Movie Review: (500) Days of Summer

DKC and I took an Olympic break last night to get in a movie: (500) Days of Summer. I honestly can’t remember where I heard about this flick. It’s been in my Netflix queue for a while, and then it appeared in my mailbox. I got distracted by other things (Lost, Olympics), and it was getting to the point that I was considering just sending it back to get something new. After all, if I’d had it that long and hadn’t watched it, it couldn’t have been that good, right?

Wrong.

Fantastic movie. The tagline pretty much sums up the premise: Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t. Fantastic performances by Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. I think one of the things I liked most about it was how well it seemed to capture my general feel of romance prior to when I finally met DKC. I’m not going to get all sappy here and tell you about it–suffice it to say there are a few movies that really stick with me about relationships, and this has now been added to the list. (Others on the list? Films like High Fidelity, Joe vs. the Volcano, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) This movie is full of quirky, edited in a unique but easy to understand mishmash of time, and spot on throughout. There’s a reason it’s in the imdb top 250 list.

One thing that stood out to me was how well the characters were developed. They were all well-rounded and fully believable, and the way they interacted was where much of the interest in the film came from. As DKC put it, the film feels very real. It doesn’t feel like your typical Hollywood romantic comedy, because it isn’t. (It states that plainly right at the beginning of the movie, which I appreciated.) Don’t go in expecting a story where everything fits and people act like people are Supposed To in movies.

In any case–highly recommended. Four stars. See it today.