Ryan Leeds

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/22/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-two-notting-hill/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58838

So, a story. More than a decade ago, I was having lunch with Tom Hanks, because he read my work and was a fan, and since I was in town on tour, he asked if he could meet me and I said, sure (actually, what was said, to me from my manager as I was getting off a plane at LAX, was, “You’re going to the Chateau Marmont. You’re having lunch with Tom Hanks. Don’t fuck this up”).

Tom Hanks was lovely, the lunch was lovely, and when it was done, as he was waiting for the valet to retrieve his car, some absolutely random dude came up, pulled out a binder, and started pitching a movie idea to Tom Hanks. And Tom Hanks, because he is Tom Hanks, for all the values of being Tom Hanks that there are in this world, stood there being lovely and polite and endured this random person posting up in his space and trying to make him take a meeting.

I relate this anecdote not to impress you that I once had lunch with a famous person, but to make the point that famous people really are not like you and me, and more often than not, that’s because the world will not let them be people like you and me. People like you and me don’t get pitched business proposals waiting for our car. People like you and me are allowed not to be “on” when we step outside our door and into the world. People like you and me can go shopping at any random Safeway we want and not cause a scene simply by existing. People like you and me get to be people, and not celebrities all the time. Yes, celebrities get fame, and sometimes fortune, and occasionally nifty free goodie bags at award shows worth more than most households in the US make in a year. But it does come at a cost, which is, the ability to just be your own fucking self, at the times and places of your own choosing, and not have anyone who might recognize you wield veto power over that.

Notting Hill, in addition to being just a lovely little romantic comedy about two people from entirely mismatched stations in life, trying to negotiate a space in the world they might get to call their own, is one of the best films out there showing at least a little bit of what it’s like to be famous to everyone, everywhere, all the time, forever and ever, amen. The person in the film cursed with such a blessing is Anna Scott (Julia Roberts, who was in fact the most famous actress in the world at the time, so, typecasting), who has the sort of worldwide fame that means that every single thing she says, any thing she does, who she might date or who she might have a feud with, equals miles and miles of newsprint across six separate continents, and probably at least an email or two in Antarctica.

One day, while in London doing publicity for her latest film, she wanders into a Notting Hill travel bookshop owned by one William Thacker, who is meant to be a self-effacing everyman but who is played by Hugh Grant, also at the height of his fame at the time, so at least the self-effacing part is there. William tries to be helpful to Anna as she browses, and she is having none of it, because she knows he knows who she is and thus her shields are up. Then later in the street there is an incident with an orange drink, William offers his flat, directly across the street, as a place for Anna to clean up, and the first spark is lit.

To say that there are going to be complications because Anna is famous on a level that is nearly beyond comprehension is not a spoiler; likewise that there will be complications because William underestimates, more than once, what a burden being that level of famous can be and how it can warp and distort friendships and relationships, even as the people involved try to compensate for them. Any relationship is hard, but being with a celebrity is like being in a throuple where the third partner is fame. And fame, well, it’s a fickle, fickle beast.

Nevertheless, it’s a delight to see everyone in the film give it a go. The film is scene after scene of either William trying to comprehend all of the everything that comes with the girl he likes being The Most Famous Person In The World, or Anna trying to be a normal person and not quite being able to do it because no matter what she does, her celebrity hangs all about her. This leads to delightful scenes like William trying to meet up with Anna at her request and unwittingly being dragooned into a press junket (a scene which I, as a former film writer who had been to dozens of such junkets, found deeply hilarious), or, one of my favorites, William taking Anna to his sister’s birthday party without telling a single one of his friends who the “new girl” he’s dating is, and watching them deal with it, with varying shades of success.

The dinner party scene is actually the heart of the film because it does so many things at once: It establishes Anna’s level of fame while at the same time giving her a little bit of time to escape it and be off the clock. It gives context to William by showing his friends and relations, and lets them all have the easy back and forth that comes from a lifetime of knowing each other. It also shows Anna watching it all, and, while not envying it, still noticing it and being able to compare it to her relatively lonely life.

And it shows that everyone in this scene is kind, and that others are noticing this kindness. This is the scene where we stop enjoying the utter mismatch of William and Anna, and start hoping the mismatch doesn’t keep them apart. Lord knows the film gives the two of them plenty of opportunities to mess things up, and they manage to do just that at least a couple of times.

