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The December Comfort Watches, Day Thirty One: The Princess Bride

Posted on December 31, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      45 Comments

The Princess Bride is possibly the ultimate in comfort watches, so much so that even the framing device of the film is about the story being beloved and comfortable — it’s the story a loving grandfather tells his (slightly) ill grandson, even if the grandson would rather play his video game instead. But the grandfather will not be denied. Nor will the story of The Princess Bride.

By now, you know the set-up: The lovely Buttercup (Robin Wright, her first starring role) loves the farm boy Westley (Cary Elwes), but after his ship is lost at sea, she is unwillingly betrothed to the oily Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon). Just before the wedding she is kidnapped by a trio of travelers, who are in turn bested by an interloper, who rescues Buttercup. Who is the interloper? Why was Buttercup kidnapped? Will she and Westley ever be reunited? Also, this is a kissing story? All will be revealed, with some commentary by both the grandfather (Peter Falk) and the grandson (Fred Savage).

The Princess Bride is now such an institution that it’s arguably churlish to point out that when it was released, it was only a modest success at best: It made not quite $31 million at the box office, off of a $16 million budget, and while the reviews were generally good, there was nothing to suggest that it would become one of the most beloved films of all time. I can speak to this myself: I saw The Princess Bride the weekend it came out, in a theater that was not, shall we say, immensely packed. I liked it! I thought it was sweet and some parts were clever, and I didn’t mind that it was a kissing movie. But when I left the theater, I didn’t think to myself that I’d just seen a film that was destined to become a classic.

The magic, as the grandfather knew, lay in the retelling. The Princess Bride is a story and a film that rewards being told and seen over and over — the clever lines become punchier, the action scenes become more impressive, the grief of Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) over the loss of his father becomes deeper. Everything that was initially slight and pleasant takes on contours and depth.

Some of that really is because the film is a time-bomb of cleverness. It was written by William Goldman (an adaptation of his novel of the same name), who was one of Hollywood’s most apt screenwriters. He wrote it in such a way that it could age well, and that the action and events and the one-liners would, with each viewing, become more textured rather than more threadbare. This is a hugely impressive trick if you can manage it, and if you think you can manage it, okay, try it.

But some of that longevity is because of a different kind of magic. Here is a story that changes depending on where you are in life. When you are a child, it’s a story of action and adventure, with pirates and sword fights and Rodents of Unusual Size (they do exist!). When you are a young person, it’s now a story of romance and longing, of two people fighting for their true and perfect love. When you are older, it’s a story about loss and the struggle to define yourself once everything you’ve worked toward has happened. When you’re older still, you think, why, how clever this story is, to have so much of life in it, I never noticed before.

This is the true power of The Princess Bride. The story it tells is not important. The way the story’s told is. It’s told by Goldman and director Rob Reiner in a manner that lets the viewer’s own life experience reverberate through it. You will (probably) not rescue a princess from kidnappers, but you will, if you’re lucky, experience the rush of love, and how sometimes that love can rescue a life from the sadness it would otherwise have. You will (probably) not attempt to avenge the loss of a loved one with a sword. But you might find your own way to expiate the weight of that sort of crushing loss in your own life. You will (probably) not come back from being mostly dead, but it’s possible that at some point in your life you will find your way back from a tragedy that would have defined you, if you had given up and let it.

And so on. It’s all there. The Princess Bride stays the same. You change. What you get out of the film is little bit different, each time.

It helps that The Princess Bride is unabashedly guileless. This film plays to its audience — widely! Broadly! With vaudeville patter and razz-ma-tazz! — but it never winks at it. The romance is played deep, the action full bore, the emotions big and wide. Don’t get me wrong, I love my sarcasm and meta and knowing asides. I may have even built a writing career on them. That’s not the play here, however.

What is the play here is “more than meets the eye.” You have a damsel in distress who insists on being a prime mover in her own story. You have a pirate with a secret identity. You have a swordsman with a deep inner pain. You have a giant (Andre the giant!) whose heart is possibly the purest of them all. Even the villains have their unexpected sides — a love of science and a sneaking undercurrent of self-knowledge, respectively — that round them out. This is a thing that I think other films that have tried over the years to match the whimsy of The Princess Bride have missed. Everyone in the film has their assigned role, but they have more than just their assigned role. It makes a difference in how the story plays out, and how the characters stick with us.

