The People in the Computer Box

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/20/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-a-fish-called-wanda/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58812

I have thought a number of films have been riotously funny, but only A Fish Called Wanda made me laugh so hard that I was in very real danger of pissing myself right there in the movie theater. It was 1988, I went to see this movie with my friend Marty Glomski, and — to be fair — I did buy myself a soda to enjoy while I watched the film. Normally such a thing would not be a fraught action, but then there were scenes involving inept assassination attempts, and I ended up laughing so hard and so long that my bladder very nearly couldn’t take it any more. I swear to you I was two seconds from peeing my jeans. I wanted to stop laughing so I could stop spotting. I could not. It was mortifying, and delightful.

I cannot guarantee you will laugh as hard at A Fish Called Wanda. If you did, however, and you fell victim to laugh-related involuntary micturition, just know that you are not alone. There are probably legions of us. John Cleese should have invested in adult diapers before writing this film.

The story of how A Fish Called Wanda came to be is interesting in itself. Back in the 1970s and 80s, when John Cleese wasn’t busy with Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, he had co-founded a company called Video Arts, which created training videos for corporate clients (they were allegedly funny corporate training videos. I’ve not seen any, I can’t say). One of the directors for these corporate videos was Charles Crichton. Having Crichton directing corporate training videos was a little like having Scotty Pippen on your basketball team at the Y. In a past life, he directed films at Ealing Studios, including the Academy Award-winning The Lavender Hill Mob, generally regarded as one of the best British comedies of all time.

What was Crichton doing making training films? Well, look, folks, show business is a tough gig. You’re on top one day and the next you’re trying to spice up a video on how to file reports.

That said, John Cleese was certainly aware who he had on staff, and eventually he and Crichton started scheduling time to think up a comedy crime caper, which would eventually become A Fish Called Wanda. The plan was for Cleese to star and Crichton to direct. One catch: When the film was being pitched, Crichton was well into his middle 70s, which worried the money guys. In order to get the film made, Cleese agreed to be co-director. What did that mean for Cleese? Apparently not much! Cleese was open about not having any experience in feature film directing. He was basically there if Crichton keeled over during filming.

Crichton did not keel over. In fact, for the film Crichton (and only Crichton, not Cleese) was nominated for an Academy Award for best director. Don’t feel too bad for Cleese, he got nominated (along with Crichton) for an Oscar in the screenwriting category. Having landed on top again after years in the corporate training video wilderness, Crichton promptly retired and spent the rest of his life fishing. Good for him.

Plotwise, Wanda is a tale of heists and con-men and women, crosses and double-crosses and one barrister who somewhat befuddledly finds himself in the middle of it all. That could be Cleese’s character, Archibald Leach (film fans will recognize this name, and if you don’t, look it up), a bland tall legal type whose life is lower-wealthy-class boredom. That is, until he meets Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is not a fish, but is an associate of George Thomason, Archie’s client, who has been recently accused of a bank robbery involving quite a lot of diamonds. Wanda enchants Archie, because she is smart and looks exactly like Jamie Lee Curtis at her hottest. But, I think it should be obvious, Wanda has something on her mind other than climbing Cleese.

That’s enough of the plot. You just need to know that the people involved in the heist are all trying to screw each other, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally. There is no honor among thieves, which is not great for any of them but is fabulous for us, because Cleese and Crichton, as screenwriters, put absolutely fantastic words into their mouths, and make them to grand and ridiculous things. For a movie that at least initially comes off as a small and maybe kinda square bit of British japery, things get weird fast.

A lot of that weirdness comes in the form of Otto, played by Kevin Klein in a bit of ego annihilation so complete that he won an Oscar for it. When I say ego annihilation, I mean no one who was concerned about their ego in any way could have played Otto as he did, as the ugliest of all possible ugly Americans and the platonic ideal of Dunning-Kruger. The first time I saw this performance, I just thought it was funny; in subsequent watches it becomes obvious just how much good work Kline is doing here. The scene where Wanda chews him out for messing up her assignation with Archie is a masterclass of facial acting. His words in the scene are good. What his face is doing got him that statuette.

Be assured, however, that Kevin Kline is not the only one engaging in ego annihilation here. None of the principals, who aside from Cleese, Curtis and Kline also includes Michael Palin, get out of this film with their dignity intact. Short of Melissa McCarthy shitting in a sink, I’m not sure another film has put so many of their actors through the wringer for a pile of laughs. It’s not about gross-out comedy (speaking of that McCarthy scene), it’s about the humiliation of their characters, unstiffening that stiff upper lip, in the case of Cleese’s character especially.

