500 Days of Summer [Blu-ray]

 

 

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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.

I watched this movie not quite knowing if I would like it- I'm a chick-lit book kind of girl but don't gravitate towards romances in the movie department. "(500) Days of Summer" is far more than your typical romance.

Tom and Summer (she's a person, not a season) meet at work. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl keeps boy at arm's length. Boy and girl must work through their differences and find out if they are meant to be.

The casting of this movie was spot on. I wasn't initially sure if Joseph Gordon-Levitt would be any good in this movie. I guess that I had images of his "3rd Rock From the Sun" character stuck in my head. He was spot-on as a 20-something in love. And Zooey Deschanel was fabulous, but she's been fabulous in everything that I've seen her in so far.

The movie doesn't follow your typical time frame, and by that I mean it doesn't start at the beginning and work its way through to the end. We may see a scene from Day 3 one minute, and then a scene from Day 241 the next. It is done so effectively and so clearly that not for one minute will you be shaking your head and wondering what in the world is going on.

The ending wasn't at all what I expected, and I loved that. This is a must-watch movie, romance fan or not!

(500) Days of Summer is probably one of my favourite movies in the genre next to Garden State. A great story and the copy I got came with a Digital Copy which was awesome to throw onto my iPod touch. I've watched this movie more than five times and still enjoy it!

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3.0 out of 5 stars "Loneliness is underrated."
Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a twenty-something greeting card writer, recalls the 500 days in which he loved a girl named Summer (Zooey Deschanel). Read more

Published on May 17 2010 by Kona

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