And, of course, what The Princess Bride is about, is love. Romantic love. Familial love. The love in friendship. Which — again! — is what allows the life of the viewer to reverberate through the story. We have all, hopefully, been or will be, a person experiencing each type of love the film has to offer. It’s why the most emotionally fulfilling moment is not the film’s final kiss, as monumental as it might be, but the words that pass between the grandfather and grandson just before the credits roll.

(Is there something about The Princess Bride you don’t like, I hear you ask? Yes: The score, by Mark Knopfler, is thin and unimpressive. There, I said it. I regret nothing.)

I think Rob Reiner and William Goldman and the other folks working on The Princess Bride understood that the real measure of the film would not be the initial box office, but the afterlife on home video and on cable television, and now on streaming. But I suspect that even they did not know what a phenomenon the film would eventually become. As William Goldman himself once so famously said about Hollywood, no one knows anything — the movies you think can’t miss become turkeys, the ones you think are going to sink become smashes, and the films that at first seem pleasant and slight go on to become cultural touchstones, quoted and loved for decades, watched and rewatched and passed along the generations. In each case, it’s fate, and it’s out of your hands. Sometimes you get lucky. Quippy one-liners help.

And with that, we’ve come to the end of the December Comfort Watches. If you’ve been reading along from the beginning, or popping in for the first time, or somewhere in-between, thanks for sitting on this metaphorical couch with me. I had a lovely time writing these posts, and hopefully you had a lovely time reading them. I hope you found some movies worth watching.

And now, off we go into 2024. May it be a good year for us all.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day Thirty: Pride and Prejudice

Posted on December 30, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      31 Comments

Because I am a shallow and terrible person of poor breeding and low station, I am not much for the written works of Jane Austen. To be clear, I am not singling out just Jane Austen here; most of 19th century English language literature is a rough ride for me because it jars my brain. The words are the same but the sentences and paragraphs don’t hang together right for me, and it’s not really until the 1920s that language usage snaps into a form I can flow through, instead of feeling it chug in my head. This is, I assure you, a me problem. Neither Austen nor any of the rest of the 19th Century English language literary world needed to take my preferences into account, not least because I would not even exist until well into the second half of the 20th Century. Austen was a fantastic writer. Just not so much for me.

Filmed versions of Austen’s work (and the occasional attendant current-day riff off of it) do turn out to be for me, however. Part of that has to do with the stories having to necessarily be adapted to more modern audiences, which include me, to be successful and palatable. Part of it is that I find the era of which Austen writes to be fascinating — far enough away to be another world, close enough that the concerns of that world still echo through ours. Part of it is that, my prejudices concerning sentence structure aside, Austen was a magnificent storyteller, delving into women’s lives and the issues of class and wealth and how precarious the position of her characters were in relation to all of that.

Another part of it is that, for whatever reasons, Austen attracts really interesting filmmakers to her. The filmed versions of her works tend to be smart and sharp. My own introduction to Austen on film came in 1995, with the contrasty one-two punch of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (based, loosely, on Emma), and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, the script for which was written by Emma Thompson. One was modern-day and one was a period piece, and both worked exceedingly well, in very different ways. Thompson walked off with a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for her work, and in her acceptance speech joked about going to Austen’s grave and telling her ghostly collaborator about the box office grosses from around the world. 1995 also saw a film adaption of Persuasion, and an extremely popular TV miniseries of Pride and Prejudice, which launched Colin Firth, wet and heaving, into the bosoms of Austenites everywhere.

That last one presented an issue for 2005’s version of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright in his theatrical debut. The miniseries, which in addition to Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy also starred Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet, was so beloved that another assay of the novel was, as I understand it, something tantamount to heresy. This was made more so by Wright’s choice to move the era of events back twenty years or so into the late 18th Century, to trim the story considerably to focus on the love story of Elizabeth and Darcy, deviating from it only when doing so would illuminate their fraught relationship, and to (relatively) impoverish the Bennets so as to make their situation in the film more obviously precarious. Choices, as they say, were made, not all of them popular.

Those choices, however, endear this version to me. Joe Wright (and screenwriter Deborah Moggach, with an uncredited assist from Emma Thompson) was correct to treat Austen’s work as a living document, and not one set in stone, from which one deviates at one’s own peril. This version of Pride and Prejudice vibrates with life. Its world is lived in, and its characters are people you could know in your own life, although, probably, not with such nice houses.

