Posts Tagged ‘movie reviews’

Movie Review: Soylent Green

Tuesday, September 13th, 2022

It being 2022, the year the movie is set in, we thought it was high time to finally watch Soylent Green in a not-chopped-up-for-TV version.

Title: Soylent Green
Director: Richard Fleischer
Writer: Stanley R. Greenberg (screenplay), Harry Harrison (for the novel Make Room! Make Room!)
Starring: Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Edward G. Robinson, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Lincoln Kilpatrick
IMDB entry

A Neo-Malthusian dystopia, Soylent Green starts off by telling us that New York City now has a population of 40 million, and almost all of them look sweaty (Greenhouse Effect), depressed and desperate. Charlton Heston plays Detective Thorn, a cop more pissed off than depressed, sharing an apartment with his “book” Sol (Edward G. Robinson, in his last role; he died six days after principle photography wrapped), who does research for him. Their tiny, dingy apartment is crammed with books, no running water, and electricity so reliably unreliable that every now and then they need to climb aboard an exercise bike to keep their single bulb lit. When Thorn leaves for work, he has to step over dozens of homeless people sleeping in the stairwell of his building

Thorn works two shifts to make ends meet, and he’s assigned to the murder case of rich businessman William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotton) high in his swanky apartment. There he interviews Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), Simonson’s “furniture,” the beautiful young woman provided with the apartment, who seems to take a shine to Thorn, as well as assistant Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors), upon whom his suspicion for being the inside man falls.

The interesting thing about these scenes, despite the stark contrast between rich Simonson and the horrible grinding poverty, is how Heston’s Thorn, presented as a good cop working within a corrupt system, feels absolutely no compunction about stealing everything he can lay his hands on in the dead man’s apartment, including such unthinkable luxury goods as “soap” and “beef.” The body disposal guy also offers Thorn an agreed upon percentage for the body, and later Thorn tells his chief (Brock Peters) that the fee will come out of his share. Thorn’s also not above using his fists to beat answers out of people, and he knows how to project an air of menace.

It turns out that Simonson worked for the powerful Soylent corporation, and Thorn’s chief tells him to drop the case. “There’s been 137 reported murders since then, and we won’t solve them either.” Assuming a 24-hour period, that works out to around 50,000 murders a year, a blood-drenched total not even pre-Guiliani New York City or modern Chicago can match. Naturally Thorn refuses.

Thorn also gets assigned riot duty, and a riot breaks out when a Soylent outlet runs out of food. They bring in “The Scoops,” which are the dump trucks on the movie poster that unceremoniously scoop rioters up into the bed. What happens to them there is unclear, but given the state of the world, you can bet it’s not pleasant.

All institutions seem corrupt, dysfunctional, and most often both. Thorn gets shot in the leg, and he refuses to take time off to heal. “If I’m gone 48 hours they’ll replace me.”

Soylent Green lends itself to Neo-Marxist analysis more than most movies, but one thing that cuts against that is religion is the only institution that isn’t corrupt, but it’s still breaking under the strain. After taking a baby previously roped to the dead, knifed mother into a church filled to overflowing with homeless people, Thorn interviews the priest (Lincoln Kilpatrick) who heard Simonson’s last confession, and he’s so far beyond burnout that he has the dead stare of a PTSD sufferer who has numbed himself to the world for his own sanity.

Priest: Forgive me. It’s destroying me.
Thorn: What is?
Priest: The truth.
Thorn: The truth Simonson told you?
Priest: All truth.

Eventually Sol decides to kill himself in a suicide theater showing the lost wonders of the natural world, and shortly thereafter Thorn learns the dark secret of Soylent Green that I assume just about every reader of this review is already aware of.

There are a few memes floating around listing the similarities between the 2022 of Soylent Green and our own, so let’s list a few:

  • People wearing masks
  • Homeless people living on the street
  • People living in cars
  • Greenhouse effect worries
  • Computer games (a version of Spacewar!)
  • New York falling apart
  • Every institution is corrupt
  • Riots (we could extend that to “over food” if it were set in Sri Lanka)
  • State-sanctioned assisted suicide
  • All that said, with all our problems, the world we’re living in is markedly better than the one depicted here, war notwithstanding, largely thanks to the green revolution in agriculture. Harrison’s novel depicted the world collapsing with 7 billion people, but this year population is scheduled to hit 8 billion (though I’m not sure if that includes China overcounting their population by some 100 million people or not), and we still don’t have widespread famine. (With the agricultural output destroyed in the Russo-Ukrainian War, next year may be different.) New York City’s population is closer to 8.5 million than 40 million, and appears to be shrinking.

