(500) Days of Summer: Review'd

I've once again just gotten back from an advanced screening, and I am happy to inform you this movie is actually one I enjoyed seeing(unlike the last movie I saw). This movie is truly one I want to own, and that is rare of these kinds of movies. I'm sorry I gave away the ending of this review, but I had to get this out first. If you read nothing else, I hope you read this and decide to see (500) Days of Summer if Harry Potter happens to be sold out this weekend.

Let me cut to the chase, this is not a spoiler, they tell you this in the beginning. This is not a love story. He does not get the girl. There is no love at first sight. There is no miraculous circumstance that ends with true love. She is not "the one". That's what makes this movie so great. It's a romantic comedy minus the cliche predictability, and it's amazingly blunt about the nonexistence of true love. It takes all those years of romance stories and throws it away. This movie is about a girl, but not just any girl. If you've had a life outside of your computer room you've met this girl. I can't speak for the women, I'm just speaking to the guys here. She's the girl that you can't get out of your head but you wish you could. She's the kind who cannot commit in any way, she refuses to. When a guy wants a steady relationship she looks at him like he's insane. She's one who likes you for a while, then for some reason completely ignores you for the rest of your life, or even worse... wants to stay friends after ending the relationship. Yeah, she's a living nightmare. She may be cute, but behind those giant blue eyes is a heart of stone.

The girl in question is named Summer(Zooey Deschanel), hence the title. Said girl meets boy. This boy is named Tom(Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and he falls for her in a heartbeat. Unfortunately for him, he loses her just as easily. The movie is told in a completely nonlinear fashion, skipping through various days and phases of his relationship with Summer. But it never feels disjointed. It's perfectly interwoven so much that you hardly notice the story is skipping through time with no clear pattern. It's told perfectly.

This also is one of the more creative movies I've seen in a while. It has great visual representations of Tom's various feelings throughout his obsession with Summer, as well as alternate realities based on expectations as opposed to reality. It adds another great flair to this movie that enhances the experience, giving it a very different feel from the majority of Hollywood films. Maybe this is common in Fox Searchlight films, I don't know. This is the first one I've ever bothered to see and the only one I've been interested in. It almost makes me want to go back and see what else Fox Searchlight has made.

I've yet to address another great this about this movie; the humor. This movie is hilarious! I've never laughed much ina romantic comedy, but I had quite a few laugh out loud moments here, and was never bored. I unfortunately had to go to the bathroom and missed a scene or two, but I reluctantly did so. I never felt bored in this movie, and the laughs were peppered throughout the movie in such a great way. I'm not going to spoil any of these jokes though, you need to see it for yourself. You'd do yourself a disservice in not doing so.

But there's one more thing about this movie that made it great; and that is the performances. They were so real. These were real people on screen, they seemed completely genuine throughout the entire film. I never had a nitpick about anyone's acting in this film. The director is truly great at getting all these people to seem real on film. The writing never came to my mind throughout this entire film because I wasn't watching a movie, I was watching a man flashing back throughout the past few months of his life, I was watching real people interact and was invested in what happened to them.

Plus, the soundtrack is fantastic.

So it should be pretty easy to guess what my rating is by now, I have no flaws that come to mind after coming out of this film. And I give this the a HIGH FULL PRICE. I mean, the highest full price you could ever get before becoming Better Than Sex. I had to debate with myself whether it was better than sex, but I decided against it only because I've never seen a movie I think is completely perfect and I've never had sex. I'm a total guy who loves action movies and superheroes, but this to me is better than any of those I've seen. This is a movie for everybody and you owe it to yourself to see this film as soon as possible. Let Hollywood know that you just need to make a good movie for people to enjoy it and pay for it.