Which — confession time — is not the kind of humor I usually like! Cringe humor (the kind of humor that makes you cringe in sympathy for the embarrassment the characters are going through, not the kind of humor that is eye-rollingly corny) is actually one of my least favorite forms of humor. I think my sympathetic response for people making fools of themselves is too strong for me to enjoy the comedy of it. It mostly just makes me want to leave the room until the embarrassing parts are over. Not here, though, and I think it’s both the skill of the writing from Cleese and Crichton, and actual abandon to which the actors give themselves, that simply overrides my desire to curl up into a ball at their misfortunes. Wanda isn’t exactly farce but it’s near enough to it that, for me, at least, it’s inoculated against cringe.

Wanda remains one of the funniest films of all time, but it’s okay to note that 80s films are gonna 80s, and this film does that. The plot line about a character’s stutter was at the time and now continues to be the least successful attempt at humor in the film, and there’s a bit that Otto does that straddles the line for casual homophobia. Also, truly, if animal endangerment bothers you, go ahead and skip this one. You won’t be happy, even if I find at least one of those scenes one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a theater. What can I say, I’m a terrible human.

I keep coming back to why it was this film made me almost pee myself in public. I think it comes down to the simple fact that very little about this film was what I had expected when I sat down to watch it. I figured it was going to be funny; after all it had a third of Monty Python in it. But I think I went in expecting to chuckle. This wasn’t Monty Python, it was by all indications just a standard issue mid-80s comedy, and again the first several minutes of the film gave the impression that was where things were going.

But then. And then. And then after that. It kept laughing in the face of my expectations, and I kept laughing in surprise. I just did not see it coming.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/20/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-a-fish-called-wanda/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58812

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/20/two-homes-for-christmas-which-is-to-say-two-different-versions-of-the-same-christmas-song/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58807

I felt like trying my hand at a Christmas song, so I did “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” which was a big hit for Bing Crosby. First I did a pretty traditional version, and when I was done, I thought, why not mess with it a little? So I did a second version, with trap drums and lots of bass.

Here’s the traditional version:

And here’s the NOT traditional version:

I hope you enjoy one or both!

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/20/two-homes-for-christmas-which-is-to-say-two-different-versions-of-the-same-christmas-song/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58807

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/19/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-nineteen-the-big-short/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58795

There was, to be clear, nothing very comforting at all about the 2008 global economic crisis. It was a deeply messed-up time, and even if one was not in danger of losing one’s home in the mess, the reverberations of the collapse of the US housing market echoed through people’s lives in strange and unexpected ways. In my own, there is a line of dominos that goes from the collapse of the housing market to me walking away from a contract for a five-book YA series in early 2009. I was pissed about that, I want you to know. But I assure you that what I experiences was a glancing blow compared to the very real hits lots of other people took. People lost houses. People lost jobs. People’s lives were ruined. And, apparently, no one saw any of this coming.

No, one, that is, but a few finance dudes who, in the mid-2000s, looked at how mortgage-backed securities were being put together by banks and financial companies, realized they were a time bomb waiting to happen, and did what finance dudes do — figured out a way to make a shitload of money when the timebomb went off. These men (and they were all men) were not heroes or good guys. They made money when everyone else had the ground beneath their feet crumble into dust. They did by betting on the misfortunes of others. But no matter what else happened, they did see it coming when no one else could see it, or, more to the point, wanted to see it.

The Big Short is based on the book of the same name by financial journalist Michael Lewis, who, it must be said, has had enviable success in getting his books turned into films; aside from this, his books Moneyball and The Blind Side found their way to the big screen as well. Those books had an approachable hook in that they were about sports as much as they were about money, and everyone (in the US, at least) knows about baseball and football. For The Big Short, the question was: was there actually an audience for a movie about mortgage-backed securities? And how would you find that audience if there were?

Director Adam McKay, who previous to this movie was best known for a series of funny-but-not-precisely-sophisticated films with Will Ferrell, including Anchorman and Step-Brothers, had a two-step solution for the problem of making trading interesting. First, he absolutely packed the film with big names: Brad Pitt. Steve Carell. Christian Bale. Ryan Gosling. That’s a pretty stacked cast right there. Second, any time he had to explain an abstruse financial concept, he gleefully broke the fourth wall and had some other incredibly famous people tell you what the concept was, in a way that didn’t sound like a bunch of boring exposition. So: Anthony Bourdain using fish soup to explain collateral debt organization, Selena Gomez making bets in Las Vegas to elucidate credit default swaps, and, most memorably, Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, explaining how mortgage-backed securities worked in the first place.