    Director Richard Fleischer had an interesting career in the 1970s, with his most prominent films being Tora! Tora! Tora!, Charles Bronson action film Mr. Majestyk, Soylent Green… and Mandingo.

    The 1970s were a weird decade.

    Soylent Green has something of a mixed reputation, partially based on them changing Harry Harrison’s original ending. But I found it a very effective film, one that uses it’s obviously limited budget to good effect and succeeds on its own terms. Heston is very good, as always, and Edward G. Robinson nails his final role. All in all, I’d place it as the second-best SF dystopia of the 1970s, behind only Rollerball.

    Halloween Horror Movie Review: Lifeforce

    Friday, October 1st, 2021

    Lifeforce
    Directed by Tobe Hooper
    Written by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby, based on Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires
    Starring Steve Railsback, Mathilda May, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart

    I avoided Lifeforce when it came out because the reviews were considerably less than positive, it was a Golan-Globus production (two names that did not spell quality), and the whole thing had a whiff of cheesiness about it. But with Halloween approaching, we thought it was time to give it a try.

    I actually enjoyed it a bit more than I expected, despite the fact that it steals generously from just about every successful 1979-1984 science fiction/fantasy/horror film, from Alien (O’Bannon) to Poltergeist (Hooper) to Dawn of the Dead to The Hunger to The Keep, plus a big helping of Quartermass and the Pit.

    A multinational expedition is sent to Hailey’s Comet, where they discover a huge, 100+ mile long derelict spaceship. Exploration reveals dead giant bat-like creatures…and three naked, perfect human beings in suspended animation inside crystalline coffins. Naturally they take them on board.

    You can guess how well that works out for them.

    Soon the female (Mathilda May) is wandering around London naked, sucking the lifeforce (via swirly blue beams) out of people, who in turn become lifeforce vampires themselves. And the race is on to track her down, lead by the captain and sole mission survivor (Steve Railsback) who has a deep psychic bond with her, along with an SAS colonel (Peter Firth). And they soon find out that their quarry can switch bodies…

    Despite it’s reputation, Lifeforce has a lot going for it. Hooper keeps things moving along at a steady clip, the disparate elements mostly make sense together, the John Dykstra special effects are generally more than passable, and the movie (budgeted at a then-pretty-hefty $25 million) avoids the usual Golan-Globus cheapness. There’s an excellent cast of British character actors (including a post-Equus Firth and a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart) in supporting roles. Plus it hales from The 1980s Golden Age of Mainstream Female Movie Nudity, and a 20-year old Mathilda May is very easy on the eyes.

    Also, it may be the first use of “body hoping psychic vampire” idea, which I didn’t encounter until Stephen Gallagher’s Valley of Lights (1987). I assume that (and many other elements) are taken directly from the Colin Wilson novel, which I own but haven’t read yet.

    Not everything makes sense, but usually the movie moves quickly enough that you don’t have time to think about it. The “London goes crazy” scenes are good, but probably go on too long, and look more like an attack of zombies than vampires. The special effects for the “real form” of the vampires seen near the climax looks pretty cheesy. Oh, and you get possibly Patient Zero of the now ubiquitous “glowing blue space beam” trope.

    Here’s the (R-rated) trailer:

    It isn’t so great that you should pay $80 bucks for the Shout Factory Blu-ray of it. But if you’re looking for a gory-but-not-really-scary science fiction horror action film for the Halloween season, you could certainly do a lot worse.

    Movie Review: Godzilla vs. Kong

    Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

    Godzilla vs. Kong
    Directed by Adam Wingard
    Written by Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields (story), Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein (screenplay)
    Starring Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Julian Dennison, Kaylee Hottle and Demian Bichir

    This is the best of the Monsterverse movies. The people at Legendary Films seem to have finally figured out what viewers actually want (hot kaiju-on-kaiju city-destroying action) and what they want left on the cutting room floor (boring human backstory).

