth wall more and better than anyone before or since, yes, even better than Deadpool, I said what I said — if he does it again after this, he’ll have to barf up a lung to make it stick. That being the case, The Day Off needs to be a day more than just hanging with friends. It has to be an event. Making it so will, among other things, require the “borrowing” of an expensive car, the chutzpah to brazen one’s way into a place that will serve you pancreas, the cunning to evade parents and school principals and, significantly, the ability to make your depressive best friend confront his own fears.

Oh, and, singing “Twist and Shout” in a parade. As you do.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom — well, that appealed to me a lot.

Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris’ ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he’s screenwriter/director John Hughes’ special boy. The rest of us don’t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn’t regret them.

(I even got called “Ferris” once or twice! Not in high school, but in college, at The University of Chicago, where somewhat exceptionally among my peers at that famously intensive school, I didn’t grind or panic about my grades, I would actually leave campus to see concerts and plays and to visit a girl at Northwestern, and I got a job straight out of college reviewing movies for a newspaper, in the middle of a recession. I apparently made it all look easy, thus, “Ferris.” Spoiler: It wasn’t all easy, not by a long shot, the girl at Northwestern wanted to be just friends, and I got that job because I was willing to be paid less on a weekly basis than the newspaper paid its interns. I only achieved Ferris-osity if one didn’t look too closely.)

There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you’re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon). I’ve never gotten to that point, but it’s surely true that Ferris becomes less of a character goal and more of a character study as one gets older. Ferris himself understands that he is living in a moment that’s not going to last: As he says in the movie, he and Cameron will soon graduate, they’ll go to separate colleges and that’s going to be that for them. Ferris’ trickster status is predicated in his being in a place and time where his (let’s face it mild) acts of transgression have little consequence. The penalties for him here are of the “I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record” sort, and even those are thwarted by Cameron letting him off the hook for property damage and a soror ex machina moment. Ferris knows it, which I think is why he takes advantage of it. After graduation, things get harder for everyone, even for privileged white boys from the north suburbs.

This might mean that Ferris eventually becomes one of those people who realizes he’s peaked in high school, and what an incredibly depressing realization that might be from him (Cameron, on the other hand, will not peak in high school; once he’s out of his dad’s house he’s going to thrive. Sloane is going to be just fine, too).

I do wonder, from time to time, what has become of Ferris. Many years ago I wrote about what I think happened to Holden Caufield of Catcher in the Rye; I said I expected he went into advertising, was good at selling things to “the youth” and became a mostly functional alcoholic. My expectations for Ferris are similar, although more charitable: He goes to Northwestern, is popular but not nearly at the same level (Northwestern has a lot of Ferris types at it), gets a job in marketing, does very well at it, marries someone who is not Sloane, moves back to his hometown when they have kids and when they get old enough to go to his high school, he bores them with his stories about his time there. The kids, it turns out, didn’t ditch. Ferris has grandkids now. He keeps in touch with Cameron and Sloane through Facebook. They’re fine. He’s fine. It’s all fine.

If it sounds like I’ve given Ferris an ordinary life, well, that’s kind of the point. Early on, I said the point of The Day Off was, what will you do, if you can do whatever you want? It turns out, for all his cleverness and antics and quoting of John Lennon, what Ferris wanted was actually pretty ordinary: To have a great day with his friends, while he still could have a great day with his friends. And, well: Who wouldn’t? Just because what he wants is ordinary doesn’t mean it isn’t good, or that it wasn’t a shining moment that all three of them will be glad all their lives that they got to have. Our lives are made of moments like these, where one day you get to do what you want with the people who matter to you, and you look around and you say to yourself, yes, this.

Most us don’t then mount a parade float and lipsync to a Beatles cover, true, and if we did we would probably get arrested. But this is why Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a fable, and why the actual date of The Day Off doesn’t matter. What matters, and why I come back to this movie, is the joy of a perfect day, with the people that will make it perfect. My Day Off isn’t this day off. But I’ve had one or two of them, and, hopefully, so have you.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/12/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twelve-ferris-buellers-day-off/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58638

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/11/the-december-comfort-watches-day-eleven-godzilla-2014/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58631

No, the 2014 version of Godzilla, the US-produced one directed by Gareth Edwards, is not the best Godzilla movie in the several-decade, several-dozen-installment history of the franchise. If I had to rank it, I would probably put it at three or four, depending on how I was feeling about Shin Godzilla that day (for clarity, number one is the original 1954 production, the Japanese version, not the cut-up US release, and number two is Godzilla Minus One, proof that $15 million goes a long way if you know how to spend it). So don’t be jumping down my throat about that. Remember that the thing about these “comfort watches” is not that they are the best movies, or, sometimes (but not in this case) even actually good movies. They are the movies I find myself watching over and over.

And why do I rewatch this Godzilla, more than the others? Well, for one reason, I think this movie is one of Godzilla movies that actually gets the kaiju right.

I wrote about this a year or so ago in my film column in Uncanny magazine. You can follow this link to see the whole essay (and I recommend you do!), but the brief version is this: The recurring problem with Godzilla, the monster, is that the longer he sticks around, in sequel after sequel, the less he is an unstoppable force of nature and the more he becomes, if not an outright friend to humanity, then at least an entity whose interests appear to align with ours. That makes him progressively less interesting and, ultimately, boring. When a kaiju gets cuddly, it’s all over. Then the only thing left to do is reboot him and start over.