Yes! It’s a gimmick! But it’s a gimmick that works to give everybody watching the information they need to know to keep watching and understanding what happens next. McKay has the characters in the main story break the fourth wall every now and again as well, to let the audience know when the story on the screen deviates from what happened in real life, or, in the case of Ryan Gosling, to act as the narrator for the story. This could be obnoxious but it mostly works, largely because the story being told is, actually, gripping.

Why? Because it’s about the end of the world, economically speaking — a financial collapse so big that the only other economic collapse in living memory to compare it to was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Financial folks were taking mortgages, the unsexiest and presumably most stable of financial instruments, and finding new and ever-more-risky ways to repackage them as investment properties, aided by greed and a regulatory system that either didn’t know how to evaluate these risky securities, or, equally likely, simply didn’t care to look. By the time we enter the picture, a few years before the collapse, the downsides are there if someone wanted to look.

The people who looked were Michael Burry (Bale), a clearly autistic nerd running a hedge fund who pored through the numbers and saw the inevitable; Jared Vennett (Gosling), one of the first bankers to look at Burry’s numbers and figure he was right; and Mark Baum (Carrell), who takes a meeting with Vennett, hears his pitch about the collapse, and decides to see how far down this mortgage-backed securities hole goes. Later on we meet Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley (John Magaro and Finn Witrock) two small-fry fund managers who stumble upon Vennett’s pitch and then recruit Ben Rickert (Pitt) to get them the access they need to make their own short bets. All of these folks with the exception of Vennett are total outsiders, and when all of them come around to buy their shorts, every bank and financial firm is happy to take their money, because they think they are fools.

The thing is, none of these people were just working on a hunch. Burry looked deep into the numbers, while Baum had his people go down to places like Florida, where extremely risky mortgages were being written up, specifically so they could be shoved into, and hidden by, these securities that were allegedly low-risk investment opportunities. These scenes in the movie, where exotic dancers own five homes and are unaware how much risk they’ve exposed themselves to, renters are shocked to find their landlords aren’t keeping up with their mortgage payments, and mortgage underwriters simply do not give a shit who they give a loan to, are like a punch in the face. We see what Baum and his people see: all these people are screwed and there’s no way out of an economic slide into the abyss.

Mind you, not everyone understands it in the same way. When Geller and Shipley manage to wrangle a series of shorts on some exceptionally risky loans, they start dancing and pumping their fists thinking about their little victory — until Ricket makes it extremely clear to them what the cost of their being right is going to be. What? Consequences? Yes. Consequences.

We all know how this ends: The housing bubble collapses, century-old banks go under, foreclosures shoot through the roof, and the Great Recession misses becoming the Second Great Depression only by the smallest of margins. There is wreckage, and all of the main characters in this movie get their payday, although in some cases, it’s a near thing indeed. They get what they wanted, and not a single one of them is happy about it.

Damn it, Scalzi! I hear you say. This movie is depressing as hell! How can you say it’s a comfort movie? Because ultimately it’s about smart people doing smart things. These people don’t get where they end up in the movie because they’re lucky, they get where they end up because they of all people are willing to actually pay attention to what’s directly in front of them. They’re not just going with the flow; they understand the flow is actually an undertow, and it’s going to take everything down with it. And because no one else in the world wants to or is willing to see, then they’re going to do what’s available to them: Make some money off it.

Again: This does not make them good people. It makes them opportunists. Baum, at the very least, seems to be appalled by it all, not that the opportunity exists, but that it exists because other people can’t see the disaster they’re helping to make. He seems genuinely angry that people really are just this stupid. He still shoves his chips onto “collapse,” like everyone else in this film.

Here is the film’s implicit question: Even if any of these guys had screamed to high heaven about the risk of collapse, who would have listened? They weren’t going to do that — these are not those guys — but if they did, would it have mattered? The banks and the regulators and the financial gurus were all on board for everything being great. And there were Cassandras, people who pointed out that these securities were primed to explode, and just like the actual Cassandra, no one listened. If you could yell at the top of your lungs and still no one would give a shit, what’s left? As an investor, either find some part of the market that’s going to weather a global collapse, or short the crap out of it and fiddle while everything burns. We know what these guys did. What would you do?

