Review: "Safety Not Guaranteed"

A curious ad in the personal section of a local newspaper spurs three magazine staffers to investigate the man who placed it. Jeff (Jake Johnson) is the writer who proposes checking into the ad as a potential humor piece. He brings along Darius (Aubrey Plaza) and Arnau (Karan Soni), two interns that he can push the workload onto, while he uses the trip to reconnect with an old girlfriend. With little difficulty, the two interns track down Kenneth (Mark Duplass), a damaged, but likable supermarket employee who is looking for a companion to travel back in time with.

Nothing works out the way each character expects and what begins as a funny, little human-interest story turns out to have a significant impact on all their lives. Darius poses as a candidate for Kenneth's time-traveling adventure in order to get Jeff the story, but what should be easy to dismiss as crazy is not, and Kenneth begins to win her over. Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass aren't your typical romantic comedy pairing, but that helps lend itself to the underdog quality of the film.

Combining elements from many genres -- science fiction, drama, comedy, romance, paranoid conspiracy thriller -- with an off-beat indie sensibility, this is a nice debut feature from director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly that keeps you guessing until the very end. Plaza, Duplass, and Johnson are terrific -- all finding the humor, the heartbreak, and the humanity in these characters, who are all heavily shaped by regret. I especially like that Jeff and Kenneth are two sides of the same coin, both longing for a second chance at happiness -- desperately looking to the past as a way to change their future.

Funny, charming, even suspenseful at times, Safety Not Guaranteed reminds us that there are no sure bets in life, love, or time travel.

"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = B+

Review: "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World"

After man's last ditch effort to stop it has failed, a gigantic meteor is going to collide with our planet, destroying all life on Earth. The end of days is quickly approaching. What will you do with the last few weeks of your life? That is the subject of the new film, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, starring Steve Carell and Keira Knightley.

Dodge (Carell) is alone; his wife ran out on him as soon as the news broke -- presumably to spend her final days with someone else -- and although his friends want to set him up with someone so that he won't be alone, Dodge can't get over his wife leaving him. He meets Penny (Knightley), a young British girl who lives in the same apartment building, and the two form an unlikely bond. She has missed the last commercial airplane flight back to her home and may never see her family again.

Whereas the rest of planet Earth seems to be treating their final time as a cross between the free love of the late 1960's and the chaos of the L.A. riots, Dodge and Penny are seemingly alone in their loneliness. So when Dodge decides to take a chance on tracking down an old flame, he strikes a deal with Penny -- if she helps him get to where he needs to be, he will help her find a way back to her family before the world ends.

The phrase "opposites attract" is certainly something that has been proven true in the past, both onscreen and off, but the likelihood of these two people getting together is so small that it puts a lot of pressure on the film (and performers) to make it believable. Unfortunately, it's not. It doesn't help that Dodge is the least interesting character in the entire movie. He's closed off, bruised, awkward socially -- a doormat, hoping to be as anonymous as possible -- just a minor variation of the same character Carell has played in many films before (Dan in Real Life, The 40-year old Virgin, Crazy Stupid Love), only this time he has even less to do, less to say, and is simply less engaging overall.

Also, the movie never finds a consistent tone, wavering between sentimentality, both lighthearted and broad humor, and brief stings of deadly seriousness. It's asking a lot of an audience to swing in that many directions and would take an extremely seasoned filmmaker to link those together. First-time director Lorene Scafaria (who adapted the screenplay for Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, a film that really masters its tone) is ambitious to take on such a task, but not wholly successful at doing so here.

There are funny and touching moments in the film that work individually, but Seeking a Friend for the End of the World never seems to gel as a whole or connect its characters in anything other than a circumstantial way. I give it points for trying, but it would have been better to stick to heartbreaking with a touch of comedy (or just go completely outrageous). Instead, the film is at best a sometimes charming, sometimes funny film, or at worst, a sometimes dull and often predictable mess.

"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = C-

Review: "Ted"

A young boy with no friends wishes for his teddy bear to come to life so they can be best friends forever, and magically, that's exactly what happens. Ted (voiced by "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane) and John (Mark Wahlberg) grow up playing together, being Thunder-Buddies for life, and later on . . . drinking, getting high, and partying together. John strikes gold when he meets Lori (Mila Kunis), a beautiful young woman and a successful professional who for some reason doesn't seem to mind that John has zero career potential and spends most of his time getting baked and watching Flash Gordon with Ted. After four years, however, Lori finally wants more, and the couple is ready to take their relationship to the next level, but John's friendship with Ted will threaten to tear them apart.

MacFarlane, who also co-wrote and directed the movie, is hilarious as Ted, and the film will certainly appeal to fans of his work on "Family Guy." If being funny is all you need out of a movie, Ted has plenty of laughs to get by on, including a guessing game that provides Wahlberg a chance to make the Micro-Machine Man proud, a hysterical hotel room brawl, and the two partying with their favorite celebrity -- a cameo that will delight fans of a particular eighties camp-classic. Ted is raunchy and irreverent, a comedy that insults every single possible demographic, using language that would make Andrew Dice Clay howl with laughter.

From a more critical perspective, Ted features strong writing, but throws in two unnecessary attempts at creating a villain for the piece and falls apart in the last act. In the end, it's just another lazy comedy with no real consequences for its characters' actions. A film that represents the reality for a growing number of people who are working dead-end jobs and perpetually avoiding adulthood, Ted has keenly observed its target audience, but has nothing of value to say to them.  Like John and Ted, the film has no ambition except to have a good time.

"Setting the Frame" Film Grade = C+