OK, I know I’m about a year late to the party on this one, but I just watched this movie for the first time last night. I had heard from any number of sources that this was a great movie, but circumstance only allowed me the chance to see it now.
Most of the things I love about (500) Days of Summer are the things that everyone else goes bonkers over. The fragmented narrative as Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who couldn’t be further removed from his 3rd Rock from the Sun days1 reflects on his relationship in bits and pieces. Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel being utterly adorable as Tom and the titular Summer. The way writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber managed to make every note of dialogue feel genuine, in a film best described as a romantic comedy, no less. And then there’s Marc Webb, best known as a music video director, who gives a feature length film the same kind of quirkiness that comes with good music videos without crossing into the land of hipsterism.
And then there’s the soundtrack. Everyone remembers the fantastic bit with Hall & Oates’s “You Make My Dreams Come True”, but across the board (500) Days of Summer hits it out of the park musically. It mercifully avoids the middle-of-the-road dreary pop music of 2009, but stops short of going with songs as completely obscure and pretentious as the soundtrack to Juno2. And maybe it’s just because I have a special relationship with the music of The Smiths3, but I couldn’t help but love the fact that the two meet over my favorite Smiths song. It just felt, for lack of a better word, real.
If you haven’t seen (500) Days of Summer yet, I can’t recommend it enough. Unless you just got out of a relationship. Or into one. In those cases, you might want to hold off a bit. But for everyone else, you can’t really go wrong with this one.
The Smiths – There is a Light and it Never Goes Out [iTunes]
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1Yep, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was Tommy on 3rd Rock ten years ago. I guarantee someone’s mind was just blown after reading that.
2Fact: I might be one of about 6 people on Earth who hated the soundtrack to Juno
3I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but I first started listening to The Smiths because they were the favorite band of a girl I was trying to date at one point in college. That didn’t work out. Listening to The Smiths did.
Filed under: What I'm Watching Tagged: | movies, Soundtracks, The Smiths, What I'm Watching