The 2014 Godzilla was not the first US-based reboot; there was the 1998 version, directed by Roland Emmerich, which was financially successful and a critical and cultural flop, the latter being especially interesting to me, even at the time. The movie did what it was supposed to do: make money (it was the #8 top-grossing movie of its year domestically), but at the cost of Godzilla’s cultural cachet; the humans in the movie were kinda soft and goofy and Godzilla, while not at all on the side of the humans, didn’t feel like Godzilla. Godzilla is (to varying degrees of effectiveness over the years), a vessel for humanity’s fears and a representation of the world smacking us back for our hubris. 1998’s Godzilla was… just a monster, and not one that actually looked like Godzilla was meant to look (also, the laying of eggs in Madison Square Garden didn’t help much). It’s not a surprise that Toho Studios, the owners of Godzilla, later retconned the ’98 Godzilla into “Zilla,” a kaiju, yes, but not the kaiju. Not Godzilla.

For the 2014 movie, Gareth Edwards and the other filmmakers didn’t screw with what makes Godzilla Godzilla, they leaned into it instead. There were some criticisms of the monster design, because of course there would be, nerds are gonna nerd, but this film’s Godzilla looks like it’s sharing DNA with its Japanese predecessors. I remember some complaints about this monster looking too chonky and thicc, but speaking personally I didn’t consider this a problem at all because (and here I get super nerdy myself), look, a 300-fucking-foot-tall monster ain’t gonna be svelte in any of its dimensions. It’s going to have meat on its bones, okay?

(Also, before you get in on me about the square-cube law, remember I wrote a whole novel about kaiju and I get into the square-cube law in it. Whatever you’re going to throw at me, I already thought about it. Anyway, we’re ignoring some elemental physics at the moment for this movie. Accept it, my dudes).

More importantly, Edwards, et al understood Godzilla for what is meant to be, a force of nature — indeed, the force of nature, a huge variable designed to zero out the equation when something threatens to unbalance it. In this movie that would be the MUTOs, a pair of Kaiju who eat radiation, which is why one of them was attracted to a nuclear facility in Japan at the turn of the century, wrecking it and then cocooning there to feed until the time was right to pop out, a weird, sleek kaiju that looks Art Deco, or maybe like the vector tanks from the Battlezone videogame. The monster heads east, looking for a mate…

… and then here’s Godzilla to stop it, at, of all places, the airport at Honolulu.

And what a very fine entrance it is, too. Edwards has learned from Spielberg, Scott and others that your monster is more effective the less you show of it, until, that is, it’s time to show it all. Our first introduction to Godzilla are his back fins and body parts illuminated by spotlights and flares and exploding planes. And then, finally, there he is… and he is pissed.

This is the other thing this film does right. Godzilla is huge and Godzilla should feel huge, but for much of his existence, he hasn’t. For the first several decades of his existence, as much as you might want to, you couldn’t escape the fact that Godzilla, king of the monsters, was a dude in a rubber suit, stomping around a scale model of Tokyo. It didn’t make the early movies bad (note my position of the original Godzilla in the rankings), but special effects tech was what it was. As time went on, more advanced compositing and CGI could have fixed that, but in the 1998 Godzilla, at least, didn’t. That monster moved too fast and had no mass onscreen.

The 2014 edition doesn’t make that mistake. Godzilla’s big, and he’s massive, and he acts and moves like it. Every move Godzilla makes in this movie is a spectacle of heft. There’s no doubt he’s going to do damage with every step he takes. Godzilla and the MUTOs eventually settle their scores in San Francisco, and while there is never any doubt that the city is going to get wrecked, here it’s getting wrecked at a level of special effects mastery that gives it all an extra dollop of, well, not realism, exactly, but certainly consequence. Buildings don’t fall over like cardboard when a kaiju smashes into them. They crumble, and they eventually fall, like they are actually made of concrete and rebar, and the Kaiju get smashed to match.

This wasn’t Edwards’ first time at the monster rodeo. He made his directorial debut with Monsters, a 2010 science fiction film about, you guessed it, monsters, which did some amazing things on a reported budget of half a million dollars. His budget for Godzilla was 32 times as much, for the monster fights alone, he got some good value out of the money.

I’m mostly into this movie for the monsters and the havoc the wreak, but the human stories here, unlike most Godzilla movies I’ve seen, don’t make me want to just fast forward to the good stuff. One, it has a level of gravity to it that I appreciate; all the humans in it take what’s happening seriously, and so does the screenwriter. There’s generational drama, a husband and wife separated by monsters, a mysterious NGO dedicated to the tracking of kaiju, and a race to deal with a nuclear bomb that it was humanity’s fault was there in the first place (there’s that hubris!), and so on. It’s fine! It moves along and no one acts stupidly, which is never a guarantee in a monster movie no matter how high-toned it is. Godzilla, I’m happy to say, gives almost no shits about anything the humans are doing, any more than any of us would worry about ants if we got into a brawl with our cousin at a cookout.