The Big Short changed the career of Adam McKay, who walked away from this film with an Oscar for screenwriting and a license to make movies that aren’t just goofy (his films in the aftermath of this one: Vice, about Dick Cheney, and Don’t Look Up, about the actual end of the world). Good for him. I would like to say this movie also served as a warning about the dangers of blind and heedless capitalism, but look at the AI Bubble, where seven tech companies, all besotted by “AI,” are 40% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, and are sucking the US dry of energy and water. The look at the current state of the housing market in the US, where in most states buying a home is unaffordable on the average income, and tell me what we’ve learned. The tell me whether the people running the country right now are equipped to handle the collapse when it happens, or will just try to short it themselves.

This movie isn’t a comfort movie because it has good people or a happy ending. It’s a comfort movie for one reason: Some people actually can see what is going to happen before it all goes off the rails. It’s comforting to know that in this, one is not alone.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/19/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-nineteen-the-big-short/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58795

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/18/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-eighteen-starship-troopers/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58786

If you should ever want to wind up an old-school Robert Heinlein fan — which, by the way, you shouldn’t do, they’re all clocking seventy-plus years now, and you should respect your elders — tell them you enjoy the movie version of Starship Troopers more than the Heinlein novel on which it was (somewhat loosely) based. Then move fast, because if you don’t, you’re gonna get whacked upside the head with a cane. Those OG Heinlein fans may be older now, but they’re spry, and if there is one heresy remaining for them, a preference for the film over the novel would be it.

And in many respects they are not wrong. The movie version of Starship Troopers wasn’t originally based (directly) on the novel; screenwriter Ed Neumeier wrote up a sci-fi action movie treatment called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7 that did not reference the novel at all. It was only later in the development process that Neumeier and producer Jon Davidson learned the rights to the novel were available and optioned them, and started grafting elements of Heinlein’s tale onto the spine of Outpost 7. Add in director Paul Verhoeven, who legend has it couldn’t even get through the novel but knew he wanted to satirize fascism in the film, and you end up a final cinematic product that is to Heinlein’s novel like grape soda is to an actual grape.

As it turns out, however, a lot of people like the taste of grape soda. I happen to be one of them.

Nor do I think it’s a particular heresy to enjoy the movie, even if one prefers the novel. Very few movies adapted from novels are scrupulously faithful to their source material, and the few that are, are usually weirdly paced and unwieldly (looking at you, Watchmen, and even that changed the ending). The things that make for a great novel are not often the things that make for a great cinematic experience, and vice-versa, as some of the greatest films in history are made from mediocre books (looking at you, The Godfather).

Whenever I mention to people that my novel Old Man’s War is under option, there’s someone who inevitably tells me, I hope they keep it true to the novel. I can assure you they probably will not. As just one example, at one point Chris Hemsworth was attached to star in the movie. Do you think they would pay Hemsworth $20 million (or whatever) to be in the movie, and then paint him green, to match the description of his character in the novel? I do not. Nor do I think a star on the level of Hemsworth would have wanted to be that color. It’s not easy being green, by which I mean that he (and many many other characters) would have to spend hours in makeup every morning. They’d save time and money letting him be his original hue.

I was a movie critic for years and now for years I’ve been having works optioned for film and television. So I am here to tell you, with some authority: Movies always deviate from the novels. The question is less, why aren’t they being faithful to the source material. The question: Is what they’re doing to the source material interesting? That’s the question I ask when I watch a movie based on a novel.

What Paul Verhoeven is doing inStarship Troopers is very interesting. No one was asking for a pop art scifi movie that was ostensibly about shooting big damn alien bugs but was really a mediation about the quiet mainstreaming of fascistic thought and imagery into everyday life, and how all that glossy, idealized ubermensch aesthetic and thinking falls apart once it meets the chaos of war. But surprise! Here it is! Would you like to know more?

The story at least initially follows the novel’s outline: Johnny Rico (the impossibly square-jawed Casper Van Dien) is a callow, rich pretty boy who is not too smart, but is also vaguely dissatisfied with the cushy life being laid out for him. So when his pals Carmen (Denise Richards) and Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) sign up for Federal Service to fight against a bug-like alien race called the Arachnids, he sort of goes along, too, annoying his parents in the process. Boot camp is hard for Johnny, and he almost calls it quits, but then his home town of Buenos Aires gets smooshed by an Arachnid-guided meteorite, and then, well, it is on.