    The movie opens with King Kong contained within a Truman Show-type dome over Skull Island and Godzilla attacking the Florida research facility of sinister Apex Cybernetics (think Yoyodyne or Weyland-Yutani). The movie quickly splits into two strands: Millie Bobby Brown’s character (a bit less useless than in Godzilla: King of the Monsters), her tubby geek friend (Julian Dennison) and a conspiracy theorist (Brian Tyree Henry) try to penetrate Apex systems to learn The Real Truth, while Kong, along with his deaf Child Monster Whisperer companion (Kaylee Hottle; think Kenny from Gamera, but much less annoying) and guardian Rebecca Hall (the bank-teller from The Town) help Alexander Skarsgard take Kong to Antarctica on an Apex-underwritten mission to the hollow earth to uncover a new power source.

    If the last part sounds extremely unlikely, you’re right, but they’ve cannily kept explanations to a bare minimum to keep you moving on to the next monster scene. (You know that 5-15 minute segment where they have to knock out Kong to get him on the ship? They snipped that sucker entirely out and cut to him already in giant chains mid-voyage.) The first battle between Godzilla and Kong takes place at sea, with round one going to our reigning lizard champion.

    There’s some delightful stuff with Kong reaching the hollow earth, where he roams the verdant green-and-purple landscape, fights some Quetzalcoatlesque giant flying serpents (which this rundown dubs “warbats”) and finds a giant ancestral throne room and (plot point alert) a Kong-sized Zilla-spined axe.

    In the other plotline, the Scooby Gang discover that Apex is breeding Skullcrawlers (from Kong: Skull Island), and are promptly whisked via high speed underground tunnel to Hong Kong (Monsterverse tech seems to be advancing much faster than our own), where they discover that Apex head honcho Walter Simmons (Demian Bichir, basically playing Evil Tony Stark) has built to his own Mechagodzilla to put man back at the top of the food chain.

    If you watched the Toho Godzilla films, you pretty much know how this is going to turn out.

    We finally get Godzilla and Kong smashing up neon-lit Hong Kong in a truly epic battle royal that Mechagodzilla later joins. Legendary really makes use of the possibilities of CGI to make you feel like you’re in the middle of a battle between two giant monsters, with the viewpoint frequently swooping in and around the action. There’s even a scene where Mechagodzilla emerges from a hillside that I would swear is an almost exact lift from a Toho hillside monster emergence scene.

    This is the Godzilla movie where Hollywood finally figured out how to get out of its own way. No “reinvented” Godzilla, no tedious backstories, no time wasted on pointless human drama, no 15 different studio executives having to stick their dicks in the soup to justify their salaries. Just compelling kaiju on kaiju action rendered with top-notch modern CGI that puts you in the middle of the city-stomping. (And none of the “they make their own weather so everything is dark and stormy” effect used to excess in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.) It bests all previous Moinsterverse films in just about every area (except Kong: Skull Island in cast; Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman and Tom Hiddleston beat Eleven, Ben Affleck love interest and a random Skarsgard hands down).

    And it’s light-years better than the 1962 King Kong vs. Godzilla, which features perhaps the saddest Kong ever committed to film. (Banglar King Kong doesn’t count.)

    If you like Godzilla movies, this one is well worth catching while it’s still in theaters.

    Movie Review: Kong: Skull Island

    Friday, April 2nd, 2021

    Kong: Skull Island
    Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts
    Written By Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly and John Gatins
    Starring Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Tom Hiddleston, John C. Riley, Brie Larson

    With Godzilla vs. Kong upon us, I finally watched Kong: Skull Island. Even though I’m a Godzilla partisan, overall I think it’s the best executed of the Monsterverse films. (I’m seeing Godzilla vs. Kong this weekend.)

    In 1973, with the Vietnam War winding down, LANDSAT has discovered Skull Island in the South Pacific, previously hidden because it’s perpetually ringed by storms. An Air Cav force, lead by Samuel L. Jackson in the Samuel L. Jackson role, escort a group of ostensible scientists to the island, including John Goodman (head of barely-funded Monarch, secretly looking for monsters), Tom Hiddleston (an ex-SAS pathfinder/tracker mercenary) and Brie Larson (a photographer). Soon they run into Kong, who crashes their helicopters a lot quicker than the Viet Cong. Jackson immediately goes full Ahab while another group runs for their life and right into John C. Riley, playing the American version of Sir Basil St. Exposition as a stranded WWII American flyer, along with the silent but friendly native tribe. Riley quickly explains to them that not only is Kong king, but he’s the good king, saving people from the monstrous subterranean “Skullcrawlers,” which look like giant tatzelwurms with vaguely possum-ish snouts.

    The plot unfolds more or less the way you would expect.

    This seems the best of the monsterverse movies because it has the best cast, and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts (who’s primarily worked in TV) seems to have come closest to realizing his vision for it. It quickly and efficiently gets the ensemble to the island with a minimum of character exposition accompanied by a great classic rock soundtrack that runs the gamut of CCR, Jefferson Airplane and Black Sabbath. Jackson, Goodman and Riley all turn in their usual solid work in roles that might seem trite with less stellar performers (see: everyone who’s not Brian Cranston in the previous Monsterverse films). Larson is less annoying than her Marvel role. The support cast of mostly redshirts also do good work. Only Hiddleston comes across as Johnny Onenote And His Pet Stoic Gaze, but the script doesn’t give him much to do.

    The special effects work on Kong is extremely solid (which you would expect from Industrial Light & Magic), even if not as expressive as the Andy Serkis version from Peter Jackson’s remake. The Skullcrawlers are appropriately menacing. But it’s the Huey flight sequences where the effects really shine. It’s obvious from the shot composition that Vogt-Roberts watched Apocalypse Now a whole bunch of times…

    By jettisoning the “Kong takes Manhattan” plot from the previous versions, and dialing the Beauty and the Beast bits down to a bare whisper, Legendary Films has created a swift-moving kaiju film that even casual fans of the genre should enjoy.

    Halloween Horrors: The Abominable Dr. Phibes

    Thursday, October 1st, 2020

    I just picked up The Vincent Price Collection from Shout Factory on Blu-Ray and had a chance to watch The Abominable Dr. Phibes for the first time, a movie that’s now just shy of a half a century old.

    It’s less a straight horror film that a black comedy Grand Guignol take on a Jacobean revenge drama, in which organist/inventor/theologian Phibes (Vincent Price, wearing disguises to hide his horrible disfigurement and speaking through mechanical aids) and (never explained) beautiful female assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North) venture from their elaborate Art Deco lair (complete with a raising and lowering organ for Phibes to play, along with an animatronic jazz band) to carry out a series of revenge murders based on Biblical plagues on a team of doctors lead by Dr. Vesalius (old pro Joseph Cotton), who Phibe feels botched his late wife’s surgery. Victims are dispatched by bats (who actually look quite adorable), rats, a particularly nasty mechanical frog mask, and (in the case of British comic actor legend Terry Thomas) having their blood drained.

    Police, as usual, are always one step behind the fiendishly clever Phibes.

    The film it most reminds me of is near-contemporary Suspiria, in that both are completely nutso, color-drenched horror films of hallucinatory intensity. The art direction by Bernard Reeves is so striking, and so integral to the success of the film, that it’s quite surprising he never did another full-length film.

    I actually tracked Reeves down and asked why that was:

    Thank you for your enquiry, yes I am the same Bernard Reeves that Art Directed the film Abominable Dr. Phibes.

    I did very few films in my life, basically due to the fact I was Production Designer for TV commercials and travelled abroad a lot.

    These days he’s best know for his motorsports art.

    Phibe’s lair is so vivid that it does a great job of making you forget the usual American International Pictures cheapness in the rest of the film. Another fascinating aspect is that while it’s set in 1925, the design of both Phibe’s lair and of Dr. Vesalius’ house is less straight Art Deco than a version re-imagined through the prism of mod London, with bright colors, wall mirrors and anachronistic red plexiglass panels on Phibe’s organ.

    And you can easily imagine Diana Rigg modeling some of Vulnavia’s very sexy fashions in The Avengers.

    Speaking of which, Director Robert Fuest (who directed several post-Rigg episodes of same) keeps things moving along at a steady clip, so it never drags over its 94 minutes. It’s not really scary, but it does hold your attention throughout. It’s not as good as Suspiria, manly because nothing matches the crazy intensity of latter film’s first murder, and because we root for Jessica Harper’s protagonist in a way we can’t for Price’s twisted antihero.

    Some have talked about The Abominable Dr. Phibes as an example of camp, and while aspects lend themselves to that, distance and the sheer vivid weirdness of the film has given it the feel of an intense fever dream.

    Still worth a look.

    Halloween Horror Movie Review: The Night Stalker

    Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019

    Before the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show came the original TV movie The Night Stalker, which first introduced dogged yet deeply-irritating reporter Carl Kolchak, brilliantly and unforgettably played by Darrin McGavin. Our grizzled, disheveled hero starts listening to his own notes on a tape recorder, about a very strange murder case. We see a Vegas girl get killed by an incredibly powerful man, then cut to an autopsy performed by a pre-M*A*S*H Larry Linville (who would go on to play a Police Captain of The Week Who’s Annoyed With Kolchak’s Shenanigans in the TV series), who discovers that a body has been completely drained of blood. So three minutes in, any viewer is going to figure a vampire is stalking Las Vegas. (And it was obviously filmed in Vegas; everyone looks believably hot and sweaty.) It takes the Vegas police a whole lot longer to figure things out.

    Enter our intrepid seersucker-clad hero.

    Kolchak is pretty much fully formed the moment he walks into the news office, a smart, cynical, sarcastic reporter with authority issues. You quickly see how he would get on just about anyone’s nerves. (Later he recites all the cities he’s been fired from newspapers in. “Wasn’t it twice in Boston?” his much too young and pretty girlfriend (played by the recently deceased Carol Lynley) asks, to which he holds up three fingers.) He doesn’t think much of being assigned the first murder, but when a second one shows up, also drained of blood, with no tracks leading to her final sandy resting place, he realizes something is up, and tenaciously goes digging into the story, despite staunch opposition from both the police chief (Claude Aikens) and his own editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland, in a role he’d reprise in The Night Strangler sequel and the TV show).

    The plot moves along at a quick pace, police procedural fashion, as it quickly becomes apparent to Kolchak that an actual vampire is killing young women in Las Vegas. The “vampire police procedural” has been done plenty of times since, but this was pretty much the first media instance (though Leslie H. Whitten’s novel The Progeny of the Adder preceded by seven years), and even today, despite the obvious budgetary constraints of a TV movie, it has a compelling intensity to it that later examples have never duplicated.

    But McGavin’s Kolchak is what holds the entire thing together. He was a great, underrated actor, and in the scene where the police finally break down and promise to follow his lead and give him the exclusive, he’s so wonderfully, unbearably smug that you know exactly why he keeps getting fired. The movie has a panoply of solid TV character actors, tight direction, and plenty of tension when (inevitably) Kolchak tracks the vampire back to his lair…

    We watched a beautiful Kino Lorber Blu Ray, but the movie is also available on YouTube if you want to get a taste:

    There are a few extras on the Blu-Ray, including with producer Dan Curtis and director John Llewellyn Moxey, who said it was much easier to get a TV movie made in the early 70s. You had an idea (comedy, drama, horror, whatever), and if someone at the network liked it, you got a greenlight to do it. He said that now there are too many people involved in the process to get anything approved anymore. Wikipedia says that it was made for $450,000 and earned “a 33.2 rating and 48 share,” which is absolutely unheard of for a TV movie in today’s media landscape.

    (More thoughts from Dwight.)

    Three Sentence Review of Tora! Tora! Tora!

    Wednesday, July 5th, 2017

    1st part: Slow, static and talky.
    2nd part: Slow, static and talky.
    3rd part: HOLY FUCK!!!!!

    Criterion Top 10 Lists

    Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

    I wasn’t really considering a Top 10 Week when I posted yesterday’s Talking Heads list (and I may not do it every day), but I stumbled across this this collection of Criterion Top 10 lists from various luminaries. Among the more interesting are:

  • Anthony Bourdain
  • Ricky Jay
  • Jonathan Lethem
  • Joe Mantegna
  • Dominic Monaghan
  • Christopher Nolan
  • Edgar Wright
  • All are worth reading, if not necessarily agreeing with. But it’s good to know I’m not the only person who loves This is Spinal Tap and Brazil

    Movie Review: General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait

    Wednesday, May 15th, 2013

    General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait
    Directed by Barbet Schroeder

    At this remove, few people remember how big Idi Amin Dada was in the 1970s. He wasn’t just an African dictator, he was the African dictator. Richard Pryor spoofed him on TV (“My name is Idi Amin Dada. That’s 3 A’s, 2 D’s, and one gun.”) He made the cover of Time magazine, back when it actually mattered. Never mind that Uganda is only the ninth most populous nation in Africa, or that Amin was arguably less murderous than (to name but a handful of African dictators) Haile Mengistu of Ethiopia, Francisco Macías Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, and possibly half a dozen others. Amin was well known in the 1970s, while the others remained obscure to all but foreign policy wonks.

