Raised-in-Carolina is a blog dedicated to music, film, culture, fashion, the arts and everything inbetween from the view point of two editors and guest writers.
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500 DAYS OF SUMMER
(500) Days of Summer is not your typical rom-com…if you can
even classify it in that genre. The conventional boy-meets-girl formula is
traded for a more fractured look at relationships, and the result is bittersweet.
I instantly fell in love with it, so much so that it’s hard to know where to
begin!
Funny, quirky, joyful, sad, (500) Days has so much on offer. It is refreshing to see a film about modern relationships that is so (sometimes painfully) honest and its ups and downs are where its beauty lies. If you’ve ever had your heart ripped out, and chances are you have, this will certainly strike a chord.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, the hopeless romantic who falls for office new girl Summer (Zooey Deschanel). So far, so stereotypical but the twist here is that Summer doesn’t believe in love, and whilst Tom thinks he’s found the one it is inevitable that he is going to get crushed. The two leads make such a wonderfully kooky couple. Both can do no wrong in my book, they have great chemistry and the performances feel authentic. The narrative is played out in non-chronological order using a clever time counter device (one of many little editing tricks used throughout), which flicks back and forth between scenes letting us see the ecstasy against the misery.
‘Indie’ is written all over it. A backdrop of hand drawn graphics, a Belle And Sebastian reference here, skinny tie and cardigan combo there and a couple of Joy Division tee’s thrown in for good measure, but I’m a sucker for these kind of cliché’s and that’s part of it’s appeal. Then there’s the music. The film boasts a killer soundtrack (including tracks from Wolfmother, Doves and Temper Trap to name a few), which goes hand in hand with the story. The Smith’s ‘There Is A Light’ provokes the first conversation and Regina Spektor’s ‘Hero’ is a perfect match for the devastating expectations/reality split-screen scene. Hall & Oates’s ‘You Make My Dreams’ is used brilliantly in the musical sequence after Tom spends his first night with Summer. There is also a great karaoke scene where Gordon-Levitt valiantly takes on The Pixies ‘Here Comes Your Man’ and Deschanel is an absolute dream crooning Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Sugar Town’.