That wouldn’t last. There have been several sequels to Godzilla in the last decade, all as part of a “Monsterverse,” some involving King Kong. The further we go along, the more Godzilla is becoming an ally of sorts to humanity, and the more the stories feel drained of consequence. In the latest movie in the series, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Rio De Janeiro is laid to waste with the same gravity as a bunch of kids knocking over a LEGO set. It’s pretty, and silly, and since New Empire made more money than any other film in the series, the series will almost certainly continue to be pretty silly.

Thus is the nature of Godzilla. At a certain point, the returns will diminish and they will reboot him, yet again, to be a force of nature and not our pal (actually they already did with Godzilla Minus Zero, but that’s not in the same timeline or extended universe, so (jedi wave) forget about that for now). Until they do, I have the 2014 Godzilla to keep me company. It lets Godzilla be Godzilla, and I like that about it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/11/the-december-comfort-watches-day-eleven-godzilla-2014/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58631

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/11/why-ive-been-mia-which-in-this-case-stands-for-moving-is-agony/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58620

Or maybe Moving Irrationally Angrily? Because both are true.

You may have seen on here a bit ago that I got a house. Well, you would probably expect someone to be happy about this sort of thing, or at least pretty excited, which I am, but it has been completely overshadowed by stress and anxiety, and I’ve been having a really hard time with moving.

Since the move began, from the get-go I was immediately overwhelmed. Right off the bat, I was distressed by the inspection, which while it went “well” still revealed that there were plenty of things that needed fixing.

I was overwhelmed with the fact that I had to transfer utilities into my name, hire movers, get internet installed, pack everything up and then unpack everything and put it away somewhere. The previous people took their washer and dryer, so had to go buy those and have those delivered and installed, plus got a new microwave so had to have that installed, now this entire week has been electricians and insulation guys and a plumber, and you get the picture.

Yes, I know that transferring utilities and getting bills and internet and whatnot is completely normal and a regular adult thing to have to do, but I’ve never fucking done it before, okay? It’s a little stressful.

I knew moving would be hard, but I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be for me. The overwhelm shut me down. The stress made me unable to function. I wasn’t coping well. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything. And not just stuff related to moving, I wasn’t doing anything.

For a bit there, I was crying everyday, the to-do list getting longer and longer and me getting more stressed and depressed. It felt like every time I checked something off the to-do list, two more tasks would pop up in its place. It’s a hydra of a house. And yes, I know, “welcome to being a homeowner.”

While I’m largely through the move, with most things being in decent order and shape, there’s still so much to be done. While I haven’t been in the trenches this week like I previously was, I’m still not doing great emotionally. A big reason for this is because of how many people have been in the house working this week.

I know they’re here to do the work that needs to be done and of course I appreciate their service and whatnot, but it’s becoming hard to be stuck in the house while four guys are here from 9am to 4pm and I don’t even have internet or power in some of the rooms because the electricians are actively working. It’s not like I’m nervous to have men in the house or anything like that, but I am on alert that there are people in my house and if I leave my room I’m going to be in their way or something. And I can’t even do laundry or dishes or shower or something productive. I just have to sit there and listen to them drill and bang around and do their work. And they track SO MUCH MUD IN!

And I’m tired of people being late all the time. The internet guy said he’d be here from 8-10am and that installation would take about two hours. So I planned my day expecting the guy to be done at around noon or one at the latest. So I practically waited at the door until he came, and the guy didn’t even show up until 11:45am, and then didn’t leave until 4pm! My day felt like it was gone!

What it comes down to, I think, is that I don’t feel at peace (yet) in my home. I feel trapped and stressed and I can’t find my fucking pans to cook with. I want eggs for breakfast gosh dang it.

Ugh, this just sucks. And I know everyone says moving sucks, but boy does it suck. I underestimated the suckening. And I underestimated how poorly I was going to handle it all.

I’ve been angry, and lashing out a lot. My patience is low and my stress is high, and I keep snapping at people close to me. Then I feel bad afterwards and cry about that, too.

Also, word of advice, don’t move the week of Thanksgiving, and don’t move when it’s fucking cold as shit and snowing outside. Normally, I really like the holiday season, but I feel like my festive spirit is being ruined by the moving stress. December is flying by and yet everyday is also exceedingly long.

I am looking forward to this part being over. Soon, hopefully. I want to be happy in my home.

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/11/why-ive-been-mia-which-in-this-case-stands-for-moving-is-agony/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58620

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/10/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-ten-swimming-to-cambodia/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58611

It’s difficult to explain Swimming to Cambodia to anyone who hasn’t seen it. More accurately, it’s actually very easy to explain Swimming to Cambodia to someone who hasn’t seen it — literally, it’s actor/writer/monologuist Spaulding Gray sitting at a desk and talking for an hour and a half — but it’s difficult to explain how him sitting at that desk for an hour and a half is so compelling and watchable. Is it because Gray himself is watchable and compelling? Yes he is, in a blue blood nebbish sort of way, but it isn’t that (or not just that). It’s also because what he’s doing, monologuing while sitting, is almost entirely at odds with the very idea of a motion picture. Spaulding Gray just sits there, talks into a microphone, occasionally gesticulates and at a couple points pulls down a map to point to things. And it’s magnetic.