    I suspect that Barbet Schroeder’s documentary, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, had a lot to do with that. It’s a fascinating film about a man who was a ruthless dictator, giving access to a film crew in expectation that it would make a fine piece of propaganda, unaware of how nakedly it would reveal the vast gulf between his own self-image and reality. Amin was a man of limited intelligence and limitless ego, who would eventually adopt “”His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular” as his preferred title.

    I knew that Idi Amin was crazy, but until I watched Schroeder’s documentary, I didn’t realize he was nine different types of crazy.

    The film follows Amin around to several official and unofficial functions: reviewing troops in parade formation and field maneuvers, giving speeches, watching (and occasionally participating) in musical and dance performances, conducting a waterway nature tour, and conducting a cabinet meeting. All more-or-less normal for a modern head of state, except all these scenes play out differently than they would in a First World country. Amin watches paratroopers descend playground slides. He leads a mock assault on the Golan Heights with a force so small and ill-equipped it would have trouble capturing a 7-11. His cabinet meeting is filled with meaningless platitudes (“You should not be weak, like a woman”), and a voiceover tells us that the Minister of State Amin criticized ended up dead in the Nile two weeks later. He sends inexplicable letters to other heads of state (“If you were a woman, I would marry you,” he says to the President of Tanzania). He says he has prophetic dreams, including one telling him the time and place of his own death. He tells us he’s obtained a secret Israeli policy manual: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

    And yet, despite all that, and despite knowing what a monster he was, the film also displays a playful, charismatic side to Amin. Like Dwight said while we were viewing it, “he’s like a big kid with the world’s biggest toybox.” He loved firing guns and riding boats and having jets fly overhead. He was a competent accordionist and an enthusiastic dancer.

    It’s amazing that Amin let Schroeder film this. There was an hour version of this broadcast on Ugandan TV, and a 90 minute version released in the west. When Amin’s agents transcribed the longer film, the dictator only asked for about two and a half minutes of cuts. When Schroeder refused, Amin rounded up some 500 French citizens in Uganda, put them in a hotel surrounded by his troops, and gave them telephones and Schroeder’s phone number. The director caved to this censorship by hostage, but restored the footage once Amin was deposed.

    The complete film is available online, but not embeddable.

    It’s a fascinating documentary, but by the time it was over, I was tired of watching Idi Amin.

    Movie Review: Safety Not Guaranteed

    Monday, March 4th, 2013

    Safety Not Guaranteed
    Directed by Colin Trevorrow
    Written By Derek Connolly
    Starring Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake Johnson, Karan Soni, Jenica Bergere

    This was a pleasant surprise when I watched it at a “Pre-Hugo Nomination” viewing party. It’s fun, well-executed, light entertainment that just happens to be about (theoretically) time travel.

    The setup: Depressed wallflower Darius (Aubrey Plaza, the girl who had the black bars appear over her mouth every time she cussed in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) working a crappy intern position at a Seattle magazine is given a ride-along assignment to investigate a quirky classified ad by an asshole writer Jeff (Jake Johnson) (“Give me the lesbian and the Indian.” (Karan Soni)) Turns out he’s just trying to hookup with an old flame living in the same town as time travel guy.

    The ad (based loosely on a real ad done as joke filler), asks for a partner to go back in time with, must bring their own weapons, safety not guaranteed.

    They manage to track down Kenneth (Mark Duplass), the guy who placed the ad, but he rumbles asshole writer at once at tells him to get the hell off his porch. Darius has better luck, and soon she’s undergoing survival training him while Jeff rekindles his old flame.

    If it’s not Romantic Comedy 301, then it’s not any later than Romantic Comedy 315: Two Damaged Weirdos Find Each Other. Despite the fact that the overall arc is somewhat predictable, it’s very well-executed, the dialog is clever and there are some surprises along the way. Like a hilarious, incompetently executed heist of a government research facility, where Kenneth walks past an office birthday party in his black intrusion gear. And the revelation that government agents are, in fact, tailing him. Plus the chemistry between Darius and Kenneth is completely believable. And by the end of the film, Jeff is even a little bit less of an asshole.

    Safety Not Guaranteed is less about time travel per say, and more about time in general, and the vital, fleeting nature of human relationships. This came and went pretty quickly last year. While it won’t make you forget Donnie Darko or Primer, as a light romantic comedy with (possibly) time travel elements, it’s very well done, and worked a lot better than I expected. It will probably find a place on my Hugo ballot, and probably deserves a place in (at the very least) the top third of your Netflix queue.

    Oh, and this song appears in the film. It’s pretty good.