Seems like many of the movies I’ve watched lately have had this ‘movie crush’ theme, and (500) Days Of Summer fits squarely into that category. My entire interest in this movie revolved around the fact that Zooey Deschanel was in it, not sure any other actress would have even made me curious about the movie. I just really enjoy her characters, they are quirky, off the wall, awkward, and usually just perfect.
I really went back and forth on this movie, there were a number of scenes and lines that made me laugh, but there were almost an equal number of scenes that just frustrated me. More after the break.
So much of the movie can be summed up in the opening narrative:
This is a story of boy meets girl. The boy, Tom Hansen of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he’d never truly be happy until the day he met the one. This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total mis-reading of the movie ‘The Graduate’. The girl, Summer Finn of Shinnecock, Michigan, did not share this belief. Since the disintegration of her parent’s marriage she’d only love two things. The first was her long dark hair. The second was how easily she could cut it off and not feel a thing. Tom meets Summer on January 8th. He knows almost immediately she is who he has been searching for. This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know upfront, this is not a love story.
The movie follows the relationship of Tom and Summer, how they met and how Tom fell head over heals in love with Summer. Summer likes Tom and has a lot of fun with him, but just never really loves him. Tom is basically emotionally unstable and reaches unimaginable highs with Summer, but then also falls apart and crashes into life-shattering lows without her.
Although there are a number of fun scenes as they spend time together, some of the funniest lines come from the parts of the movie depicting Tom’s emotional roller coaster moments. In short, this movie could be described as a well written, well acted movie about how terrible love and relationship can be, especially when you aren’t with the right person. Getting too detailed about the parts of the movie I enjoyed will give away too much of the plot, so suffice it to say, for what this movie is, it does it well enough.
Dave’s Quick Hits: Gotta confess, I was only interested in this movie because of Zooey Deschanel, if anybody else had played her character I wouldn’t have watched this movie, it had a few funny scenes though, 5 out of 10.
Thoughts From The Better Half: I really didn’t care for this movie at all, I had a lot of distractions during the movie, but from what I saw it’s not worth trying to watch again. I’m weird about relationships and they were both completely stupid in this movie, 1 out of 10
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87% – A clever, offbeat romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer is refreshingly honest and utterly charming.
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