Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow, 2012)

[tabuno]

Using time travel as a backdrop, Safety Not Guaranteed is about regret, about the deeply personal experiences of “love” and the stuff we carry around with us that make us embarrassed or afraid, and ignoring the possibility of acting on that own stuff. This movie offers a fusion of normal and abnormal behavior, everyday life along with the comedic and dramatic surprises, even tragic, that life drops in on people from time to time. Without pretension, this light-hearted, crazy-like world of paranoia and secrets is wrapped up in discovering relationships, unexpectedly explorations of one’s inner world, and risking exposure of one’s own personal locked and sensitive mysteries. What is real, what is crazy? The movie incorporates conspiracy theory, mystery thriller, and romance and comedy (the last two aptly displayed separately). At the same time this movie presents characters that could be genuinely real people all with observable flaws from the “normal,” or, in short, they could be you or I. It’s about conflict, reactive behavior based on fear or hopes (those current or subsequent impulsive wonderful expansive and those terrible immature feelings and decisions we make) and dreams not accepted and rejected, and the resulting regret or resolution and discovery of what we can or could do about it. Safety Not Guaranteed is a look at ourselves sometimes in ways that we’ve experienced before and in ways that we only imagined or feared and failed to and thus preventing ourselves from life that in turn prompts up to have wanted to make our own time machines.

The movie keeps the audience guessing, leaping from one belief about sanity to another belief about insanity, keeping the audience feeling uncomfortable, entertained, and being off-balance – to almost a dizzying sense of a delicious mixture of sweet and sour, hot and cold.
It’s possible to see elements from the movies Contact (1997) which instead focused on the larger religious, political, and science fiction themes rather than the more intimate everyday personal experience of life, The Fisher King (1991) that entered the world of mental illness in a creative, fantastical but respectful and meaningfully emotive way, and K-Pax (2001) that entered the world of mental illness but also in a world of other-worldly reality and sanity. What’s special about this movie is that it doesn’t explain explicitly and allows the audience to become immersed into the film experience and discovery and speculate in their own time and in their own way. The movie appears to have been produced, directed, and acted with sincerity which permeates out into the film experience itself and thus enhances the belief and trust of what is experienced, connecting the film to the audience in an intimate, close way making the experience more powerful and meaningful.

The only distracting element was the sync over musical scene that distanced and partially broke the magical immersion into the movie and instead flipped the audience back into a more outside perspective looking at the scene, realizing that the scene was created and made up, shot and then remixed with subsequent singing, albeit quality (perhaps unnecessarily good), recording voice-over. What the audience is allowed to come away however, with is the mixture of the past and the present and how one’s experiences the now that may offer another future. In the end this movie is about going it alone or with a partner, when if one chooses a partner, you have compromises and sacrifices but also someone their to cover your back.

[Chris Knipp]

I actually reviewed this movie when it came out last June. My original thread/review on it is here:

http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3294-SAFETY-NOT-GUARANTEED-%28Colin-Trevoroow-2012%29&highlight=safety

I also mentioned CHRONICLE (which I sort of forgot about) and PRIMER, whose director has a new Sundance film that I'll be seeing probably as part of New Directors/New Films 2013.

I'm glad you saw this. I would have looked at the DIY sci-fi aspect a bit more.

[tabuno]

When I entered the name of the movie in this website's search energy, nothing came up regarding the movie. Odd, I thought. I tried again and nothing. But I tried to connect my comments with any previous commentary on this movie.