The story, if you don’t know: The Bennets, country gentry implied to be on the lowest rung of polite society, have a problem, in that they have five daughters, no sons, and a need to marry off the girls to suitable men before their house is inherited by a distant relation purely because he’s man. Eligible and very rich bachelor Mr. Bingley arrives in the neighborhood, and suddenly there’s a ball, where he’s introduced to everyone, including the Bennett daughters. Also at the ball: Bingley’s diffident friend Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfayden), who rubs young Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightly) the wrong way when she hears him casually dismiss her, and indeed, most of the county. She resolves to have nothing to do with that annoying Mr. Darcy.

Of course, she will have quite a lot to do with Mr. Darcy through the course of the story, as the two headstrong leads find themselves in the same room over and over, and their friends, families and circumstances intertwine. Darcy takes a fancy to Elizabeth, and why wouldn’t he, but she is not impressed, either with his riches, which are even more considerable than Mr. Bingley’s, or what she sees as his interference with Bingley’s potential courtship of her sister Jane. It will take a few more crises, and re-evaluations, before Elizabeth and Darcy learn to overcome their pride and their prejudices, and yes, I see what I did there, and I’m not sorry.

So much of the success of this film rides on the interaction of the two leads, and Joe Wright got lucky with the leads he has. Knightly’s Elizabeth is the late 18th Century version of a tomboy, in love with the countryside, fiercely loyal to and protective of her family, forthright and glowing from the inside with the sort of intelligence that sees everything, tries to understand it all, and is not inclined to settle for less than what is fair and right. You can see why Darcy falls for her, and also, why Elizabeth at least initially decides he, regardless of his wealth and station, does not match up.

Which brings us to Macfayden’s Darcy, who is an interesting puzzle. He’s awkward and abrupt in a manner that feels to me almost spectrum-y; he’s either feeling nothing (except irritation), or he’s feeling everything, in a way that’s overwhelming, and which he clearly doesn’t understand why it isn’t immediately acquiesced to by Elizabeth. His Darcy doesn’t know how to people, basically, or at least, not on the terms that include other people’s interests and considerations above his own. And why should he? He’s rich as hell (when Elizabeth Bennet first sees his house, her reaction is to laugh at its absurd scale) and people are more than willing to bend around him — this behavior, alas, has not changed much from Austen’s time to today.

Darcy’s confused by Elizabeth, who is not impressed with him, or by his estate. Perhaps the most pleasant fiction Austen weaves is the idea that someone of Darcy’s circumstance can or will overhaul his view of the world to accommodate someone like Elizabeth (whose own required overhaul in perspective, while necessary for the story, is exponentially smaller). But I suppose love makes all of us do remarkable things, in fiction at least. In Wright’s telling of the tale, and with these actors, both Darcy and Elizabeth’s butting of heads, and meeting of minds, feels merited and earned.

Wright and this film also do a magnificent job of sketching out all of the characters, especially the Bennet sisters, not just by giving them dialogue, but by putting them in rooms with people and then letting them be who they are. This is how we learn Jane Bennet (Rosamund Pike) is kind, Lydia (Jenna Malone) and Kitty (Carey Mulligan) are flighty and irrepressible, and Mary (Talulah Riley) would rather be at home with a book. Mr. Bingley’s sister Caroline (Kelly Reilly) gets a huge amount of mileage from withering stares, while Mr. Bennet (Donald Sutherland) gets an equal amount of mileage from tolerant smiles.

Wright films all of this with an eye that does not discount the mud over the pomp; Wright referred to this a “dirty hem” film because the Bennet’s country life would have a lot of those. This does not mean Wright choses naturalism over all. One of the most striking scenes has Darcy and Elizabeth dancing in a crowded room and then, with a word, everything else falls away but the two of them. Wright knows what he’s doing when he does that, just as he knows what he’s doing when, after Darcy helps Elizabeth into a carriage, the director focuses the next shot on Darcy’s hand. The focus and intentionality of Wright’s directorial eye is never in doubt here, and is one of the reasons I prefer this version over others.

This is not to run down the beloved-by-many 1995 miniseries version of this story. This 2005 version is not better, it simply has differing aims and choices, not the least is to fit this story in two hours instead of the miniseries’ six. Those aims and choices comport better to what I want to watch, and how much time I want to devote to it. This version of the story is, for me, complete, and magical, and one I immerse myself in whenever I want a romance on a grand scale.