Spaulding Gray himself was something of a character, a New Englander in birth and education who drifted west after college to be part of an “intentional community,” only to drift east again to New York, and a life of writing and theater, becoming a co-founder of The Wooster Group. Eventually Gray started doing one-man shows based on his life, monologues with him and chair and a desk, and a notebook with outlines of what he wanted to say but (as I understand it) no hardened script. He would just go in the direction he would go, and hopefully he would take the audience along with him. Occasionally he would do a movie or some television, because, you know, if you could, why wouldn’t you.

One of those movies was The Killing Fields, a Roland Joffe film about Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge era, and two journalists, one American and one Cambodian, caught in the crossfire. Gray did not play the American journalist (Sam Waterston did); Gray played a minor bureaucrat who gives Waterston’s character an important piece of information. A small role, but as your high school drama teacher undoubtedly told you, there are no small parts. Certainly Gray didn’t think so; he played a minor role in the film, but the film and his experiences as part of the cast gave him enough material for a new monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, which was first performed live in 1985 and then published as a book in 1986 before becoming this movie in 1987.

When I first watched Swimming to Cambodia in college, I was trying to find some familiar slot to put it in. Surely there have been “one man shows” committed to film before, albeit usually in the form of some TV special where Hal Holbrooke was portraying Mark Twain, or some British actor was glaumphing about insisting they were Charles Dickens or Winston Churchill or some such. Occasionally, and again mostly on TV (and here in the US, mostly on PBS) you might see some illustrious Shakespearean actor talk about his life, interspersed with a monologue or two from the bard.

There were also, of course, comedy concert films, of which the ones with Richard Pryor are probably the most memorable: one comedian up on a stage with a microphone and ninety minutes to two hours to kill, and an audience to slay. There are even one-man dramatic movies, although those are rare too, quirky films like Robert Altman’s 1984 film Secret Honor, where Philip Baker Hall portrays Richard Nixon rattling around his private office, offering a stream-of-consciousness monologue about how it was he came to resign.

Swimming to Cambodia was like these movies and also not like them at all. Gray is not portraying some historical personage or plucking choice words from playwrights; he’s not pacing the stage or wandering a set. He is sitting at a desk, saying his own words, talking about his own experiences. Those words are funny as often as not, and Gray, a professional storyteller, know how to pace his material like the best comedians might. But this is not a comic performance — any performance that goes into great detail about the horrors of the Cambodian auto-genocide is not one that one would (or should) describe as a nonstop laugh riot. It’s not a concert film, with that call-and-response energy that concert films, musical and comedy, often have.

So: Not precisely a one-man show, not precisely a comedy concert, but a heretofore secret third thing involving one man and his own words, done in a way that, as far as I could remember, really hadn’t been done before and, excepting Spaulding Gray himself, who did more films like this, wasn’t done again, at least not theatrically. Spaulding Gray was and is sui generis as a cinematic genre.

Of the four monologue films he did do (not counting a monologue-laden documentary after his death), Swimming to Cambodia is the first, and, to my mind, the best. It is only Spaulding Gray on the stage, but it’s not only Spaulding Gray making the film. It’s directed by Jonathan Demme, who three years earlier directed Stop Making Sense, one of the greatest concert films ever made, directed Something Wild right before this, Married to the Mob right after this, and The Silence of the Lambs right after that. There may be greater movie directors in the history of American cinema, but few have such a willfully quirky stretch of their career.

Of all of these films, it’s Stop Making Sense that Swimming to Cambodia shares the most DNA with, which is funny to say considering that in that film, the members of the Talking Heads never stop moving, and in this film, Spaulding Gray never once leaves his desk. But just because Gray is relatively stationary doesn’t mean filming him can’t be kinetic. Demme finds his ways to make movement happen, through camera choices, lighting and set design. There is a lot happening here, even if the one person onscreen isn’t moving from his chair. That kinetic style is what makes this pair well with Stop Making Sense, even if they are otherwise polar opposite films in Demme’s filmography.

Again: I can’t think of another film quite like this one, not starring Spaulding Gray. I wonder why that is, and also I don’t wonder at all. Lots of people are comedians, and lots of actors can hold a stage even without the support of another actor. But to do this sort of studied monologuing is an odd duck middle ground, and I don’t think a lot of people do it, or can do it. I don’t think a lot of people have the temperament for it, for one thing: Spaulding Gray, gone more than twenty years now, did the monologue thing on the regular, doing it before this film, and doing it well after. I saw him do it myself in the 90s, when he was touring (touring!) with his monologue, Gray’s Anatomy, which would become his fourth and final monologue film (directed by Stephen Soderbergh, as it happens).

He had a real commitment to the form, which other people don’t have, or perhaps, have not have had with the same amount of success. Perhaps it was the case that even a nation as capacious as the United States could only sustain a single breakout monologuist at a time. Gray died in 2004 and no one has climbed into the role of the nation’s monologuist since, or if they have, I regret to say I have not been made aware of it. This is a shame. The United States needs many things right now, and perhaps a monologuist is one of them.

