500 Days Of Summer
UPDATE: OUR PREVIEW SCREENING IS NOW FULL! EEP, IT WAS NEVER LIKE THIS PRE TWITTER.
Rom-coms tend to unfold over days or weeks. This one takes a more realistic year and a half. 500 Days Of Summer is not exactly a documentary, since Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (aka "bargain basement Heath Ledger") are still improbably gorgeous and articulate. And it gives off an unmistakably Garden State-scented whiff of loving itself sick with its own cleverness and poignancy. But there's nonetheless something about it that feels ‘real'.
Not the calculated whimsy of that Hall & Oates dance scene. Not the all-too-familiar (and ultimately, inconsequential) joy of believing you're meant to be with someone because you share the same tastes and cultural references. Not even the way it leaps about chronologically to mimic the scattershot way we remember our love affairs.
Rather, it's a movie about disappointed expectations. Tom (Gordon-Levitt) is a would-be architect slumming it as a greeting-card writer, but deep down he clearly believes his own platitudes. Summer (Deschanel), his boss's PA, frustrates Tom because she refuses to fall for him the way he has for her. Maybe when she says she doesn't believe in love, she's saying she doesn't believe in rom-coms.
Format: Cinema
Mood: Whimsical
Keywords: Zooey Deschanel
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