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

[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.