Of all the films in this “Comfort Reads” rubric, I think Swimming to Cambodia might end up being the most divisive and even the most unpopular. I don’t think it takes any great power of observation to understand why I, who have frequently written about myself and my life, and who even takes to a stage now and again to read to people things I have written, would find this film fascinating. I, too, monologue! (Not at his level, to be clear.) But I don’t know if other people who don’t do these things will find it as interesting, and as rewatchable.

But here’s the thing: like, love or loathe Swimming to Cambodia, you’re not likely to see another film very much like it. Of all the films I’m writing about here, this one is probably the most unique. It’s worth seeing for that alone.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/10/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-ten-swimming-to-cambodia/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58611

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/09/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-nine-strictly-ballroom/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58598

A personal story to begin: I was a film critic at the Fresno Bee newspaper when Strictly Ballroom came out in 1992. My review of it was an unqualified rave, and I said something along the line that people who loved old-fashioned movie musicals should go out of their way to see it. Then, on opening day, I took my friend Kristin to see the film at a matinee showing at the Fig Garden theater, which was at the time the “high-toned” theater in town.

I didn’t expect there to be much of an audience for a small Australian film about ballroom dancing on a Friday afternoon, but the theater was packed, and mostly with older folks. Kristin and I took our seats and as we did so an older gentleman in the row in front of us, who I assure you did not know I was there, turned to his seatmate and said, “If John Scalzi is wasting my time I am going to find him and kick his ass.”

That’s when I knew that this entire audience was there because I, as the local film critic, has promised them a good old-fashioned time at the movies. And if they didn’t like it, and found out I was there, there was going to an actual geriatric riot as they tore my body apart, slowly, and with considerable effort, limb from limb.

Reader, my ass was not kicked.

And this is because, while Strictly Ballroom is, actually, not at all an old-fashioned movie musical, the vibe, the feel, the delight and, yes, the corniness of an old-fashioned musical is indeed there — that deliriously heightened space where nothing is quite real but everything feels possible, including the happy ending that’s just too perfect, and you know it, and you don’t care, because you’ve been there for the whole ride and that’s just where it had to go, and you’re glad it did. That’s what Strictly Ballroom nails, just like the musical extravaganzas of old. All it’s missing is the Technicolor.

Plus! It was the feature film debut of Baz Luhrmann, the Australian filmmaker who has gone on to give the world some of the most movies of the last 30 years, including Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby. Everything that made those movies the gonzo experiences they were is here, in primordial, smaller, and much less expensive form. Luhrmann could not yet afford more here. But he was absolutely going to give the most with what he had, which was three million dollars, Australian.

And also, a humdinger of a story about Australia’s delightfully weird ballroom dancing subculture, where men dress in tuxes with numbers attached to them, swinging around women wearing dresses that look like they skinned a Muppet and added sequins. The opening sequence, filmed in documentary style, introduces us to Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio), a ballroom dancer whose path to the top of the field is all but assured — until, that is, Scott does the unthinkable: He starts improvising, and adding… new steps!

Which is just not done, ballroom dancing has standards, after all. Scott’s act of insurrection costs him, to the consternation of those around him, including his mother. But Scott is a rebel! He doesn’t care! He wants to dance his new steps!

No one believes in Scott and his new steps except for Fran (Tara Morice), a gawky beginner to the ballroom dancing scene, yes, but one who has some moves of her own from outside the ballroom world. Scott is intrigued, first by the steps and then for other reasons. Naturally Scott and Fran will be beset on all sides by disapproval of parents, institutions, the expectations of others, and ultimately, their own selves. Will they live a life in fear? Or will they dance their way to that promised happy ending?

It’s not even a little bit of a spoiler to say that there will be a happy ending — this movie was not made in the early 70s, after all, where the rebellion against cinematic norms would dictate that everyone in the film would have to be hit by a train or something. The interest of the film is how it gets to the happy ending. The answer is, with a lot of comedy, a lot of dancing and a couple of not-surprising-in-retrospect twists that are, the first time you see them, nevertheless a bit of a surprise. Scott is a classic pretty boy dancing rebel, Fran is a classic ugly duckling, and the two of them ultimately have their big dancing scene that we’ve been waiting for the whole film, which totally feels earned, even if it’s all a little ridiculous, in a good way.

And to be clear it really is all ridiculous, in a good way. Baz Luhrmann, who also co-wrote the movie (based on a play he put together, which in itself was based on his own experiences in the ballroom dancing scene) is not here for your cynicism or your snobbery. He knows the ballroom dancing world is something that can look silly and even foolish from the outside, but if you’ve decided to put yourself on the outside, that’s a you problem, now, isn’t it? It’s clear Luhrmann has deep affection for the scene and the people who are in it, and if the characters in the movie are a little too into it all, wrapping themselves up in it to the exclusion of much else — well, what are your passions? What weird little insular groups do you belong to? Speaking as someone who is extremely deep into the world of science fiction, and its conventions and its award dramas, which are in their way no less ridiculous (and also has had its own movies parodying its scene, more than one, even), not only am I not going to cast the first stone, I am going to claim a kinship. We are all a part of a ridiculous scene, and if we are not, we’re probably really boring.