I’d like to think Jane Austen would understand the choices made to her story here. Maybe we could get Emma Thompson to explain them to her.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day Twenty Nine: The Nice Guys

Posted on December 29, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      17 Comments

Shane Black writes like cocaine feels. Nervy, twitchy, moving quick, with a lot of words coming out at once, which while entertaining, may or may not be directly relevant to the discussion at hand. He also writes about the sort of scenarios where cocaine (at the very least) might be involved: cops, killers, pornstars and sleazebags, all doing their various sordid things, usually in LA. I’m not saying Shane Black knows cocaine. I am saying Shane Black understands cocaine. It comes out on his pages, and in his movies.

(Shane Black would say Shane Black knows cocaine, but not anymore. Good for him.)

The Nice Guys is Shane Black at his Shane Blackest: It literally begins with a porn star’s car crashing through a house in 1977 Los Angeles, where the smog is so bad you can see it at night. This feels random, but it’s not: The plot of the film involves the porn industry and the automotive industry, and a very weird way in which the two are going to intersect, involving an element that makes sense only in the 1970s.

Into this scenario Shane injects the two “nice guys” of the title. There’s Holland Marsh (Ryan Gosling, sporting a very 70s ‘stache), a rather-less-than-reputable private investigator who is not above taking money from old ladies looking for their missing nieces, and then stringing along the investigation in order to get more money. There’s also Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), who basically beats people up for cash, which he’s not especially proud of, but, look, it’s the 1970s and a gig is a gig. By now you understand that “nice guys” is meant ironically here. And yet: these are our heroes. Again, it’s 1970s LA. You take what you can get.

The two of them connect when, in kind of the opposite of a meet cute, Healy roughs up Marsh as a warning to stay away from one of Healy’s clients. He’s professional about it, he’s not taking any particular pleasure in it, but rough him up he does. It’s as amusing as a meet cute should be, just, you know, more painful. The problem is, after their meet rough, it becomes clear that there’s more going on with the missing niece and Healy’s client than either of them thought, and that “more” might get one or both of them killed. As much for their own protection as anything else, they form a reluctant team to get to the bottom of things. This will lead them to porn star parties, airport hotels and automotive shows, where clues, and bodies, keep piling up.

I’m not going to explain the plot further because while there is a mystery to solve, it’s held together by baling wire and gum, and not really what you’re here for. You’re here for Marsh and Healy, the itchy P.I. and the laconic muscle, go from enemies to frenemies to friends. This sort of “chalk-and-cheese” pairing is a thing Shane Black knows and does well, most notably in the original Lethal Weapon movie, and again in The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight and, my favorite, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Of all these combos, The Nice Guys is arguably the one that works the best, possibly because Healy and Marsh are both already on the bottom rung of things. This isn’t Good Cop, Bad Cop, or Competent and Comedy Relief, this is Low-Rent Investigator and Privately Regretful Thug. They really are better together, but, at least initially, it’s not clear how much of an upgrade that really is.

Marsh and Healy are perfectly cast. Gosling has never had a problem channeling his inner twerp (see: Ken in Barbie), but he’s never done it better than he’s doing it here. His Marsh is paper-thin bravado and gallons of flop sweat, and the sure knowledge that he’s hanging on to everything, including his sanity, by his fingernails. Crowe’s Healy, on the other hand, knows who he is and how he got to his station in life, and is, if not resigned to it, at least understanding of the predicament. Crowe’s secret weapon is that he’s capable of making you believe that his characters have an interior life; his Healy has that, even if he doesn’t like it much.

I dig The Nice Guys for the characters, but I also dig it for the vibe. As someone who was a kid in the Los Angeles basin in the 1970s, this movie does a pretty good job of nailing the look and feel of the less-than-glamorous side of that time and place (disclaimer: I was not going to porn star parties in 1977. I was eight at the time). It’s made even more impressive for the fact that outside a few exterior shots, this film was mostly made in Atlanta. Movie magic! It’s a thing. I’m happier with the LA as it exists now, I will note, if for no other reason than you can actually see the mountains most days. That’s a definite upgrade. Still, when I want a nostalgia hit, this film does the trick.

