I didn’t get to see as many films as I would have liked to this year, but the ones I saw were pretty uniformly great. Here’s a quick rundown:
Safety Not Guaranteed
It’s in theaters now, and it’s definitely charming. You may consider the field of medium-budget romantic comedies with an emphasis on time travel pretty much sewn up. Aubrey Plaza is the co-lead with Mark Duplass, and you couldn’t really ask them to be more likable. The plot centers around snarky journalists following up on a crazy-sounding classified ad in hopes of mocking the hayseed who posted it. Meeting, mocking and table turning follow in their course, but there’s a real sweetness that threatens at every moment to go full treacle on you, but never does. Pretty satisfying, even for a guy who’d prefer a romcom moratorium.
My Sucky Teen Romance
The director is 19. She was eighteen when she made this. She was at the screening and couldn’t have been more charming. It’s not even her first feature.
The film is a nerd melt of monster movie, fantasy con expose, coming-of-age story and surprisingly deft sendup of popular dorkdom. The actors are decent, given their age and relative lack of experience, and they make the most of what was clearly a limited budget. Maybe 15 minutes too long, but fresh and clever and most assuredly a sign of great things to come. I don’t know if it’s got distribution, but it will surely be on Netflix or some other kind of VOD, and I hope people support her.
Compliance
Strangest film I saw this year. Its a dramatization of a true story you may have heard on ‘This American Life’ or some other such outlet.
It’s set in a fast food restaurant. The manager gets a phone call. The caller identifies himself as a cop. He accuses the pretty girl at the register of stealing from a customer, and enlists the manager’s help in detaining and searching the cashier. The manager reluctantly complies. From there things swerve in a decidedly ‘Stanford Experiment’ kind of direction. It’s an uncomfortable movie about an uncomfortable thing happening to people who appear to be both too decent and too clever to follow the caller’s increasingly bizarre instructions. I don’t know how strongly I’d recommend it, but it had me talking about it for a couple of days.
Take This Waltz
Indie-flavored, precious but ultimately successful relationship drama directed by Sarah Polley. Love, betrayal, aquarobics – it’s all in there. The performances are strong, and Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman deliver surprisingly mature and restrained performances. Michelle Williams is soulful and lost and impossible to dislike, at least for anyone with eyes and a heart. The theatrical run is likely to be limited, but it will make a worthy rental.
The Revisionaries
Save this for a day when you want to get really angry.
This is a movie about the gentle folk who set Texas textbook policy, and by doing so very heavily influence the textbooks the nation gets to use. It’s a movie about how the Texas Board of Education has been hijacked by people who honestly believe that men and dinosaurs shared the earth a scant few thousand years ago. It’s also a movie about how out of control our American populist anti-intellectual streak has become.
It’s a well-told story, and the director works very hard not to mock any of his subjects. It’s likely that if you agree with the young earth creationist who chairs the textbook committee, you might see an entirely different movie unfold than I did. But when I heard ‘Someone has to stand up to these experts’ the second or third time I got chills.