Roger Michell directed Notting Hill, but it takes nothing from him and his skill as a director here to note this film is primarily a Richard Curtis film. Curtis is probably the most successful writer of British film comedy in the last 40 years, and most of these comedies have some sort of romantic bent. In addition to this film he wrote Four Weddings and Funeral (the film which made Hugh Grant a star, and which got Curtis his sole Oscar nomination), Love Actually, which he also directed, and two of the three Bridget Jones films. (He also wrote the Blackadder television series, beloved by Brits and US nerds, and also The Tall Guy, which is where I first encountered him, the vaccination scene of which I ripped off wholesale for my novel The Kaiju Preservation Society. I will send you a check, Mr. Curtis).

Of all of these films, I think Notting Hill shows Curtis at the height of his screenwriting powers. It’s extremely funny, which is great (especially when Rhys Ifans, as William’s daft roommate, is anywhere onscreen), but it’s also empathetic. It’s hard to do a really good job of making an audience feel sympathy for someone who is so famous that by all rights all that we should feel about her is envy, but Curtis does it. It helps that by this time he had been around famous people enough to understand that celebrity is cage. Gilded, yes, and with staff who will get you everything you want and need, but still a cage. He writes a good cage.

It also helps that this role could be thinly-veiled autobiography for Julia Roberts, who at the height of her celebrity was a media presence on par with Taylor Swift, for all the good and bad that comes with that level of fame, achievement and scrutiny. In 1999, there was literally no one else who could have understood Anna Scott better than Roberts. I have to think there are some parts of this movie that had to be cathartic for her, like the scene where, after a media scandal erupts and William is caught up in it, he suggests it will all just blow over in days. Anna knows better, and so does Julia Roberts, and I think it’s pretty clear both are making the rebuttal to William’s misinformed take.

The gilded cage of celebrity life in 2025 is, if anything, more solid than it was when this film came out. Miles of newsprint have been replaced with hours of celebscrolling on Instagram and Tik Tok, where famous people have to actively manage their online personas, or cede the management of it to a mob of influencers and bored social media mavens who are not their friends, no matter how close they imagine their parasocial relationships are. More people have wide fame (there are YouTube and Tik Tok celebrities who I’ve never heard of, but millions of Gen Z and Gen Alpha people have), but it’s harder than ever to make the money that used to be associated with fame. So all a lot of these newly-famous get is a grind to stay top of mind, and a lack of privacy, and, eventually, a very profound burnout.

It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. At least Notting Hill suggests that sometimes, if you’re lucky, and with the right people, you might get to slip out of that gilded cage, and, if only for a moment, be your own person again. Fame is nice. Love and community is nicer. May everyone, even the famous, get to have it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/22/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-two-notting-hill/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58838

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/21/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-21-kill-bill-vol-1/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58819

There are better movies that Quentin Tarantino has written and directed than Kill Bill: Vol. 1, but I strongly believe there no other film of his that is more him than this one. Most of those other films — Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and of course Pulp Fiction, are about other things, ranging from a day in the life of various petty criminals, to rewriting history because it’s just so much cooler that way. And while those other films are very clearly done in a way that only Tarantino could or would choose to do them, this is the one film above all others (even and including Kill Bill: Vol. 2) where it is all about what Quentin Tarantino wants. His wants. His needs. His desires. This film, from the top of Lucy Liu’s head to the bottom of Uma Thurman’s feet, is a distilled cinematic trip through Tarantino’s id. And what a trip it is.

The plot, which is really just the thinnest of scaffoldings for Tarantino’s obsessions: Uma Thurman (whose character is not given a name in this film, and when and if anyone says it, it’s bleeped out) plays a super mega badass hot assassin chick who after years of, you know, killing the shit out of people, decides to leave it all behind when she finds out she’s pregnant. This does not thrill Bill (David Carradine), her boss and also boyfriend, and he makes that point known at her wedding, not to him, when he and the other members of the super mega badass hot assassins he fields into the world show up and shoot everyone and every thing at the venue, including the bride. When she wakes up from a coma a few years later, babyless, she naturally does what anyone in her position would do: Makes a list of everyone who tried to kill her with the goal of returning the favor.

That’s it! That’s the movie! Thank you and good night!

But of course that’s not actually the movie. The movie is not the plot, the movie is how the plot gets done. And for Tarantino, who is a pop culture magpie and has also fundamentally never stopped, in his heart, being a thirteen-year-old boy, how it gets done is by piling on every single movie and television genre he’s ever loved. Japanese anime and crime films? In here. Hong Kong action cinema? Absolutely one hundred percent on call. Spaghetti westerns and blacksploitation? Present in visuals, score and sound design. The actors from these genres that Tarantino idolized? They’re in the cast. From Michael Parks’ aping of Charlie Chan to Thurman wearing Bruce Lee’s yellow athletic apparel, this film is not just filled with cinematic Easter eggs, it’s a whole goddamned Easter parade.