I see The Nice Guys as being possibly the most divisive of my December Comfort Watch picks. The “Shane Black” type of film is one that has as many detractors as admirers — you have to want cocaine-speed dialogue — and because, in gleefully capturing the shady side of 70s LA, there’s more gratuitous nudity and murder than any other film in the series. I acknowledge this may not be the film to watch with your grandmother — although, you know what, today’s grandmas were in their teens and twenties in the 70s, so maybe nothing here is new to them. Maybe your grandma went to a 70s party or two. Maybe there are things about grandma you’re not ready to know! Clear it with her before putting it on, is what I’m saying.

But this series is about what I enjoy, and I enjoy this. I do dig the Shane Black of it all, the quips, the seedy characters, the down-on-their-luck vibe and the 70s sheen, and enjoy coming back to it now and then. It is a very specific sort of cinematic experience, and of that experience, there is none better.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day Twenty Eight: Return to Me

Posted on December 28, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      19 Comments

Return to Me may be the gentlest romantic comedy I have ever seen. There is not a single sharp edge to it, nor does it want one. This film delights in the coziness it’s created for itself. The movie has very little risk to it; at no time in the whole of the movie are you concerned that proposed sweethearts Bob and Grace are not going to find the happy ending this film intends for them. It’s not that kind of film. Its pleasures are low-key and slice of life. It’s slight, but that’s not a slight. It’s slight like a family gathering where you actually like all the cousins and uncles. Does anything happen at the gathering? Not really. But you’re glad you came and you’ll be glad when you can see them all again.

David Duchovny is Bob Rueland, who (in shades of Sleepless in Seattle) is a Chicago architect and widower, whose wife Elizabeth (Joely Richardson), a great apes zoologist, has died in a car accident. His life after her death is largely concerned with finishing the ape environment at the zoo that he promised her before she died. That is, until, on a night that he’s dragged out to dinner by his friend Charlie (David Alan Grier), he suddenly feels a spark with the waitress, Grace.

Why the spark? Well, for one thing, Grace is played by Minnie Driver, who is delightful. But there’s another reason the film wants to suggest for the spark. Grace was, for many years, quite ill due to a bad heart. But then suddenly a heart donor appeared and now Grace is thriving and feeling that spark with Bob. If at this point you have to be told whose heart it is that is now beating in Grace’s chest, and that feels that thrill at the sight of Bob, who feels that very same thrill, you are hopeless and we cannot be friends.

Not that Grace or Bob knows this at this point, of course. Organ donation is anonymous, although recipients may, via the organ donation bank, send a letter to the donor’s family after the fact, a thing which Grace does immediately before meeting Bob. She also declines to tell Bob that she’s a heart transplant recipient, because it’s not exactly first date material, and also because she’s sensitive about it, and a little awkward generally because she’s new to this whole dating and romance thing. Bob, who is enchanted by Grace and perfectly willing to go at her pace on all this, doesn’t press.

Will that letter resurface at an inopportune time? Will there be a small crisis? Will Bob and Grace nevertheless find their way to a happily ever after? Look, I am not spoiling anything here when I say you already know these answers. The joy of Return to Me is not the will-they-or-won’t-they of the romance. They absolutely will. The joy of the film is enjoying the company of these characters along the way.

And not just Bob and Grace. The film is stuffed with supporting characters who have known each other for years, who sit around tables and play penny-ante poker and debate which shortstop is the best of all time — and woe betide you if you attempt to mix the modern and deadball eras. These folks love and encourage the main characters and only want the best for them. There’s the crew at Grace’s restaurant, led by Carrol O’ Connor and Robert Loggia, there’s Grace’s best friend Megan (Bonnie Hunt, pulling double duty, as she’s also the film’s director and co-writer), her husband Joe (Jim Belushi) and their increasingly large brood of children. On Bob’s side there’s Charlie and his work crew at the Zoo. All of these characters feel lived-in, and established in the flow of the lead’s lives.

This community of characters is what’s really at the heart of Return to Me. Often it feels like Hunt has forgotten to tell her actors the camera is rolling, and they’re just sitting around riffing, waiting to be told to get back to work. The vibe is loose and familial, and the banter, while entertaining, doesn’t feel workshopped for maximum zinginess. No one’s trying to outclever someone else. No one’s reaching for the punchline. It’s just people in the flow of their day and life, watching two other very nice people that they love circling each other, and giving them an occasional nudge here and there, because, after all, who doesn’t want the people they love to be happy?

