Thursday, February 23, 2012

(500) Days of Summer (2009)



“What happens if you fall in love?”

            (500) Days of Summer when I saw first saw it in theaters restored my faith in the film industry. Here is a film that is so unique, so carefully and wonderfully made that when I saw it I could not believe what I was seeing. I left the theater feeling happy at what had been played before me. The movie is so good and so different that for a while it may boggle your mind.
            Right from the beginning a title card tells us that this is not a typical love story. Yes it is a story of how boy meets girl but instead of the girl being the one who falls head over heels in love and cannot stand to be away from the boy and is heartbroken when they separate it is the boy who goes through those emotions.
            Tom (Joseph Gordon- Levitt) works in a greeting card company when he has a degree in architecture (*hey sounds like me I have a degree in Art History and I have only been able to get retail jobs*). His life is pretty uninspiring and boring until he sees the new office assistant Summer (Zooey Deschanel).
            The movie is not done in chronological order instead it goes through all the highs and lows of Tom’s five hundred days of thinking of Summer. One day we may see them sitting in the park all happy the next it may be after they had fight or Tom realizing that Summer did not love him as much as he loved her.
            There are so many scenes that just make this movie fantastic: Tom is so in love that he imagines himself dancing and singing to “You Make My Dreams” by Hall and Oates; when Summer has broken his heart he goes to see a French movie and he pictures himself in the Avant Garde movie; in the end when he sees Summer after a long at time a party the screen is split into “Expectations and “Reality.” I really like how the movie is so true to how life is. We all have expectations of how a relationship is going to turn out but those are our expectations not the expectations of the other person. We can feel so in love and on cloud nine the one day and a week later we can completely hate the person.
            Joseph Gordon- Levitt and Zooey Deschanel were fabulous together and as their characters. No other actors could have done a better job. Gordon- Levitt really did make you feel sorry for him when Summer broke his heart and we rooted for him as he was falling in love. Summer is not a character that is easy to like since we are being shown the relationship process through Tom’s eyes. She really is kind of a bitch (as my mom and brother so kindly put the character). I really like Deschanel a lot so I am bias when I say she was very good. I have yet to see a role that she plays where she is not good. But I guess I am not the only one who really liked her in the role since this basically launched her career even though she had been in several films before.
            (500) Days of Summer is a movie all film lovers should see because the director took a risk on creating a type of movie that was different from anything that had been released before it in the 2000s decade. The story is just great to sit through because you are not getting bullshitted around and the ending is not all happy and romantic like stupid chick flicks. (500) Days of Summer may not be for everyone (it is very hipster-ish) but for those who truly like movies and really want to see some thought and care go into a modern movie than sit through this one.
 

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