[tabuno]

Back on May 16, 2005, I had this to say about Primer (2004), a time travel movie that Chris apparently likes and uses a basis for comparison of such movies, particularly Safety Not Guaranteed. I on the other hand didn't like the movie so much and thus I don't use it for comparisons to other movies. I can't say I want to spend my time looking at the movie again just to see if I've changed my tastes:

"This obscure look at time travel from a bunch of small enterprising wannabees tries to be sophisticated with a low budget and capture a low-key approach to movie-making. Much of the suspense and understanding come indirectly, all the while the audience is subjected to start-up business dialogue and a home grown version of Blair Witch Project without the intense dread or excitement. Somehow the informal - semi-real manner in which this whole movie goes down has some merit in terms of live acting, but in some ways it is also unpolished and confusing, with the pacing off, slowed down by attempts to come across as natural. Unfortunately there is too much left unspoken, unexplained, unexperienced, with too much fill in the spaces and too much thinking on the part of the audience to appreciate and enjoy the experience. This time travel experiment had its merits in trying to be believable with real ethical dilemmas, but only ends up with the parting of the ways. Five out of Ten Stars."

[Chris Knipp]

Primer's Metacritic rating is 68, which is pretty good especially for something so mystifying. It has occasioned considerable discussion and comment. I found it so fascinating and puzzling I went to see it twice in the same week, which I don't often do.

As for the lesser mystery of finding my SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED review, I had trouble at first too, but I simplified the search to just 'safety' and I got it. Usually you get a page of titles and have to search it. But you know that I'm sure.

The thing PRIMER and SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED have in common is the way low budget movies can seem more real than ones using all all the latest technology and CGI, which we simply know to be fake. The stuff in INCEPTION was impressive, but anybody knows it's expensive computer-generated imagery. I'm pretty sick of that stuff, which goes with shlocky blockbusters. If what weirdness in the story of PRIMER is happening in their garage or storage space rental, why not watch it on a movie made in a garage or storage space rental? This is kind of the BLAIR WITCH PROJECT principle, but in a less genre-based form.

[tabuno]

I don't often read Chris being so interested in a movie. It would be a challenging experience to have an opportunity to see Primer again and then see what if anything I missed over seven years ago. If I find some down time and easy access, I may just see what the buzz continues to be about this movie.

[Chris Knipp]

You don't think I'm usually interested in a movie? What do you think I'm doing with my time?

I think the new film by Carruth, the maker of PRIMER is going to bring out, will give rise to a lot of new discussion of PRIMER, which may be enlightening. It's not a perfect movie by any means, but it's a very interesting one, that's all.

[tabuno]

Chris wrote, "I found it so fascinating and puzzling I went to see it twice in the same week, which I don't often do." It would appear to me that this statement suggests that the movie Primer had something to do with Chris doing something he doesn't do often which further suggests that his seeing this movie twice in the same week would either mean the movie was so terrible that he wanted to check to see if he might have been wrong about it or that it was so "fascinating," intriguing, good, "puzzling" or sufficiently important to go see twice among the other things that he does with his time which I presume consists of sleeping a little at least, eating, and of course going to films all over the world.

[Chris Knipp]

Mainly it was puzzling, and very intriguing and different. But when you said (why must you always use the third person?), "I don't often read Chris being so interested in a movie," I thought that was strange, because I'm passionately interested in a lot of movies; I was only saying I don't often go back to see one again right away because it's mystified me. Maybe I should.

As I said, in New Directors/New Films, word is that Shane Carruth's followup to PRIMER is coming: "'The series will also present Upstream Color, a new film written and directed by Mr. Carruth, and which is described in a news release as "a love story embedded in a horrifying kidnap plot whose full import isn’t revealed until the final, poignant moments."' It sounds like there may be an intentional puzzle element in this one too.

As for PRIMER, I've just come across Mike D'Angelo's Esquire piece (http://www.esquire.com/features/movies/ESQ1104-NOV_MOVIES) on it. He makes plenty of sense of it. The fact that it can't be fully understood on first viewing should not be a condemnation. Why shouldln't some movies be tricky, smart, and complicated? PRIMER reproduces the effect its main characters have of treading ground so new they don't know what they're getting into.

You, Tabuno, say SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED is about regret, and that may be so, but seems largely about following someone along who seems rather crazy, when you don't really know what's doing to happen till the very end. PRIMER is smarter, but SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED is similar in being a good low-budget sci-fi movie set in the present day. Your description is so general that readers would have little sense of the content and plot of the film.

[tabuno]

I probably have been trained on posting on IMDb where it's very important to avoid spoilers unless one is careful to not them. I also hate it when other people tell me the plot, so I typically in the Japanese method of indirectness avoid being too specific and in most cases I assume most people have seen the movie so that I can just talk about technical details without revealing too much about the movie.

[Chris Knipp]

SPOILER ALERT!

I always thought knowing the plot was a useful prerequisite to watching a movie or play or reading a novel or poem. John dies at the end. So does Hamlet. Does that really spoil it for you? Then you will not enjoy traditional literature as traditional people enjoyed it. The Anglo Saxons knew what happens to Beowulf. Their interest in listening to the bard retell it was in the flourishes he added. So it is not the what of a story but the how of the telling that matters, and knowing the what helps you appreciate the how better. Watching a movie or reading a book to find out "how it turns out" is a goofy, primitive way of experiencing what just might be art. I even liked knowing how my comic books ended, when I read comic books, if they were the "Classics Illustrated" ones.

Spoiler warnings are something I never heard of untiul the late Nineties when the great unwashed started "publishing" their "reviews" of movies on IMDb (like me). Still, this worry goes with the modern illusion of "innovation" that assumes art is always new. This is presumably a 19th-century idea, which came in with the Industrial Revolution. It's also an aspect of global capitalism. That sounds paranoid, maybe borderline crazy. But what I mean is that a commercial vision of all life is predicated on the idea of ever-new products that people will want to buy. If movie ads said "This is exactly like the movie you just saw last year, with slight variations," it woudn't fly. But that's actually what people want, and what they get. It's what franchises are. The same thing over and over with slight variations. So it's really not so different from the Angles and the Saxons. The difference is the illusion that you don't know how it ends -- or that if you do, it will all be "spoiled" for you. Wake up! You know how it ends! You just need to know which one of the five possible plots every story follows is being used for this particular movie.

Secret: you can give away the plot on IMDb. They won't notice.

[tabuno]

I hate knowing to much about a movie except the theme or topic. I usually most like to experience a movie as if it was fresh, new, somewhat unpredictable, a simulation like what one experiences in real life - the unknown street corner and not knowing what's around it, or like Lost In Translation, its the authentic natural progression that we get to vicariously experience what the character experiences for the first time. This bias also extends to my criticisms of some movies where the audience doesn't know as much as the characters who are performing on the screen, familiarity that characters know about other characters or the background story that helps to explain their behavior. If such isn't included in the movie or is left out not using a backstory, it usually upsets me.

Nevertheless the less I know about how the movie is going to go, the more I like it... This preference is likely derived from childhood as I read many science fiction stories where it was like following the footsteps of characters exploring the unknown, fresh, new, exciting, scary...

[Chris Knipp]

I understand your concern. You want to be surprised. We all do. Of course it is not necessary or desirable to know every detail of a new film, how its details will unfold. I never said that. I do think however that "plot" and "theme" are interchangeable, and we know the outlines. There aren't many plots, really.

The fact is that you can know "what happens" in a movie, play, novel, poem or piece of music and it can still be fresh and surprising. If this were not true, nobody would would want to go to a concert of classical music, or hear a favorite rock or pop artist perform, or see a famous play.

The element of surprise is only a tiny aspect of watching a movie. We appreciate the movie better when we have already seen it before and on subsequent viewings can savor more thoroughly its many nuances (if it was worth watching in the first place), observe elements that had eluded us previously, experience it more fully as art and as craft.

Personally, I often forget how a movie ends, so I'm still surprised if I watch it a year later! But it's the style ad the art I am interested in. And ultimately one cannot discuss a film intelligently without taking into account all that goes on in it.