Return to Me is Bonnie Hunt’s one and only theatrical release as a director, a fact which I think comes down to numbers: This film was not a financial success. The very things I love about it — its familial charm, its old-fashionedness (the closest this movie comes to sex is a kiss on a neck), its resolute lack of tension — probably doomed it at the box office. It’s too bad. I would like to have lived in a universe where this film did well enough that Hunt was given other films to direct. I suspect they would play very similarly to this one. Yes, they’d be a little corny. But to quote The Holiday, another film in this December Comfort Watch series, “I like corny. I’m looking for corny in my life.”

In this universe, Return to Me is probably the most comforting of all the December Comfort Watches, and the one I’ll watch when I just want to see nice people fall in love, nicely, with all their nice friends cheering them on. It’s a hot-chocolate-and-Snuggie-on-the-couch sort of film. I’d like to hang out with all the folks in this movie at their next gathering of family and friends. I think they’d make me feel welcome, and I think they would be happy when I showed up to the next one.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day Twenty Seven: Pacific Rim

Posted on December 27, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      26 Comments

Here’s a fun fact: Pacific Rim is Guillermo del Toro’s rebound relationship. In the early 2010s, del Toro was meant to direct a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness for Universal Pictures, with James Cameron producing and Tom Cruise as the star. Madness had been a dream project of del Toro’s for most of his professional life, but, alas, it was not to be. It fell apart over budget and the fact del Toro, quite reasonably given the material, want to have it be an “R”-rated film, and Universal did not. The film got the ax on a Friday. Del Toro spent the weekend moping about it. On Monday he signed on to direct Pacific Rim.

We should all have such fruitful rebounds.

To be fair, del Toro was not parachuting into Pacific Rim sight unseen. He had been developing the film from a story treatment by screenwriter Travis Beacham, and was intending to be a producer on it, with someone else handling the directing part. He was always going to have a substantial role to play in the development of this film. Having watched the film several times, however, it’s hard to imagine anyone but del Toro directing this thing. This is a film in which one gets the distinct feeling that del Toro is just off-screen, cackling delightedly about what he’s getting away with.

The plot: The Earth is being invaded by monsters from another dimension! And to fight the monsters, humans make big damn robots! Piloted by humans with interconnected brains! Alas, the humans are not winning and we’re down to our last few big damn robots, all gathered in Hong Kong. The plan is to seal up the interdimensional portal that the monsters are coming out of with a nuclear explosion. The monsters are not down with this plan, and will happily destroy Hong Kong (for a start) to stop it.

There, that’s all you really need to know going in. Yes, there are bits about “drifting” with your mind to pilot the big damn robots (called Jaegers in the film), some interpersonal conflicts with the Jaeger pilots, Idris Elba being Idris Elba all over the damn place, and Ron Perlman showing up because he’s del Toro’s good luck charm, and why not. But let’s not kid ourselves: We are not here for the plot (sorry, Mr. Beacham). We are here to see monsters and robots just beat the holy crap out of each other, and, collaterally, Hong Kong (sorry, Hong Kong).

The film does not disappoint in this regard. The quality of the monster bashing here is absolutely top-notch, some of the best that has ever been filmed (or, more accurately, been number crunched in CGI). The monsters have weight and force, as do the Jaegers. They move more or less as they should under the laws of physics, with momentum and inertia playing a substantial role in how the battles play out. I hesitate at calling these giant battles “realistic,” and I would caution that the physics of these battles only go so far: Yes, the creatures and robots move like they have mass, but when one of the robots picks up a whole damn container ship and starts whacking a monster with it like it’s a cricket bat, that’s when physics has gone home to have tea and play with its dog.

But at that point you won’t care. Certainly I didn’t care. Trust me, as someone who has written his own story about Big Damn Monsters, I understand at some point you just have to wave off physics, and come up with something that’s reasonable-ish enough to let people just get on with the story. Guillermo del Toro is not sweating the square-cube law here. He’s assumed you’ve watched enough Godzilla films and Gundam anime over the years that you will just accept that skyscraper-sized monsters exist, and big damn robots are the logical way to fight them. You knew what you were getting into from the moment you saw this movie’s poster. Rare is the individual who bought a ticket for this film, plopped themselves down in their seat, and was disappointed that Pacific Rim was not a drawing room drama set against the background of the economic development of East Asia after the Second World War.

With that said, I am being slightly unfair to Messrs. Beacham and del Toro on a story level. There is a story here, and in fact there are several — most of the major characters in this film are on a redemption arc of some sort or another (not Ron Perlman’s character, however. He’s just there to be colorful). And those redemption arcs are perfectly fine! But del Toro, to his credit, understood that the redemption arcs are not the main course of this film. Robots Vs. Monsters is the main course, the soup course and the dessert. He apparently filmed substantially more of the human drama, and then sliced it down because it got in the way, leaving just enough of it to make things tolerably interesting when the monsters weren’t around. I respect the filmmaker who knows what his film is about, and how long he can keep his audience away from what they really came for.

Monster films have had a resurgence in recent years. After Pacific Rim we got a new Hollywood version of Godzilla and an attendant “monsterverse” which features King Kong and famous kaiju like Mothra and Ghidorah, and these films have ranged from pretty good (the 2014 Godzilla) to passably entertaining (most of the rest of them). Just this year there’s been a soft reboot of the Toho Studios Godzilla with Godzilla Minus One, which is arguably the best Godzilla movie since the very first (non-Americanized) version back in 1954. And Pacific Rim had its own sequel in 2018 — not directed by del Toro, who filmed with The Shape of Water instead. He came away with a couple of Oscars for his troubles, so probably the right choice there.

This monster-renaissance has been entertaining, but at the end of the day, of all these latter-day kaiju films, Pacific Rim is the one I come back to. It’s the one with joy in it, and the sense that del Toro can’t believe he’s getting away with making robots punch monsters. I can’t say that I’m glad del Toro wasn’t able to make At the Mountains of Madness — and still hasn’t! Despite two Oscars! — because that would have been awesome, and still would be one day. But I am glad that after a good solid sulk, del Toro decided to move on and make this. As rebounds go, this is one of the most glorious, or at least the most deliriously entertaining, in cinematic history.

— JS

The December Comfort Watches, Day Twenty Six: Sleepless in Seattle

Posted on December 26, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      14 Comments

It is late June 1993, and you are me, and you are about to go on the third date in two weeks with this impossibly out-of-your-league woman you’ve somehow managed to attract to yourself. You don’t know much of anything when it comes to romance (trust me on this one), but you know that the third date is kind of the “make or break” date for relationships. It’s the last date where you can go “you know, this is not really working for me” without things getting unduly awkward, and, alternately, the first date where you can go, “Hell yes, let’s do this thing” without things also getting awkward. You are 24 years old and you have not been in a relationship since college, and if this does not work out you are likely facing another depressingly long bout of not dating, possibly lasting until you are in the grave. Plus, this woman is, remember, impossibly out of your league. You will never once in your life do any better. You are extremely aware of this. You really, really, really, really need this third date to work.

Fortunately for you, you have an ace up your sleeve. Sleepless in Seattle is opening on the same day as your third date, and you know it’s going to be great. One, it has Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, two of the cutest film actors of the early 90s. Two, it has Nora Ephron as the film’s co-writer and director, and you have very positive feelings about how she handles romantic relationships in film. Three, you are a professional film critic and you’ve already seen the movie to review it, and you know it is perfect for your third date needs. The fix, as they say, is in, and thank God for that. You know yourself pretty well. You need all the help for this third date that you can get.

Sleepless in Seattle is a romantic comedy, and also, it is a film that knows it is a romantic comedy. The characters do not know they are in a romantic comedy, but they certainly know about how the movies treat love and romance: The film An Affair to Remember crops up over and over again, and the climactic scene of the movie both borrows from and subverts that film’s plot twist. The characters bring up the romances of movies, and of their stars. At one point a character says to another “You don’t want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.” The comment is a gentle criticism about how that character understands relationships, but it’s also a wink and a nod to what we already know: That this is a movie, and we, the audience, want the characters to ultimately fall in love, and fall in love like they do in movies. This movie will not disappoint on that front.

It almost could not fail to. Nora Ephron, the co-writer and director, was by this time no stranger to how people fall in love in the movies. One could say it was even in her blood: Ephron was the daughter of Oscar-nominated movie screenwriters Harry and Phoebe Ephron, who had written romantic comedies of their own, most notably (to modern viewers) The Desk Set, starring complicated Hollywood couple Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. By the time Sleepless came around, Ephron, who was also a journalist, essayist and novelist, had already written one of the biggest romantic comedies in the past decade, When Harry Met Sally… The romantic comedy was familiar territory to her. She understood its pleasures and pitfalls.

She also understood that romantic comedies work best when they’re not about perfect people. The film’s appointed lovebirds, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) and Annie Reed (Meg Ryan), are both a bit of a mess, in different ways. Sam is an architect widower with a young son, and believes the love that he had with his wife was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. He’s not opposed to dating, but he doesn’t expect lightning to strike twice. He’s charming but he’s also sort of cranky, not in a showy off-the-handle way, but in the way that makes you understand that his wife probably helped keep him in line, and that he appreciated someone who could do that for him, because he’s not as good at doing it himself.

For her part, Annie is flighty; apparently a good journalist but in her real life engaged to a solid, boring man (Bill Pullman, resolutely and sympathetically playing the part of the man who gets left) who promises a life of security and tissues up the nose whilst he sleeps because he’s allergic to everything. Annie didn’t have doubts about this life until one Christmas Eve she hears Sam on a radio relationship advice show; Sam’s son Jonah has called in to find Sam a new wife, and Sam is dragooned into being on the radio talking about his late spouse. Annie breaks down crying, becomes obsessed with his voice, and then, in a wanton misuse of newspaper resources that couldn’t happen today because no paper has these sort of resources anymore, goes out of her way to find out more about him. This includes actually flying to Seattle to see him (not meet him; just see him).

In real life, now or in 1993, this would have been stalker behavior; in real life of 2023, it also would have been unnecessary because Annie could have just taken to social media to learn everything she could possibly want to know about Sam Baldwin, architect. I don’t want to excuse this sort of behavior, because Hollywood has done us no great favors in selling the idea of obsessiveness as love. What I will say is that, in the milieu of a romantic comedy that knows it’s a romantic comedy, Annie is playing fair. She (like hundreds of other women) wrote Sam a letter, collected by the radio advice personality, and both Sam and Jonah liked what was there. Sam, of course, discounts all of the letters — he understands the stalkerish implications — and it’s Jonah who forces the issue by replying, opening a door that should otherwise remain shut. Again, Ephron knows her way around the territory.

Ultimately what Sleepless in Seattle knows is that two people can be better together than they might be alone. Sam is in danger of falling down the hole of his crankiness; Annie is in danger of letting her flightiness turn her life into a safe and weightless nothing. Annie needs Sam’s edge; Sam needs Annie’s optimism. They both need the grounding they could provide each other, Sam to come up from his hole, and Annie to keep from flying away. Will it actually work that way, once the two of them meet? We don’t know; Ephron, again with decades of experience in the form, ends the movie where most romantic comedies truly begin, with the meet cute. I would like to think they’re still out there, balancing each other out.

Nora Ephron is the heart of this movie, and there is no doubt about this, but she did have help. The movie started with screenwriter Jeff Arch, Oscar-winning writer David S. Ward added to it, and when Ephron came on board, in addition to adding bits herself she had her sister Delia, also an author and screenwriter, come in for an uncredited polish. And then of course there are Hanks and Ryan, who had been a movie couple before (Joe Versus the Volcano) and would be again five years later with You’ve Got Mail (also co-written and directed by Ephron). Hanks’ reputation is being the wholesome lead, but really, he’s best at being the guy who is just this far from being an asshole. Which we all are! Which is why we love him so! With Ryan, well. You have to be smart to play the ditz. The final scene of Sleepless lets Ryan have Annie be who she is, and hopefully gets to be moving forward.

Yes, yes, you say, but what happened with that third date?!? Well, again, you’re me. You take that impossibly wonderful woman to the movie, and she loves it, and in time, she loves you too. You propose to her some time later (in your newspaper column!), she says yes, you get married, and you live happily ever after for (checks watch) 28 and a half years so far.

About seven years into that happily ever after you learn that this impossibly wonderful woman came home from her first date with you and told her mother that she had met the man she was going to marry, so all your angst and worry about the success of that third date was entirely in your head; the fix was indeed in, but on her side, not yours. But taking her to Sleepless in Seattle certainly didn’t hurt your case, and in fact may have helped it.

I rewatch Sleepless in Seattle because it’s a romantic comedy, and a romantic comedy that knows it’s a romantic comedy, and because it’s a romantic comedy, that knows it’s a romantic comedy, that helped a guy who loves romantic comedies live a romantic comedy of his own. It’s part of my own happily every after, and always will be.

So, thanks, Nora Ephron. You did me a solid. You’re the best.

— JS