My All Time Favorite Movies: (500) Days of Summer)

I have been toying with the idea of doing a series of posts on my all time favorite movies for a little while now. Working at a movie theater again has started all of these conversations about movies and I always love to hear what people have on their lists of favorite movies. I decided I would take my 20 favorite movies of all time and write a blog entry about each of them. There are no set qualifications for a movie to be on this list. These are simply my 20 favorite movies of all time. They will not be numbered. Do not assume that I am going in order from 20-1. I will probably do that starting at 10, but honestly 11-20 are not numbered. They kind of exist right outside of the top 10. A few things you will realize as the list goes on are how recent so many of them are, and how Americanized the list is. I make no apologies for this. I know most people who are deep into film as I am often have many movies from the pre-1970s on their lists, but you will only find 2 or 3 of those here. I do not dislike "classic" movies in any way, but they have never stuck with me as much. I respect the craft, but I am rarely left feeling like they are my favorite movies. I cannot really explain it further than that. I am not xenophobic, but when it comes to cinema, I just prefer the American Aesthetic. I have roughly 10 foreign films that I love, but they do not make it into this list. Again, it is just my personal taste. Each post will be labeled as "favorite ever" so you can easily find them as I go on. As always, I love to hear feedback, if not on my choices, on your choices for some of your favorite movies of all time. Okay, onto this week's post. Oh and there will probably be spoilers about each title on the list.



Not going to lie, I tried to create this list without this movie. Not because I feel guilty for loving it, but because I am not sure how I feel about putting it on my favorite movies of all time list. However, I want to be honest with myself and the few people who read this thing and if I am being completely honest, (500) Days of Summer is absolutely one of my all time favorite movies. In fact, I can count the amount of movies I watched more than this one on one hand. I saw it more than any other movie in theaters (tied with Liar Liar, and Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring) and since it came out on DVD, I cannot even remember how many times I have watched it. My girlfriend and I have the movie poster up in our dining area and a mini for it in the downstairs bathroom. Hell, I even taught it to my seniors last year as a way to show them how film can be read as literature and I gave them an in class essay about it and I learned even more about the film. I think that is why I love it so much, every time I watch it, I can approach it from a different angle and I can pick up something, or realize something or just appreciate something different with each viewing.

(500) Days of Summer concerns the relationship between Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) which spans 500 turbulent days. There is an omniscient narrator who tells us right off the bat that "This is a story of boy meets girl, but it is not a love story." From the very start of this film, we realize this is not going to be a traditional romantic comedy and it definitely is not. Tom believes Summer is the one from the moment he sees her. Summer very clearly states she is not interested in a relationship, and they become friends. Summer knows that Tom is into her, but he never fully says it because he just wants her in his life and because of that, it gets tricky when they start kissing, going on adorable dates to Ikea, and start having sex. Are they a couple or are they not a couple? Who knows? Clearly neither of them know. Tom believes they are, Summer maintains that they are just friends. This back and forth could get old quickly, but the great thing about the script is that the story unfolds in a non-linear fashion. We get the good mixed with the bad. We get the humor followed by the sadness. The film never lets us wallow in the sadness for very long and it never lets us celebrate the happiness for too long. It creates this wonderful blend of emotions and it is not afraid to smack us around with them. My favorite transition is from the morning after the first sex to the first day post break up.

Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel have remarkable chemistry and it would make me happy if they could be in any more movies together. They are both certainly in their respective elements with these characters, and in my opinion, they make them feel real. I know Tom Hansen, hell I might be Tom Hansen. Summer is often mislabeled as a bad person and the cause of Tom's heartbreak, but Deschanel plays her very real and I believe that the idea of the film is to play with the idea of the Manic Pixie Girl in the same way that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind did. Summer is not going to save Tom. She is not magical. Tom never listens to her when she states what she is looking for. Tom has unilaterally decided she is the one who he will be with forever. The movie is vague on what it wants Summer to be, and that is another reason why I love it. If I am in a good mood, I view the movie as optimistic and real and heartfelt. If I am in a bad or sad mood, I loathe Summer to her very core and I bawl my eyes out repeatedly. it is not easy for a movie to be approached in such drastic ways for the viewer and it is quite an accomplishment. The supporting roles from Tom's friends, his little sister (played perfectly play Chloe Grace Moritz) and Tom's boss (played by Agent S.H.I.E.L.D's Agent Coulson) are all perfect and only drive home the point that this story is from Tom's point of view. We are supposed to, at first, see Summer only as Tom sees her.

Marc Webb, first time director, does great things with a great script. The screen writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, crafted a pretty straight forward story in a very unique way. The morning after the couple first has sex, Tom comes out dancing to Hall & Oates' "You make my Dreams Come True" complete with back-up dancers, UCLA's marching band and a cute animated blue bird to emphasis the point that Tom believes that he has just had sex with the woman he will marry. He even looks in a window and sees his reflection as Han Solo (something all men have done whether they admit it or not). We have the aforementioned non-linear narration technique of the film. There are sections in black and white and Tom, as he sits alone in a dark movie theater, even envisions sad student Avant-garde films in which he is the star. The film also uses music to perfection. In a very happy scene The Temper Trap's "Sweet Disposition" plays, then later in the film, when Summer and Tom reconnect, the song plays again,, giving us the impression that things just may end up going well for the young couple. Many of my students even said they did not believe the narrator when he said it was not a love story because of this scene. They wanted to be believe because of how the mood was set up by the music, the lighting and how the two young people were framed together with the sunset in the back and flowers in the background.

All of that is great, but there is one scene that sort of drives this movie to my list. It is a scene to which every person can relate, I believe. As Tom goes to a party hosted by Summer, the film goes to a split screen and on one side we see Tom's expectations and on the other side we see the reality. This is after the break up, and after months of not seeing each other before the scene I mentioned in my last paragraph. His expectations and the reality are so grossly different that it hurts to watch them side by side. I have seen movies press forward with the expectations only to pull back and reveal it was in the character's head and then go forward with the reality, but to see them side by side just hurts. It is an achingly brilliant move on whomever decided to go that way. It is like that in the shooting script, but who knows if Webb had input there. That scene will crush you because we have all done it. We have all seen what we want to happen in our heads, only to see reality go in a completely different direction. In a movie full of hilarious moments and sad moments, this scene is easily the most crushing. The scene even ends with Hansen no longer a human being, but a sketch in one of his architectural creations as all of his surrounding are being erased to a sad poignant song.

(500) Days of Summer will frustrate you, make you cry and make you laugh. I think, though, in the end, it gives you hope. It makes you believe in the search for true love, even though it hurts when it does not go your way. it deconstructs our idea of what a romantic comedy is supposed to be and it perfectly deconstructs the character tropes of the genre. It has a kick ass soundtrack that is made more kick ass by how each song is used in the film. The non-linear narrative technique serves the film in a variety of ways, but mostly it keeps the film from feeling too sad in the second half. The performances, direction, script and editing are all top notch. It does not over stay its welcome at a brisk 95 minutes and it leaves you feeling something. I will not say what you will be left feeling by it, but I do not know anyone who did not feel something when the film was over. half of my students hated me for playing it for them because it felt too real, but that was kind of the point. This is a movie that I know in 20 years I will still watching and enjoying and I hope that if you have not seen the movie, this make you want to see it and I hope that if you have seen it, this gives you something new to think about.