movie seen

[calimac]

Safety Not Guaranteed

This is a quirky little independent film concerning a (possibly) mad inventor who is building a time machine to travel into the recent past.

I want you to see this movie. I want you to see it, and then I want you to look me in the eye, and tell me that you agree with me that it is a much better movie than Back to the Future.

If you can say that, I will be inclined to take your further recommendations for movies. If not, I probably won't.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen it, but it wouldn't be that hard for it to be better than the adventures of Marty McFly...

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Sorry--I love them both, for completely different reasons.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I'm close to sturgeonslawyer on this one. I missed the chance to see it because of school, or didn't think I was interested at the time. However! There have been a few low-budget sf movies in the last few years that I think are really excellent.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I want to see it, and since I wasn't all THAT interested in "Back to the Future" anyway, unless it's a real dog, I can't imagine I won't like it better.

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

Echoing sartorias, I appreciate them both. Safety Not Guaranteed was one of a pile of about eight good-to-classic movies which brightened my Summer 2012. But the final Back to the Future movie, the Western one, is one of my all time sentimental favorites.

Consider that Back to the Future is about the actual act of time travel, while Safety Not Guaranteed is about the potential of time travel. Or, Back to the Future is more about plot, while Safety Not Guaranteed is about character.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Safety No Guaranteed (though on your recommendation, I've added it to my Netflix queue). But I am uncomfortable with the use of "better" in your comparison. I enjoyed the Back to the Future movies, especially the first one. Saw all three in theaters in initial release, and not since.

But what constitutes "better"? To be sure, The Time Machine and Twelve Monkeys are better at speculating about time travel. The first BttF is a great deal of fun comparing 1950s and 1980s. "No wonder you have an actor as president"... and the whole scene where Marty tries to order a diet soda. The sequels follow familiar characters through internally plausible scenarios. The ending works pretty well.

For time travel movies, especially comedies, wear your heavy duty disbelief suspenders.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Better" as a movie. As a work of art in cinematic form. Not a technical evaluation of its use of time travel. And I'm not looking for a definitive answer, just for opinions, because I think this particular comparison is a good test case for detecting whether others share what bothers me about the feel and style of the general run of SF movies.

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

I would say that Safety Not Guaranteed is only marginally a SF movie; repeating myself from earlier, the movie is more about the potential of time travel. The question becomes: is Kenneth totally crazy, or only half crazy?

So, I probably don't share your thoughts on the "general run of SF movies." But, I am very fond of the small art movie field. (The three small SF movies I need to catch up with are Moon, Gattaca, and Never Let You Go.)

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

So, looking at calimac's original point: Calimac should ignore my comments about SF movies - especially the mainstream ones - but follow my comments about small art movies. :-) So, for a recent film which touches the fringe of the genre through magical realism (and likely the best film I have seen in ten years), I recommend Beasts of the Southern Wild.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard of Beasts of the Southern Wild until it received its Oscar nominations. I use Redbox rather than Netflix, but I keep a mental equivalent of the Netflix queue, and that one's on it.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Okay, noted. I tend to watch movies a bit different than other people ("DW Griffith did it better") and like much of Robert Zemeckis' work (Romancing the Stone, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forest Gump, Contact, etc). Still, I'll see SNG and (if I remember) comment someplace.

BTW: For a long time, one of my On the Same Page/Not on the Same Page movies was All That Jazz. I love it (and most Bob Fosse). Still is, but fewer people have seen it to compare notes.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I saw All That Jazz many years ago, and recall it as fascinating, but hallucinatory. A lot less of it would have gone a lot more of a way.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Ooh! Can I be the first to say that I haven't seen Back to the Future but enjoyed Safety Not Guaranteed? (I guess I'll find out once I post this.) The movie I liked it better than was Your Sister's Sister, which was another low-budget indie shot in this area and starring Mark Duplass. Completely different stories, so the comparison doesn't really make sense, but there you have it. Anyway, I wrote a little review.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Good review; thanks. To one point I have a comment: the movie gets to evade the question of whether Kenneth is actually mentally ill because "mentally ill" is not really a very useful binary category, especially for edge cases.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Re-reading your post, I like the idea that Kenneth is a variation on the trope of the mad scientist. Yep.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Okay, finally saw Safety Not Guaranteed. It was okay. But not better than that. A slightly lower-than-average episode of Twilight Zone or a slightly higher than average episode of Eureka. As time travel love stories go, I prefer Somewhere in Time.

I'm unlikely to consider well-written any movie that slings "retard" and "fuck" so lightly and without purpose. Compare Back to the Future where every line of dialog is important and/or character building. From the news on the radio as the main character wakes up to the name of the mall.

It had it's moments, and some of the acting was good. Still, SNG was poorly edited and not particularly well thought out. Why did Kenneth need weapons? Did he even think about returning?

The door works both ways: I don't think I'll be inclined to take your further recommendations for movies.

I may break this out to my own LJ or review. Y'never know.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's fair enough, because I think we're working on quite different standards of what goodness in movies consists of. The context of my post was that I've long been uneasy about the kind and reason of praise that most SF movies get in the community, and I thought it would work the other way around. This isn't a movie about time travel, though it has time travel in it. It's a character study. The superficiality of the character study in most SF movies is palpable.

It's not that I didn't enjoy Back to the Future, though I've never been moved to watch it again, which says something, though I am astonished at your claim that the writing was tight. What it was was plot-oriented. What most distressed me about that movie was the slackness and gratuitous digs in the 1950s section of the movie. A better conventional SF time-travel movie would be Peggy Sue Got Married.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I don't necessarily agree that character gets lost in sf movies more than in other genres. Good sf movies are about the people affected by new technology, eg Singing in the Rain. A bad sf movie can be as fun as a bad western if you lower your expectations and wear heavy-duty disbelief suspenders.

I saw all the Back to the Future movies once, in initial release. So I'm going by 25+ year-old memories. That I remember it well is much to its credit, as far as I'm concerned. At some point I may see them again, in a row with commentary and extras on a large screen at home. I like living in the future.

Still, I'm puzzled by your astonishment. My major complaint against BttF was that it was too internally tight. Like many Spielberg movies, the world didn't seem to exist outside the frame. It was storyboarded to death. Virtually everything said in the early part of the movie was important, and virtually everything in every shot in the early part of the movie was mirrored in the later part. This made for a finely crafted pop movie which happened to have one of my favorite actors (Christopher Lloyd) and a decent sf plot. I was born in 1955 and enjoyed the comparisons with then-modern times. Okay, the Chuck Berry thing was gratuitous, but fun.

BttF is so tightly written that the first sequel was written around it, and BttF 2 worked, though not as well.

I liked Peggy Sue Got Married.