500 Days plays as one of the most inventive and original movies I have seen in a long time. Not all relationships are love stories, and we may not know going in, if this person is the 'one.' We may wonder but we may not know.
You may have noticed that when you listen to a story you immediately tend to identify with the lead character. Here though, the writer cleverly flips and reverses the male female duality, so that we experience a shift and a split in perception, she is the one with walls, the realist, neat and organised, emotionally unavailable, he is the one seeking relationship, looking to break those walls and make an emotional connection, the romantic fantasist discussing the relationship with friends. She focuses on the present. He focuses on the future. If you're like me, thefurther you get into the movie the more you may notice yourself looking at relationships in new ways.
If you're into personality types: He is feeling and intuiting. She is thinking and sensing.
What I love most about this movie, is not just the acting, not just the directing, not just the storytelling, but its fresh, inventive, unabashedly non linear non formula Indie beating Hollywood's formula way, giving us scenes, emotions and insights that linger long after the credits roll.
500 Days is full of memorable scenes: the morning after scene, when you feel like high fiving the world, the Ikea scene, The French movie metaphor scene, when the robot cries, the split screen expectations reality sequence.
The story unfolds in a non linear fashion, dipping in different days at random, with a recurring skyline motif the connecting thread between scenes. This time distortion technique somehow makes sense, partly because this is how we remember relationships. My favorite scene is the park bench where he tells her his dream of changing the skyline, and she asks him to draw it on her forearm, and then it fades perfectly into the skyline motif, planting that seed. The park bench becomes turning point and bookend.
I love Zooey's deadpan expressions, and when she plays logical and detached. Her sister Emilt has made a career out of playing a logician on Bones.
Joseph Gordon Levitt, whose facial expressions resemble Heath Ledger sometimes, excels as everyman Tom Hanson, who writes greeting cards but really wants to be an architect. He played lead in one of my favorite movies of 2006
The Lookout [Blu-ray] as a young man with amnesia sucked into a bank robbery.
Zooey was outstanding as the lead in Tin Man mini series, the reimagining of Wizard of Oz, which I highly recommend. She excelled in Elf with Will Ferrell, and now she excels inher own tv comedy. Quite an endearing character.
If you would like to watch a movie that is different from the usual Hollywood fare, I highly recommend it. Hope this was helpful.