Nearly everything up to this point in the film, save for a brief intro battle sequence, has the flat and brightly-lit affect of 90s teen television: it all looks like Starship Troopers 90210, up to and including absolutely beautiful “teenagers” who are clearly well into their 20s, if not older (of the main trio Van Dien was 27 when filming started, Richards was 24 and Harris was the baby at 22). And this is the point: Verhoeven wants to seduce you with hot kids in a nice clean world that seems great as long as you ignore the public executions, the denial of voting status for most people, the military dictatorship, and, you know, the war out there in space.

But then you get to that war out in space, and you know what happens to all those really hot kids? Nothing good! And that’s where Verhoeven springs his trap. All the physical beauty in the world won’t save you in battle! All those really cool, vaguely-nazi-looking uniforms don’t look nearly as good shredded and covered in blood! And all the training and/or indoctrination you might get means nothing when the military command tells you little and sends you to die by the shipload. Verhoeven, who has never been shy about gouts of blood, severed limbs and gore, paints his masterpiece here in the viscera of the young, who ten seconds before looked like they should be in a Gap ad. The director holds up the fascistic perfection of a Leni Riefenstahl film, specifically to gleefully dash, slash, and splash it into the dirt.

Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically, because this is the US and we don’t do irony especially well), lots of folks didn’t clue into what Verhoeven was up to, accusing the famously anti-fascist director of glorifying Nazism, an accusation which Verhoeven was flabbergasted by. It would take years, long after the movie was out of the theaters and into home video, for most people to fully get what he was up to. Some people still don’t like it; many old school Heinlein fans continue to be enraged that Verhoeven’s lardering his story with fascistic imagery painted their favorite writer with the authoritarian brush.

I don’t think Heinlein ever landed on the “fascist” square at any point in his life. It’s certainly true, however, that Heinlein was moving target, politics-wise; how else can you describe someone who worked on the campaigns of both Upton Sinclair, a socialist and Democrat (who ran for governor of California in the 1930s) and the uberconservative Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964? Heinlein’s politics started left and sauntered right and added in a dollop of free-love weirdness (to, uhhhhh, say the least) in there to confuse everybody. The dynamic range of his politics over his life (and how that leaked into his fiction) means that if one wants to, one can cobble together an image of him through his work that these days gives off an authoritarian odor. Starship Troopers, the novel, is the prime source for that. The blatantly fascist imagery of the movie, satire or not, doesn’t help his fans make an argument against that.

I’ve gone into the weeds with the politics of Starship Troopers, so let me note that aside from the design of the movie, it’s also a sharply-paced action film, where the bug-killin’s both varied and plentiful: if you’re looking to see a bunch of alien bugs get ripped up by humans as much as the humans get ripped up by the aliens, this is your film. The CGI in film remains immaculate; thirty years on, it’s wild how good and how threatening the arachnids look. This film doesn’t have just one or two of them, sneaking about ala the Alien films; no, it piles them on in the hundreds, and they very much look like they are going to fuck everyone up. As Carl points out, “It’s a numbers game. They have more.” Boy, do they ever. There are very few scenes in the film where it ever feels like the humans have the upper hand, and even when they do, they’re as likely to lose a few fingers than not. Whatever else this movie is, it’s a good action-adventure film, if not, exactly, a feel-good action-adventure film.

Like so many other Paul Verhoeven films, Starship Troopers is a chaotic mess of tones; all those action scenes and pointed imagery and pretty, pretty people, tossed into a stylistic blender and sent a-whirlin’ at the highest speed setting. Almost thirty years ago now I wrote a review of this film that started with “Paul Verhoeven is a director who can give you everything you want in a movie, as long as you want too much of it.” You know what? I stand behind that sentence. Verhoeven thinks subtlety is for cowards, and he’s having none of it here, and you’re not getting of it, either. You either accept this is going to be a firehose of a movie, or you get out of the way.

To get back to those old school Heinlein fans, many of whom I like very much as humans, I can only offer the following advice to them, in terms of how to think about their beloved book, and this heretical film Hey! There’s a novel called Starship Troopers! It’s pretty good! Coincidentally and unrelated, there’s a movie called Starship Troopers! It’s also pretty good! Not the same, but pretty good. You can’t copyright titles, you know. It was inevitable there would be a movie and novel with the same name, otherwise having little to do with each other. These things happen. And that’s okay.

Also, wait until I tell you about the remarkable coincidence that happened with I, Robot.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/18/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-eighteen-starship-troopers/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58786