Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

April 1, 2018 6:34 AM

Three magazine employees head out on an assignment to interview a guy who placed a classified advertisement seeking a companion for time travel.
posted by ellieBOA (8 comments total)

I loved this movie when I saw it, I wish it was still streaming on Netflix so I could watch it again.

There are a handful of movies I put in a "surprise tonal shift" category. Where I went into them somewhat blind as to where the movie was going, ones where the genre shifts partway through, and/or where I get surprised in a happy way by the emotion of the ending. "Safety Not Guaranteed" was one of those for me. I'd heard good things about the movie, but not a lot of details, so, I went into it not knowing whether I was watching a movie about a time traveler or a movie about a delusional person, so, getting to the end was such a delight.

My one gripe about the movie is the age difference between Mark Duplass and Kristen Bell -- in 2012 he was 36 and she was 32, and they were supposed to have been school-age contemporaries. Maybe Duplass' Kenneth was meant to be the same age as Kristen Bell's Belinda, but, they didn't look it. (Aubrey Plaza also looks way younger than him, though there's only an 8-year age difference which isn't egregious by Hollywood or non-Hollywood standards, though I have some vague memory that there was an actress of Duplass' age that got bumped in favor of Plaza.)
posted by oh yeah! at 11:45 AM on April 1, 2018

I saw this pretty much cold, and really enjoyed it. It reminded me of Happy Accidents.
posted by rmd1023 at 2:59 PM on April 1, 2018

Coming to the film with no information except having read about the real ad, I found it delightful. The absurd-but-not-hammy tone of the film is hard to get right, and they pulled it off beautifully.

My one gripe about the movie is the age difference between Mark Duplass and Kristen Bell -- in 2012 he was 36 and she was 32, and they were supposed to have been school-age contemporaries.

Wow. That's a very fine-tuned ability to distinguish ages. I'm a lot farther along the face-blindness continuum than most, and anyone between 14 and 70 looks more or less the same to me, but it never would have occurred to me they weren't old school pals.
posted by eotvos at 10:56 AM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I looked up their ages on IMDb, if that wasn’t obvious. I just remember being thrown by Kristen Bell’s appearance on first watching the movie because of how much younger she looked than Duplass (which, I’m sure was partly influenced by me knowing her from Veronica Mars where she was an adult playing a teen), but then later hearing/reading some interview with an actress talking about how discouraging it was to have lost out on the Aubrey Plaza role for being too old despite being the same age as Duplass. The fact that both actresses were younger than the male lead just stuck out to me - not as bad as pairing 60-70 year old actors with 20-somethings, certainly, but still.
posted by oh yeah! at 12:06 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I thought this was fun/interesting.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:56 PM on April 2, 2018

I hear they shot both endings (the machine works, it doesn't) and made the switch at the last minute.
posted by erikgrande at 9:12 PM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

just finally saw this movie, I'm a sucker for time-travel stuff so I had this on my netflix DVD queue (it's sadly not streaming anymore). I also had no idea where this was going, but I found the whole thing delightful, albeit the stuff with Jeff and Liz was kinda unnecessary, but the movie needed to fill some time. I guess it's a foil device, i.e. their relationship vs Darius' and Kenneth's.

I also highly enjoyed the original song from Mark Duplass, "Big Machine".
posted by numaner at 10:24 AM on July 8, 2021

oh yeah!: "later hearing/reading some interview with an actress talking about how discouraging it was to have lost out on the Aubrey Plaza role for being too old despite being the same age as Duplass."

Found this in IMDB trivia:
"The part of Darius was written for Aubrey Plaza, because writer Derek Connolly wanted to work with her. Jake Johnson was likewise director Colin Trevorrow's first choice for the part of Jeff."
posted by numaner at 10:30 AM on July 8, 2021