Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Safety Not Guaranteed

I didn’t catch much this weekend with a number of other things getting in the way, but I did manage to slip in this indie gem from earlier in the year that I had wanted to see, but never got a chance to find at the theater. The story surrounds a young newspaper intern sent on assignment to uncover the truth behind a mysterious personal ad offering the chance at time travel.

Aubrey Plaza stars as young Darius whose mother’s death has kept her from forming serious relationships or finding meaningful employment. While fetching toilet paper for a local magazine, one of the journalists offers up a unique story concept to seek information from the author of a cryptic personal ad and hopefully uncover a seriously nutty individual they can exploit for the Seattle magazine’s readership. Darius doesn’t quite buy into the hack job, but goes along in the hopes that the ad-writer is serious and she might be able to go back in time and stop the accident that led to her mother’s death.

Plaza is endearing in a socially awkward way (she reminds me a good deal of Jessica Harper from Suspiria fame), but she’s aided by a pair of strong actors giving carefully planned performances that seem almost effortless. Jake Johnson plays the self-absorbed journalist whose ulterior motive for visiting the small Washington town lies in a lost love from his High School days. Mark Duplass takes on the role of the “nutty” inventor Kenneth whose paranoia is almost as contagious as his charm. The three work wonders on a clever and entertaining script written by Derek Connolly and admirably visualized on the screen by director Colin Trevorrow.