With Star Wars: The Force Awakens just on the horizon, Bernard, CJ, Dustin, and special guest (and giant Star Wars fanboy) Justin Boo go in-depth about the mass anticipation of the new film as well as the feverish passion of the millions of fans of the legendary franchise. Why is there such excitement for the new trilogy when the last one was such an abomination? Also, film critic Rob Trench joins CJ and Bernard to recap the Toronto International Film Festival, from the best to the worst to the fantastic films flying just under the radar. Plus, the return of our Indie Picks of the Week!

Topics

• Indie Picks (2:13)
• Star Wars Hype (15:00)
• TIFF Wrap-Up (45:12)

WTI Articles Referenced in the Podcast

The Fool Review
Me and Earl Review
TIFF Coverage

Subscribe to the Way Too Indiecast

• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher

For fans of independent films, now might be the time to feel vindicated. The transition from the realm of indie to the studio system isn’t a new concept by any means, but in the last several years cutting one’s teeth on the festival circuit has become very lucrative for some directors. Gareth Edwards went from making the low-budget Monsters in 2010 to helming the Godzilla reboot 4 years later (and in doing so went from a 6-figure budget to a 9-figure one); Marc Webb leapt from the twee (500) Days of Summer to taking over Sony’s Spider-Man reboot The Amazing Spider-Man; James Gunn went from R-rated genre fare to handling Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy; Rian Johnson, who already made a big leap from Brick to Looper, launched into the stratosphere when he was picked to direct the 8^th episode of Star Wars; and most recently, Safety Not Guaranteed’s Colin Trevorrow followed up his début with none other than Jurassic World. The glamour of Hollywood is merging with the not so glamorous world of DIY filmmaking, and it’s clearly working out for both the directors and the studios.

It’s natural to wonder how the influx of relatively new directors from festivals like Sundance or SXSW might change the blandness of Hollywood tentpoles, but it might be better to start asking about the other side of this equation. What does this mean for independent films, and will it change the way we perceive indies? Independent films don’t have an industry as vast or profitable as the studios, which means that the indie “system” is much more malleable and, therefore, easier to change.

And it’s evident that, despite the financial success of films like Jurassic World and Godzilla, artistic success is hard to find in this new trend. The boundaries between mainstream and independent have been slowly merging together, but the entire idea of indie has been about separating from the mainstream, and providing an alternative to films designed by committee. What’s happening now is a slow, disparaging shift in what indie means, and an increase in power and control for Hollywood. Indie directors aren’t infiltrating the system; they’re being devoured by it.

Jurassic World and Godzilla

That hasn’t always been the case. The early ’90s saw the success stories of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith. For those three filmmakers, their situation was the ideal. Rather than adapt themselves to the status quo, they were able to apply their distinct styles on a bigger scale. But the film industry is a different beast today. Tarantino, Rodriguez and Smith directed their own original stories and didn’t work with a massive budget. Today, directors are getting scooped up to take over other people’s properties, and the budgets go well past 100 million. It’s nice to think that a certain filmmaker’s unique or irreverent style might successfully port over to the sequel/prequel/reboot/adaptation/etc. blockbuster, but it’s not likely. Investors would be insane to hand over that amount of cash to someone who’s only worked with a small fraction of that money.

All someone has to do is watch what’s been released so far to see how much these director’s distinct qualities from their earlier work(s) have been drowned out by the wants and needs of those truly running the show. Watch Godzilla, or James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and it’s like playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” with directorial trademarks. Gunn may have been able to cast Michael Rooker in a supporting role—a part that could have gone to anyone and no one would have blinked—but Guardians follows a very clear, familiar and formulaic path, one that also helped Marvel continue building the overall story for their massively successful franchise. It didn’t come as a huge surprise when rumours started that Edgar Wright, one of the best genre filmmakers working today, bailed on Ant-Man because Marvel wanted a Marvel movie, not an Edgar Wright movie.