I love that Baz Luhrmann loves ballroom dancing here, and lets us see his affection with an unwinking eye. I love that Scott is serious about his new steps as a way to crack open the moribund field he loves. I love that Fran unreservedly wants to be part of Scott’s revolution. I love that, in this small, bounded nutshell of a universe, this is all life-and-death stuff. I love that we see it all portrayed with a light touch, great comedy, and some genuinely fantastic dance scenes.

In fact, I will say this: Strictly Ballroom is, in its way, an absolutely perfect movie. Is it a great movie? Is it an important movie? Is it an influential movie? Honestly requires me to say “no” in all those cases. But those are not the same things! For what Strictly Ballroom is, it is genuinely difficult for me to imagine how any of it could have been done a single jot better. Everything about it works as it should, and does what it is meant to do. Everyone in the cast is delightful being the characters they are. In a movie about ballroom dancing, there isn’t a single step out of place, even the steps that are out of place, because they are meant to be where they are.

How many movies can you say that about? That you look at them and say, “yes, you one hundred percent did the thing you set out to do”? There are damned few, in any era. There is a reason this film received not one but two fifteen-minute standing ovations at the Cannes Film Festival, and won a bunch of awards around the world, and still holds up thirty-some-odd years after it was released. It’s because it’s a perfect little jolt of joy.

As a coda, another personal story: A few years ago I was in Melbourne for a science fiction convention, and as I was in my taxi from the airport, we passed a theater showing Strictly Ballroom, the musical. Well, I knew what I was going to do with my evening; I went and bought one of the few seats remaining (in the balcony! Center!) and enjoyed the hell out of the theatrical version, nearly as much as the cinematic version. Then, walking back to my hotel, I tore a muscle in my leg stepping off a curb and had to go to a hospital to have it dealt with.

It’s possible if I had not gone to see Strictly Ballroom that night, I wouldn’t have torn my muscle. But I did, and I don’t regret it. It was worth it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/09/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-nine-strictly-ballroom/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58598

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/08/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-eight-the-kingdom-of-heaven/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58588

There have always been “director’s cuts” and “extended cuts” of films, particularly in the era of the DVD and Blu-Ray, when a film’s distributor could slap in a few scenes that were cut out of the theatrical because the movie would be too long, or too laggy, or both, herald it as an “Unrated Director’s Cut” and eke out a few more bucks from the movie’s fans. Most of the time, this additional material did not change the course of the film in any substantive way — even the extended cuts of The Lord of the Rings trilogy mostly only added detail, with only one significant deviation between cuts that I can think of (that being the final disposition of Saruman).

Then there is The Kingdom of Heaven. The changes between the theatrical release, out in May of 2005, and the Director’s Cut, released on DVD in December of that year, are significant enough that in many ways they are different movies. The backstory of the hero is significantly changed, as is his relationship to characters shown early in the film; previously unknown children show up to play significant roles in the plot; and the final disposition of at least one major character in the film is entirely changed. Ridley Scott, who directed the film, called the extended version “the one that should have been released.”

So why wasn’t it? Well, because the extended version was three hours and ten minutes long, and in 2005, really only two filmmakers not relegated to arthouse status could get away with three hour films. One was Peter Jackson, whose non-extended The Return of the King clocked in at three hours and twenty minutes, and the other was Jim Cameron, who spent three hours and fifteen minutes sinking the Titanic. Everyone else, even Ridley Scott, needed their films shorter, preferably not longer than two hours, thirty minutes. The theatrical cut of The Kingdom of Heaven? Two hours, twenty-four minutes. Scott, no stranger to “director’s cuts,” (see the multiple extended versions of Blade Runner that are out in the world), waited for the home video release for the longer cut.

Most cineastes, fans of the film and apparently Ridley Scott himself will tell you that the extended cut of this film is the one to see, but today I am going to file a modified minority report. I think the theatrical release is perfectly good — and indeed in some places better than the extended version — and it’s the version that I end up rewatching, not the lauded longer version.

In both versions of this tale, the following is true: A French blacksmith named Balian (Orlando Bloom, trying to make the transition to serious actor after his franchise hits) is grieving the death of his wife when a noble named Godfrey shows up, declares himself Balian’s father, and bids him join his entourage as they journey to the Holy Land, which is, momentarily at least, between crusades. Balian passes, but then, one significant crime later, he’s on his way.

In the Holy Land, Balian quickly finds favor with the Jerusalem’s Christian king Baldwin, who is managing a tenuous peace with Saladin, his Muslim counterpart; he also quickly befriends Sibylla (Eva Green), Baldwin’s sister. Sibylla’s husband Guy dislikes Balian, which is not great because Baldwin is dying and Guy will be king soon, and when he is king, he’s going to pick a fight with Saladin. Devotees of history will know how this went for him, and it goes similarly in the movie. Suddenly it falls to Balian to defend Jerusalem from Saladin’s forces.

Now, going all the way back to my days as a professional film critic (now — lord — 35 years ago), I’ve always warned people never to confuse cinematic historical dramas with what actually happened in history, even when, as is the case here, an actual historic event (the Siege of Jerusalem) is being portrayed. Given the choice of historical accuracy and engaging drama, filmmakers will go for drama every single time.

