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 John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/i-let-my-email-go-for-a-month-and-now-it-is-crushing-my-will-to-live-the-john-scalzi-story/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58736

Two things:

One, if you sent me an email in the last month and I have not responded to it, I will be attempting to respond to it in the next couple of days. Sorry for the delay, I was busy doing secret things, and by “secret things” I mean “nothing actually, just avoiding email.”

Two, if you sent an email in the last month and you don’t get a response to it by Friday close of business, you can assume you’re not getting a response to it, not because I hate you and I want you to die, but because I might have accidentally archived it. If you want, and if it is actually important you get a response from me, send it again on that Monday.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/i-let-my-email-go-for-a-month-and-now-it-is-crushing-my-will-to-live-the-john-scalzi-story/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58736

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

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/15/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-fifteen-this-is-spinal-tap/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58705

For more than two weeks, I had it on my schedule to write about This is Spinal Tap today, December 15, 2025. The day before this, director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer were (allegedly) murdered in their home. I sat in my office a lot of the day trying to decide whether to keep this on the schedule, whether to delay it, or whether to remove it from the list of comfort watches entirely, to be replaced by some other movie. I can’t pretend that Reiner’s death isn’t on my mind right now. I can’t pretend that it doesn’t make me terribly sad. I can’t pretend that a vast number of other people feel similarly, not even counting those who knew and loved him personally.

Here’s the thing. A day like this is exactly the day for a comfort watch, a movie that can give you joy at the lowest of times. This is Spinal Tap offers a lot of joy. It is one of the funniest movies ever made, a movie that can make you laugh until you cry, and also, make you laugh even if you have been crying. It is a film for a moment like this, when one feels bereft and out to sea and nothing makes sense.

So, you know what, fuck it. Whaddya say, let’s boogie.

Rob Reiner, it should be noted, was a master of comfort watch genre. When Harry Met Sally? Total romantic comfort watch. The American President? Total political comfort watch (although harder to get into at the moment, given the state of the White House). Stand By Me? Absolute “coming of age” comfort watch. And, of course, The Princess Bride, arguably the Greatest Comfort Watch of All Time, as I have essayed elsewhere. There’s probably no other single filmmaker whose entire canon is so damn rewatchable. This is not a skill that necessarily wins awards (Reiner was nominated for the Oscar only once, for A Few Good Men, a true legal comfort watch), but it is a skill that endears a filmmaker to their audience and peers. Rob Reiner is beloved, by fans and colleagues, like few modern filmmakers are.

It all had to start somewhere, cinematically speaking, and Spinal Tap was where it began, Reiner’s first feature film as director. It was not the first “mockumentary” ever made, or even the first rock-themed mockumentary: Eric Idle’s All You Need is Cash, which followed a Beatles knockoff band called The Rutles, for one, precedes it by six years. But it’s the one that really seemed to stick in the public consciousness. Riffing off the Beatles is one thing; that’s a known quantity. Spinal Tap, now. No one quite knew what they were getting into with this one.

The premise: Filmmaker Marty DiBergi (Reiner himself) documents the 1982 US tour of Spinal Tap, a British hard rock band, whose new album, Smell the Glove, is on the verge of release. The band consists of singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), plus touring keyboardist Viv Savage (David Kaff) and drummer Mick Shrimpton (RJ Parnell), to whom one should not get too attached. As the film starts, there’s a big launch party and a mostly successful concert, and everything seems to be going well. And then…

Well, and then everything that can goes wrong starts to go wrong, and in truly awful ways: Cover art controversies, dropped tour dates, venue navigation issues, technical problems involving Stonehenge, the list goes on. The band and their manager Ian (Tony Hendra) try to weather this all while DiBergi gets it on film, interspersed with archival footage and interview scenes in which the band are asked to explain, among other things, what’s happened to all those drummers over the years.

The movie is famously almost entirely improvised, mostly Reiner, McKean, Guest and Shearer but also, one assumes, by the supporting cast as well, who are (generally) not saying as many funny things, but are certainly giving the band members things to play off of. What are not improvised are the songs, both the “in concert” and archival numbers, in which the members of the band, their actors all also actual musicians, are playing their parts. The “live” song as the full-fledged Spinal Tap are indeed loud and ridiculous, in a way that’s only a smidge off from actual early 80s hard rock and heavy metal. But for my money the real gold is in the archival bits, where Spinal Tap, with earlier members and earlier names, surf through whichever rock genres are of the moment, from Merseybeat to psychedelia.

In one beautiful bit, David and Nigel talk about the the first song they ever wrote together, and even sing a bit of it, a little snippet of skiffle called “All the Way Home.” It is, unreservedly, lovely, and the best song in the film. In that one moment, we learn something really important about David and Nigel (and by extension, the band): They in fact have the capacity to be really good musicians, and have had that capacity right from the start. But then rock n’ roll kind of got in the way.

Spinal Tap is about a lot of mostly small things, but what it is mostly about is the relationship of David and Nigel (with Derek, who in another life would be a weird mead-swilling druid lurking in a valley, there for non-sequitur pseudo-philosophy). David and Nigel are two blokes who knew each other since childhood, trying to stay friends when everything is falling apart around them. Hilariously so, sure, which is great for us. But for them, it’s their lives, and while other things are played for laughs, the way these two feel about each other is the film’s unexpectedly serious emotional core. You might not notice that, the first two or three or eleven times you watch the movie. But look for it the next time you watch it. It’s there.

This film is beloved of cinema fans and lovers of comedy, but the people who really seem to love it are musicians, particularly of the 70s and 80s rock era, many of whom experienced in real life the various mishaps Spinal Tap have fictionally. Ozzy Osbourne is legendarily supposed have thought the film was an actual documentary the first time he watched it, and honestly, if anyone was like to have these sort of touring misfortunes befall him, it would be Ozzy.

Far from being offended that McKean, Guest and Shearer were taking the piss at rock, hard rock musicians embraced the trio and the band — in 1985, in the midst of the “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and “We Are The World” era of charity singles, heavy metal and hard rock bands came together as Hear N’ Aid to make their own charity single, “Stars.” Who was there alongside members of Dio, Judas Priest, Motley Crue and Quiet Riot? Why, Spinal Tap, of course!

For a fictional band, Spinal Tap has been prolific, with four albums in total, two of which are independent of a film. There were few actual tours in there as well, with McKean, Guest and Shearer playing their respective characters to much acclaim. There have been other successful fictional bands, from the Monkees to Huntr/x, but no one else has so successfully made the leap into being beloved after being portrayed as so, well, stupid. Spinal Tap is the best proof out there that hard rock and heavy metal fans are in on the joke, and love it.

Four decades (and one year) after This is Spinal Tap, Reiner, McKean, Guest and Shearer reunited for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which was about the hapless-yet-storied band reuniting for one last (contractually obliged) show. We know now that this is the last feature film Reiner would ever make, although there is apparently a Spinal Tap concert film film completed as well (Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale). Either way, Reiner’s film career is bookended by this fabulous, ridiculous band, doing their thing to the delight, confusion and hearing damage of fans.

It’s bittersweet and also unexpectedly lovely. How many of us get to go back to where we began? How many of us truly get to come full circle in our careers? Rob Reiner, who created some of the best, most entertaining and enduring films in his era of Hollywood, has done what David and Nigel sang first and best. He has come, truly, all the way home.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/15/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-fifteen-this-is-spinal-tap/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58705

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/14/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-fourteen-twister/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58679

As mentioned several times before, I used to be a professional film critic, leaving the job in early 1996 to take a job at America Online, which at the time was the new hotness in the exciting field of online services (it’s been a while, yes). When I left the reviewing job, I went from watching six or seven movies a week to… none. I had a serious movie-watching detox for several months, during which time I focused on my new job, read some books, appeared on Oprah, and did all those other sorts of things people do when they’re not watching movies. What film finally got my ass back in a theater chair months later? Twister. It was a good call for a re-entry back into the world of cinema.

Not because it was a great film — it’s fine! — or a classic film — it’s really not! — but because it was a “B+” sort of film, a summer entertainment that had lots of fun action, an occasional bit of better-than-average acting, cool state-of-the-art-at-the-time special effects, and some memorable scenes (“we got cows!”). It’s unapologetically a popcorn movie, with lots of butter and maybe, just maybe, a dash of fancy salt. It looked good on big screens, but it also looked good on small screens, where it was, famously, the first major studio film release in that revolutionary new format: The DVD.

The story is easy to follow, too. Weather scientist Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) is about to lead her seriously rag-tag team of University of Oklahoma grad students on a quest to map the interior of a tornado, when her soon-to-be ex-husband Bill (Bill Paxton), shows up in his new truck, with his new fiancée (Jami Gertz, taking on what used to be called the Ralph Bellamy role), with divorce papers for the apparently avoidant Jo to sign. But before that can happen, Bill gets rodeo-ed into helping Jo’s scrappy team of storm chasers do their science, and from there the tornadoes, and the stakes, keep getting bigger. It’s science!

Well, mostly. The screenplay was written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin (then husband and wife), and has a lot of Crichton’s special blend of “science until science gets in the way of drama” (see: Jurassic Park, Congo, Coma, etc). It all feels kinda plausible if you don’t know much about meteorology, which is, honestly, nearly all of us. Crichton has Jo’s scrappy band of poor grad students go up against another team of storm chasers, led by an oily Cary Elwes, who have corporate backing and are just storm chasing for the money, although how there’s big money in storm chasing is never really explained (the nearly 30-years-later sequel, Twisters, explains how: By having the storm chasers be online influencer types. That avenue was not open to Mr. Elwes’ character. AOL was not that good). Nevertheless it’s enough for a second-order conflict.

The first order conflict is Jo versus the twisters; they are not just her academic interest but also her white whale, for reasons that are essayed in the first few moments of the film. The film never sells this point especially well — it’s more interested in doing a “will they or won’t they” bit of push and pull between Jo and Bill (you don’t really have to wonder how this is going to go, I already explained to you why poor Jaime Gertz is in this movie) — but it does give the film an excuse to keep putting Jo and Bill in situations involving strong winds that normal not-obsessed people would actively avoid.

Of course, if Jo and Bill avoided tornados, we wouldn’t have much of a movie. So in they go, and the good news for them (and us) was CGI in 1996 was just barely at the point where it could make twisters, and all the damage they do, look real, and really terrifying, onscreen (that and the absolutely monster sound design, which is often overlooked as a special effect but which really is key here. Both the VFX and the sound were nominated for Oscars). The twister effects are good enough that they still stand up pretty well three decades later. It’s not every bit of mid-90s CGI that doesn’t distract today’s viewer.

Speaking of special effects, this movie is weirdly overweighted with actors who went on to awards glory. Helen Hunt you probably know won an Oscar a couple of years later, but then, out there in Jo’s motley crew of grad students, is not only future Best Actor Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman but also Todd Field, who as a director, producer and screenwriter has been nominated for the Oscar six times. Jeremy Davies has a primetime Emmy for acting, Alan Ruck and Jami Gertz have Emmy nominations. So did Bill Paxton, God rest his soul. This is movie is friggin’ stacked, and nearly everyone in the film is just being kind of a goofball. It’s lovely, really.

(This movie was also the high water mark for director Jan De Bont, who did Speed before this movie, and then, rather disastrously, Speed 2 right after it. He was also the cinematographer of some notable action films, including Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October and Basic Instinct. I mean, Speed 2, we all make mistakes, but otherwise, a pretty nifty career.)

There’s nothing in Twister that will change anyone’s life, but as a movie you can just put on and dip in and out of while you’re setting up the Christmas tree or wrapping gifts or keeping one eye on Instagram or, I don’t know, polishing your silverware, it’s hard to beat. I put it on when I’m signing signature sheets for books. When you’re signing these sheets you want to be distracted enough that you’re not bored by the repetitive activity, but not so distracted that you mess up the pages. Twister is perfect for this. I can sign my name a thousand times, easy, with Jo and Bill getting buffeted by high winds pleasantly at the edge of my consciousness. This may or may not qualify as high praise to you, but trust me, I appreciate it.

Also, the film’s soundtrack has one of Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen’s best and most slept-upon songs:

Don’t look at me like that. I said what I said.

In any event: Twisters was a fun, no-pressure return to movies for me in ’96, and a fun, no-pressure movie to enjoy on the regular since then. It’s the very definition of a comfort watch. On this side of the screen. On their side, it’s a little windy. That’s a them problem.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/14/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-fourteen-twister/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58679