Why did Tarantino do this? Because this is who he is, man. He is the first superstar Hollywood director to have come out of the video store era — he even worked in a video store for a while in Manhattan Beach before making a go of it in the film industry — and he’s a self-taught filmmaker. Not for him the hallowed halls of USC or NYU’s film schools; he just watched a boatload of movies, from classics to complete crap, and gave each of them equal weight in his weird little brain. It’s very clear that Tarantino does not have a bias against genre for agreed-upon “important films.” He likes what he likes, and fuck you if you don’t like it, too. It’s not his problem if you don’t.

Which I think is fine! At the end of the day, there is no high culture or low culture, there’s just the culture that sticks, and that’s what’s used as the building blocks in the next round of creation. One era’s pop culture is another era’s “classic” culture — and here we haul Shakespeare and Dickens onto the stage to wave before unceremoniously shoving them into the orchestra pit with a crash — and ultimately what sticks, what makes it through the sieve of time and the sheer mass of creative output, is what the new generation of creative people love, champion, reference, combine and in some cases just flat out imitate.

What’s in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is everything that made Tarantino. At this point, he’s made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, won an Oscar and is a reliable (if not staggering) box office draw, and was responsible, directly and indirectly, for a whole cottage industry of mostly violent, mostly indie, mostly dude-centric films in the 90s. If anyone is at this point allowed to make a film that is basically them playing with all their favorite cinematic toys, it’s going to be Tarantino.

There’s one other thing, not to be discounted: Tarantino may be crawling both into his mind, a bit up his own ass, with Kill Bill: Vol.1, but he also remembers that he’s got to make the film actually entertaining to the people who are not him. Kill Bill was originally written and shot as a single film, but during the assembly process, Miramax studio head Harvey Weinstein (in the days when the only way women got told he was a raping creep was through whisper networks) suggested making two films out of the material. Weinstein is criminal scum who will hopefully die in jail, but his film instincts here were correct; it allowed Tarantino to overweight the really cool action stuff into Vol. 1, while letting the more somber and emotional aspects of the tale carry Vol. 2, i.e., the one everyone saw because they had bought into the first film and were left high and dry by one of the best cliffhangers in cinematic history.

(There is now a Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which unifies the two volumes into a single long film, with a couple scenes added, some amended, and some others dropped, including that banger of a cliffhanger. I have not seen this version yet but this will not stop me from suggesting that a more-than-four-and-a-half hour version of the film is not what Tarantino would have been able to get away with had Weinstein not allowed his film to be split into two. I for one would be curious to see what a no-longer-than-three-hours edit of Kill Bill would have been, using footage from both volumes, as it would have had to have been. We will never get that, though, and in any event I think the film was best served being twain.)

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is about Tarantino and all the things that make him tick, but it’s Uma Thurman who is in it the whole damn time, save for a few interludes and reaction shots. Thurman was not a passive vessel for this film — the story is credited to “Q & U,” meaning both her and Tarantino — and the whole thing rides on her shoulders. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this film is the defining one in her career, the one where Thurman gets to do it all: Be aggressive, be vulnerable, be a badass, be scared, play tough and play vulnerable. And, also, hack through literally dozens of people with a samurai sword, which is the dream of so many people, regardless of gender. None of the world of Kill Bill is real, none of it can be real (see John Wick for another example of this). But it doesn’t matter if it’s real, it matters if we believe in it while it’s happening. It’s up to Thurman to make us see it. She does.

I’ve noted above that this film is clearly Tarantino’s most personal project, and I would like to point out how absolutely weird it is that this is the man’s statement of being — until, that is, you think about it. If you’re, say, Steven Spielberg, you make The Fabelmans. If you’re Ingmar Bergman, you make Fanny and Alexander. If you’re John Boorman you make Hope & Glory. All semi-autobiographical movies about the early days of the filmmaker in question, or at least, about a stand-in who represents the filmmaker.

The thing is, Kill Bill: Vol 1 is exactly that thing. This movie is all about Tarantino’s early days, all the things, cinematically, that he imprinted upon. And while Thurman’s character cannot be separated from the actress and should not be, a idea of a secret badass in a desperate battle against the legions who want them dead? Oh, that’s absolutely the sort of power fantasy that kept young Quentin up at night, the wheels of his imagination turning.

This is Tarantino. You want to understand him, watch this film. He’s put himself out there for you to see. All you have to do is look.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/21/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-21-kill-bill-vol-1/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58819