This is absolutely the case here; in both versions of The Kingdom of Heaven, the very broad strokes of history are (generally) correct, but almost all the details are fictional as hell. The extended cut does not gain any substantial accuracy for being longer; indeed it takes a couple of opportunities to be even more historically incorrect because it’s interesting for the story. Balian did exist! He did defend Jerusalem! Everything else you should consider as being subject to artistic license.

With that noted, the drama portion is solid — the story of Balian, from humble beginnings to defense of Jerusalem, is engaging, and Orlando Bloom is on point personifying him. 2005 was still an era where people were trying to make Bloom happen as a leading man, a thing that didn’t get much traction outside of him being an elf or a pirate. I don’t think that’s Bloom’s fault, and definitely not here. He’s working as hard as he can to sell it, and he’s holding his own against folks like Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis and Edward Norton. If there’s any flaw in the character, it’s one noted by other characters in the film: He’s possibly too good (in a moral sense) for the world he’s in. But that’s the fault of the writers, not Bloom.

Where the film really shines for me, however, is the overall political milieu of the film. Surprise: the Holy Land has been a place of contention for millennia, a fact that (to put it mildly) continues to this day. The Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t shy away from the complexity of having a single place desired and claimed by, and fought over, both the Christians and Muslims. There are lots of places where the film could have easily tipped over into jingoism — this was the early 2000s, when the US’s 9/11 scars were still fresh, and we, a nominally-secular but de facto Christian country, had boots on the ground in Muslim nations — and bluntly it might have been substantially more successful financially if it had been.

Scott and screenwriter William Monaghan didn’t take that route, instead showing (among other things) the Muslim leader Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) as a man of integrity and moral force, keeping the hotheads in his own host in line, and showing respect and even kindness, first to King Baldwin, and then to Balian. The Christians in the film run the gamut, from honorable to despicable, and all of their range is given context in the story. Again, the story should not be seen as accurate history. But as an examination of how the high ideals of religion can run aground in the ambition of base humans, it has some striking moments.

Add to this the fact that Ridley Scott has a knack for visuals that has been near-unparalleled for more than 50 years, and you have a film that is a joy to look at.

To come back to the issue of the theatrical release vs the extended cut, here’s my thought on that: the extended cut is better for understanding the wider story Scott and Monaghan were trying to capture, but the theatrical cut is better paced and presented, and is a more engaging cinematic experience. “More” isn’t always better; often it’s just more. I’ve seen the extended cut and, having seen it and internalized the bits that aren’t in the shorter version, I can keep them in the ledger of my awareness while I’m enjoying the version of the film that actually, you know, moves at a compelling pace.

This is caveated with the acknowledgement that I saw the theatrical version first, liked it perfectly well, and then saw the extended version; it’s possible that if I had seen the extended version first I might prefer it more. But honestly I don’t know if I would have. Bluntly, I want my movies to feel like movies, not like a slightly-compacted miniseries.

That said, both versions are worth seeing, even if only one is going to be on my repeat-viewing list. I appreciate Ridley Scott making a handsome movie about a complicated plot of land, no less so now than in the time the film is set, and not pretending that, either then or now, there is anything easy or simple about the struggles there. I don’t think this film will convert anyone who wants to argue otherwise. But I’m glad Scott made the attempt.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/08/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-eight-the-kingdom-of-heaven/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58588

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/07/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seven-moana/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58562

I will begin this piece noting that I am not unbiased in my thoughts about Moana, as my friend, the Oscar-nominated writer Pamela Ribon, helped write a significant chunk of this film’s story. I found out about her involvement after the fact, namely, by sitting there in the theater watching the credits when the movie was done, spying her name, and saying “Oh, shit! Pamie!” out loud, thereby confusing the friend I went to see the film with. How much Pamela’s involvement in this film raises my estimation of it is difficult for me to quantify, but I can assure you I liked it very much before I knew she was involved with it. So, there, you have my disclosure.

And in fact, I do like Moana very much. It’s my favorite film out of Disney Animated Studios in the last decade, and even (barely) edges out Coco when you include Pixar in the mix (Coco is wonderful, though, you should absolutely see it if you have not). Moana does many things well, both technically and in the story department, but what I like most about it is that, without making an overt fuss about it, it’s the most feminist and woman-forward animated film that Disney Animation has made.

Disney, mind you, has been mining the “girl power” vein for a while, most overtly since the Disney Renaissance era that began with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. The Disney canon is so replete with these characters that they’re even their own marketing category within Disney itself: The Disney Princesses. The problem with the Disney Princesses, however, is one clear enough that Disney itself parodized it in a scene from Wreck It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet (written — again! — by Pamela Ribon):

Moana is in this scene, but of all the “princesses” in here (not excepting Vanellope!) she is the one whose journey’s intersection with men (and more broadly, with patriarchy) is of a different quality. Men exist in and are even essential to her path through the story, but at every juncture of the story, she is the captain of her own fate. She is continually self-motivating, self-rescuing, and ultimately, the instrument of the story’s resolution in a way that does not depend on a man (it may depend on an ocean, which is never gendered, but let’s not get into that now).

I don’t think Moana, either the film or character, overtly makes a big deal out of any of this — there’s no point where Moana (voiced by a remarkably assured teen named Auliʻi Cravalho) has a story-stopping “girl power” moment, and the only person who explicitly calls out her princess-ness is a dude who does it as a winking fourth-wall crack, and the fact is never really brought up again. Moana’s not rubbing your face in its feminist bona fides. It’s not to say they aren’t there.

In any event, at no point is Moana’s womanhood presented as a disadvantage. She is early on explicitly tapped to be the next leader of the only village on a Polynesian island of no specific provenance (the voice cast of the film is primarily Polynesian, but from varying places in the Pacific: Hawai’i, Samoa, and New Zealand/Aotearoa most prominently). This ascent to leadership is something that Moana accepts with some reluctance, for while her people have lived contentedly on the island for centuries, their antecedents once roamed the waves in big boats, and Moana sees her destiny out there. This fact is a subject of some exasperation to her father, who wants her to focus on where she is.

The issue gets forced when a blight hits the island, killing both the fish and the coconut palms the villagers rely on. This blight, Moana is told by her grandmother, is the result of the trickster demigod Maui stealing the (literal, not figurative) heart of the goddess Te Fiti, inadvertently starting the blight as well as being the cause of the pause in sailing between islands. The good news is, as a baby Moana was chosen by the ocean! For what? Well, as it happens, to leave the island, find Maui, and force him to return the heart of Te Fiti. Simple enough, yes? Well. No.

It does not pass my attention that in this film the initiating problem, and the various obstacles that Moana encounters, originate with men, and the aid and advice she gets is at the hand of the women characters (there is the volcano demon Te Kā, who is coded as a woman, but hold that thought). Again, the film doesn’t dwell on any of this — and both Maui and Moana’s dad have understandable and defensible reasons for what they do — but it’s there. Men in this film, in ways large and small, exist to be routed around and made to understand that they are supporting, not main, characters in this tale.

No one exemplifies this more than Maui, played by Dwayne Johnson in a frankly delightful bit of typecasting. If ever a movie star exuded “main character energy,” it’s Johnson. That same sort of heedless self-regard oozes through Maui, who despite being in exile for a thousand years, settles back into his own internal spotlight the second someone else gazes upon him. That Moana is having none of his guff is neither here nor there to him; she whacks him with an oar with seconds of meeting him and he reacts with mild puzzlement rather than comprehension. His signature song, “You’re Welcome,” is a literal paean to how awesome he is, and it’s perfect that Johnson’s singing voice is, how to put it, deeply imperfect. Maui wouldn’t care if he was off-key. Being on key is for people who aren’t demigods.

But the fact is, this isn’t Maui’s story, it’s Moana’s, and Maui’s journey will be to learn that being of service — the thing he’s always prided himself on — is not about filling the hole in one’s psyche.

Moana’s journey is also one of service — she wants to save her island and her people. She doesn’t know if she can do it, and there are times when she is sure that she can’t, but she is determined to anyway, and besides there is no one else who can do it. She’s learning on the job, so to speak, and what I like about her his that her doubts and fears and acknowledgements of her own deficiencies are right there in her story… and she keeps on regardless, and will do it all by herself if she has to. What saves her, and by extension saves everybody, is her ability to see, not where she has a chance to be a hero, but where she has a chance to heal what has been broken. It’s her story but it’s never been about her, or, rather, just about her.

This is a fairly subtle piece of storytelling — a story where the “big bad” isn’t defeated, or even redeemed, but is restored, from a harm perpetrated long ago. And the hero’s reward? Not riches or fame, or true love’s kiss, or a man in any shape or form. She just gets to go home, with the knowledge there is a home to go back to. This is a hero’s journey, to be sure. But it’s a different hero’s journey than we usually get, and one that I don’t think we often get to see when when the hero is a man. This is what Moana does, that the other “princess” movies up to that point didn’t really manage to do.

(Mulan comes close. But, Shang.)

I think it’s important that, while the film was directed and largely written by people who were not Polynesian, the filmmakers actively consulted and collaborated with Polynesians and Pacific Islanders about the movie, and listened about a number of things, like Maui’s appearance and why Moana wouldn’t be disrespectful regarding coconuts. Likewise, while Lin-Manuel Miranda is the marquee name for the movie’s songwriting, he collaborated with Opetaia Foaʻi, a Tokelauan-Tuvaluan composer and songwriter. I’m not qualified to say that the filmmakers got Polynesia “right” — please listen to others with better knowledge on that score — but at the very least it is good that there was an acknowledgement they were telling a story in a milieu that people currently exist in, and to which they owed respect.

I have not seen Moana’s animated sequel, which came out in 2024 and shoved lots of cash into Disney’s coffers, and bluntly, other than the obvious “for even more money,” I am confused why Disney thinks it’s a good idea to do a “live action” version of the story a mere decade after the animated movie hit theaters (actually, I do have a theory about this — the “live action” remakes of the animated movies serve the same function as re-releasing the classic Disney animated films did before the age of home video: bonding another generation of children to Disney’s character and stories, the better to keep them in the economic chain that continues on to Disney’s theme parks and cruises. Even so). I don’t imagine I will be going out my way to see the “live action” version anytime soon.

But that doesn’t decrease my appreciation for Moana, the original film. Disney doesn’t need me to tell them they got this one right. But they did. Of all the “Disney Princess” movies, this one, in theme and story, is the true queen.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/07/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seven-moana/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58562