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Quint sees indie sci-fi comedy SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED and also catches Nash Edgerton short film BEAR! Sundance 2012!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Safety Not Guaranteed was a movie I couldn’t fit into my schedule. That happens at fests, especially Sundance. It varies year to year, but there’s no way to see everything that interests you and the more you fight to see everything the more you end up missing due to exhaustion or cutting travel time between theaters too close, etc.
That’s just the way it is. In fact, I’m going to be writing an article about the movies I WISH I could have seen at Sundance this year. I’ll end up with some 20+ reviews written and some really cool interviews, so I wasn’t slacking off this year by anybody’s standards, but there’s a ton of movies that I either heard of too late to do anything about or just plain old couldn’t make work with my schedule.
As you can tell by now Safety Not Guaranteed is not going to be on that list thanks to a press screening added mid-fest that just happened to fit into my schedule.
Before we jump into that review, though, I need to talk about the short that played before it. I was so psyched to see the Blue Tongue Films logo pop up when the lights went down I think I let out a little geeky yelp. You see, they didn’t announce that there was a short before our press screening and when I saw that logo I knew we were in for some fun.
Nash Edgerton made a short film a few years back called Spider that is, academically speaking, fucking rad-awesome-sauce supreme. If you haven’t seen it, then you must watch it right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait!
So now you know how excited I was to hear that Edgerton had a short at Sundance and not just any short, but a SEQUEL to the above short film called BEAR! How awesome, right!?!
And it is a direct sequel, once again starring Edgerton as Jack, a well-meaning, but accident prone boyfriend who has a bad habit of not thinking things out. His new girlfriend is Teresa Palmer (lucky sod!) and he’s got a special birthday surprise for her. Of course things don’t quite go as planned.
It’s a great follow-up and I just miss Edgerton’s voice as a director. He has done many great shorts and I loved his first feature, The Square. I hope he’s got something else brewing soon.
Edgerton mentioned on Twitter that Bear will be online soon. When it hits I’ll throw a story up so you guys can catch it. It’s really fun and worth a watch.
So, Safety Not Guaranteed stars Aubrey Plaza as an intern at a magazine who ends up being recruited by one of the reporters (Jake M. Johnson who plays his character as a charming sleazeball… a sleazy charmball? A ball of charming sleaze?) to do all the work on a story about the guy who placed an add in the classified requesting a partner to time travel with.
Part of the movie is the mystery surrounding this crazy guy (Mark Duplass), part of the movie is an odd couple pairing of Plaza, Johnson and another, super nerdy intern (Karan Soni), part of the movie is a love story as Plaza kinda falls for the crazy Duplass as she pretends to be answering the add and part of it is a is-he-crazy or is he not ambiguity that isn’t answered until the very end of the movie. That’s my personal favorite aspect of the film. Can this dude really time travel? He claims to have done it once before, but if he really is a time traveler why’s he work at a grocery store and live in a rundown house tucked back in the woods?
The movie’s very sweet, everybody really likeable and entertaining to watch, but I can’t help but feel there was a little something missing; an oomph to the plot and/or character relationships. The story feels a little slight, a little airy and unimportant. Not that every story needs to have a deeper meaning or complex layers, but in this case it felt like the movie was a little more surface than it should have been.
That’s probably why I gravitate the most towards the ambiguity of the time travel aspect when I think about why I like the movie. That’s the most creative, smart thing about the film and even that feels like it’s missing a conclusion. We get a definitive answer at the end of the film, but while it’s a nice finale it didn’t give me the sense of completion I was looking for.
Still, everybody is so damn charming, and Plaza is so darn geek-cute, that I would certainly recommend the movie. It’s an entertaining movie, a fun movie, a cute movie, just not a life-changing movie… but then again if you judge every movie by that criteria you’d only have a few dozen truly great movies, I guess.
I’m starting to get a bit loopy, so forgive my fumbling thoughts on this one. I thought I was pretty much caught up, but I still have a good 7 reviews to write and two more interviews to post before I can put Sundance to bed! And I’m already planning two more trips in the next 2 weeks. My brain is too stupid to juggle all that!
Off to see my last Sundance movie (The Words with Bradley Cooper) and then some writing, packing and traveling. I think the next review I attempt will be The Raid, so keep an eye out for that!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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Jan 27, 2012 6:49:29 PM CST
So this has nothing to do with the time traveller from YTMND?
by margot_tenenbaum
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That was a fucking amazing short.
Good on ya! -
Did I have a stroke?
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Jan 27, 2012 6:57:37 PM CST
I so hope Safety Not Guaranteed has "Push it to the Limit" in the Soundtrack
by shut the fuck up donny
We ALL know where this idea came from, and half the kitsch factor is that damn song...
Plus, I'm sure Giorgio Moroder could use a residual check... -
I too am at sundance and this movie rocked - I wish I had a chance to see it again! My own review is at http://sundance-2012.blogspot.com/2012/01/safety-not-guaranteed-review.html?m=0
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http://timetraveler.ytmnd.com/
For those who have never seen it. -
nice giant anime eyes in that last pic.
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First we get Bad Ass, aka Epic Beard Man: The Movie, and now we're getting Safety Not Guaranteed? Christ, now Hollywood is actually mining the internet for ideas.
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and told us we get a definite answer by the end of the film... I'm gonna go ahead and assume it ends with them actually time traveling.
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I remember something from a few months back that was very similar but I don't remember the spider part. Girl pulls over and steps out and gets creamed by a car and it was much shorter.
Also, it's ad, not add.
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