500 Days of Summer [Sundance 09]

[polkablues]

Great poster.

and Zooey 

Yes. That poster is essential to my bedroom.

Great, now I'm gonna have 500 Days of Boner

Yeah, I know what you like.



Perverts.

[Kal]

http://www.imdb.com/boards/

I already registered you a name. Your username is FormerlyKalFromXixax and your password is XIXAX

See ya.

I already have an account, thanks anyway.

If I'd  left Xixax you would miss me. Admit it.

[Convael]

I saw this and liked it a lot.  I saw it in some old fancy theater at an indie film festival... It had a lot of the standard cliches in it but enough non-cliche stuff that it was still done very well.  It wasn't TOO indie/hipster which is what I was afraid of it being... I didn't need a Juno 3 after Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist aka Juno 2.  It was also shot really well and was pretty beautiful which surprised me.  I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt is gonna be a really good actor in a couple years... Not so much with Zooey.  This movie is definitely definitely worth your $10 and was extremely fun to sit through.  Lots and lots of laughs in the audience... so much so that I missed small bits of dialogue.

[MacGuffin]

'(500) Days of Summer's' many ways to tell a love story
By Mark Olsen; Los Angeles Times

Young man meets young woman. They court, fall for each other and eventually split up. Told as a postmortem patchwork of emotions and memories, "(500) Days of Summer" skips across the life of a fleeting relationship, with all of its disagreements, deep connections and trips to IKEA, lingering moments in private and enthusiasms shared in public. The film manages to be a romance even as it assays a relationship predestined to failure, perhaps being all the more romantic for chasing the effervescence of love in spite of the knowledge of its doom.

The feature debut of music video and commercial director Marc Webb, "(500) Days of Summer" -- yes, the parentheses are part of the title -- is a heady, ambitious mixture, equal parts the angsty smarts of "Annie Hall," the free-form exuberance and change-up style of the French New Wave and the particularly up-to-the-minute contemporary charms of leads Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.

The film turns downtown L.A. into an unlikely lovers' playground as the characters played by Deschanel (as the Summer of the title) and Gordon-Levitt go for walks, sing karaoke, sit on benches and eat in diners. Often with just glances and inflections and the awkward shift in posture, the pair -- who previously appeared together in the 2001 rehab drama "Manic" -- slyly convey what is invigorating and infuriating about the pursuit of affection and companionship.

"As soon as you're trying to show your audience what you're feeling, you're sunk," says Gordon-Levitt of what makes for believable on-screen head-over-heels intensity. "You have to really feel it and then not do anything. I would just watch her, and then let my fake self fall in love with her."

The film exudes an anything-goes attitude, using split-screens, graphics, animation, a sneakily specific color palette and a packed kit-bag of filmmaking techniques to convey the subjective feelings of falling in love and, later, the emotional aftermath of being dumped. In one of the film's kickiest moments, a spontaneous dance number erupts to convey an especially memorable morning.

"We literally call it the kitchen sink mentality," admits Webb. "That's what it is." Where it might seem like a bit of directorial indulgence to make a film that swings from one stylistic conceit to another, Webb says it was all on the page from the first moment he saw the script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. "I remember when I read the script," Webb says, "I felt it was really dancing with something interesting. They said something that articulated a feeling. We built on those things."

The film's time-tripping structure, jumping across the span of the central relationship as a series of subjective memories, creates an intricate pattern of moments, thoughts of pancakes leading to reminiscences of a specific outfit on an especially sunny day.

The film remains acutely aware of how those recollections are filtered as Gordon-Levitt's character moves on, putting Deschanel's Summer behind him.

"His blind date says it, 'The next time you look back, look again,' " Webb explains. "Which is sort of the conceit of the movie. You're comparing and contrasting, and obviously the nature of memory is very subjective. And it relates to the kitchen sink mentality -- how do you express this from a person's point of view that is subjective and not necessarily the whole story in an evidentiary way. All these whims and whistles and cartoon birds and dance sequences grow out of the idea he is experiencing this all in his own head."

"It's not so much what's actually happening," adds Gordon-Levitt. "It's what it feels like."

[picolas]

he always looks a little high when he's out of character.

[Bethie]

for all my boys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJFutyUrllo&feature=channel_page&gclid=CIq9w7-eypoCFQ-5FQodtExy3Q

[Kal]

for all my boys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJFutyUrllo&feature=channel_page&gclid=CIq9w7-eypoCFQ-5FQodtExy3Q

awesome

[The Perineum Falcon]

I've never wanted to be a big ball of cotton so badly in my life.

[Bethie]

I'm really looking forward to 500 days.

[modage]

I was really looking forward to this.  Pretty familiar territory but the film plays with these conventions in a way that (mostly) avoids cliche. I liked a lot of the film but it was not without it's problems. Some of the emotion in the film was very heartfelt but I was pulled out of the film a few times by some eye-rolling moments. The chronology, despite the films conceit it would be out of order, was still fairly straightforward with a few flashes towards the end mixed in. While I sympathized with Tom, Summer was so distant, it was hard to see why he was in love with her.

[SiliasRuby]

Mod, he was infatuated with her, not in love with her. Emotionally infatuated. He's afraid to be alone and I think it just finally got to him. Some women just have that special spark that make you fall hard for them. They just had enough in common for Tom to think that he's in love with her. Yes, I'm a cynic and only believe that 5% of the world really finds true love. Some guys just have some huge blind spots when it comes to women.

From what I just said you can understand that this film is my favorite of 2009 so far. It hit a little too close to home, almost scarily to close to home. It had its flaws but I was so emotionally connected to the characters and the story that I really didn't care. It might not be the best so far of 2009 but I'm sure it is the one that I related to the most. This had everything a romantic comedy should have: actual real looking romamce, characters that I could relate to, and heartache that feels real. The amount of time spent on the break up was just as much as the amount of time spent on the relationship.

[polkablues]

Yeah, it wasn't that he was actually in love with her, it was that he had convinced himself from the beginning that she was the one, and he had picked up just enough positive signals along the way to keep him believing it. 

[SiliasRuby]

Exactly.

[modage]

I would have loved this movie when I was in high school.

[Kal]

I loved this. I agree with Sillias.