So this brings me back to the first question I asked: What does this mean for independent films? What this new trend has done is turn film festivals like Sundance and SXSW—places designed to celebrate and promote distinct, independent voices—into training grounds for the next studio workman (with extra emphasis on man, as Jessica Ritchey points out). Now, indie features act as showreels or auditions, with people speculating over which directors will get hurled into the maw of the next big-budget property. And by putting the emphasis on this, it pushes the truly independent American filmmakers working today—the Andrew Bujalskis, the Josephine Deckers, the Rick Alversons, the Alex Ross Perrys, the Sean Bakers, the Nathan Silvers, and the Matthew Porterfields, to name a few—even further into the fringe. People look at the trajectories of people like Trevorrow, Edwards, Johnson, Webb, Gunn and others as a sign of indie taking over the mainstream, but it’s more like the mainstream assimilating the indie universe. The pockets of Hollywood studios may be getting bigger, but the opportunity for discovering and supporting groundbreaking new talents appears to be getting smaller with every year.

Jurassic World is one of the mostly highly-anticipated films of the summer, and if the first trailer wasn’t enough to get you excited, the new global one undoubtedly is. Filled with more dinosaurs, more action, and more suspense, if the new trailer is an indication of what’s to come,  Jurassic World could very well be exactly what fans of the series have been waiting for.

Twenty-two years after the events of Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features a fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, as originally envisioned by John Hammond. After 10 years of operation and visitor rates declining, in order to fulfill a corporate mandate, a new attraction is created to re-spark visitor’s interest, which backfires horribly.

Directed by Colin Trevorrow, the film stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ty Simpkins, Jake Johnson, Omar Sy and Judy Greer.

Jurassic World arrives in theaters on June 12th.

Jurassic World trailer

Safety Not Guaranteed thankfully takes its science fiction framework and keeps it in the background, instead putting the focus on its characters and how they grow over the film’s short running time. For the most part the movie gets by on its low-key charm, with two good central performances but the sitcom-like structure drives a giant wedge into the film’s stronger qualities.

A recent college graduate working as an unpaid intern at Seattle Magazine, Darius (Aubrey Plaza) is anti-social and mostly miserable. When Jeff (Jake Johnson), one of the magazine’s writers, takes on a story about an ad looking for a partner to travel back in time with, Darius leaps at the opportunity to work on it. The writer takes Darius along with Arnau (Karan Soni), a nerdy intern who hasn’t been with a woman yet. Darius and Arnau soon find the man who wrote the ad, an awkward grocery store worker named Kenneth (Mark Duplass) who believes he’s being followed and recorded at all times. Darius convinces Kenneth to let her be his time travelling partner, while Jeff tries to get back with his high school sweetheart and Arnau begins to come out of his shell. As Darius gets more involved with Kenneth she starts to fall for him while thinking that he might actually be able to travel back in time.

Plaza and Duplass play slight variations on the kind of roles that they’ve been specializing in over the years. Duplass throws plenty of weirdness on his role as a paranoid outcast, while Plaza brings her character from Parks and Recreation down several hundred notches to something resembling reality. Duplass is terrific at balancing Kenneth’s quirks with the emotional pain his character hides, and Plaza’s greatest strength is the way she gets people to like her without coming across like she’s trying. Their first meeting at the grocery store Kenneth works at is truly enjoyable, showing off their terrific chemistry which is the film’s greatest asset.

Unfortunately Plaza/Duplass’ time is shared with the two subplots involving Jeff and Arnau. Both of the characters’ stories are predictable, and they feel so separate from the main action that at times it feels like they’re in a different film altogether. It also doesn’t help that Jeff’s vain, womanizing qualities make him unlikable while Karan Soni portrays Arnau so broadly that he doesn’t feel like a real person. Each time the film switches its focus to these two it grinds things to a halt.

Luckily the story between Darius and Kenneth is exciting enough to carry things through to the end. The ambiguity over whether or not Kenneth is a genius or a nut is responsible for most of the film’s momentum, and writer Derek Connelly manages to give a definitive answer with a surprisingly satisfying ending. The film’s two subplots feel more like padding which suggests that the time travel story might have been too weak to turn into a feature on its own, but Plaza and Duplass really make the material work. If you can get past the flaws, Safety Not Guaranteed will make for a short but pleasant time.

Winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance this year at the Sundance Film Festival was the indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed. From the producers of Little Miss Sunshine comes a story about how far believing in something can take you. Safety Not Guaranteed stars Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake Johnson, and Karan Soni.

The film is about three people from a Seattle magazine look to cover a story about a man who believes his can time travel. They respond to his classified ad he put in looking for someone to go back in time with him. The ad states that the person’s safety would not be guaranteed since he has only done this once before.

Safety Not Guaranteed official trailer: