(500) Days of Summer Review

By: Robert Acosta

Cast:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tom Hansen

Zooey Deschanel as Summer Finn

Geoffrey Arend as McKenzie

Chloe Moretz as Rachel Hansen

Plot: When his girlfriend breaks up with him, Tom(Joseph Gordon-Levitt), reflects on the days with his ex-girlfriend and tries to figure out where it all went wrong.

Review: When I saw the trailer for this movie early 2009, I had this misinformed idea that the movie was going to be a typical love story and that all this massive hype surrounding it was just that, nothing more. I was horribly wrong. 

It was called one of the best movies of 2009 and rightfully so. I made the mistake of missing it in the theater but refused to make that mistake when I saw it on HBO. 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is definitely on the great young actors list with great movies like (500) Days of Summer and Inception. He delivers what most male lead roles in romance movies don't and that is reality. His reactions to everything just seems natural, as if that would actually happen in 9 out of 10 relationship situations. Not to mention that I've had the same reaction to similar situations and most romance movies don't deliver that emotion. 

Zooey Deschanel is charming, as usual. Always beautiful and always gripping the heart of the males. Ironically, she also injects a dose of reality into the role that is usually filled with hapless women that play the victim. Her free spirit mentality comes off as genuine and oddly enough creates great chemistry between Gordon-Levitt and herself. 

The story is pretty straight forward. Boy meets girl, Boy likes girl, Boy and girl go out, Girl doesn't want serious relationship, Boy does, all hell breaks loose from there. Viewing the relationship in its high moments is great and watching the relationship break down is saddening. 

There is on effect that the movie pulls off really nicely. Certain movies like to start at the end then go to the beginning and then work their way back to the end. Most of those movies end up being decent, it's a nice spin on things. In (500) Days of Summer they skip around and it really helps explain the story perfectly. The movie may start at day 1 but it jumps around. It'll go from day 33 to day 288 and then back to day 40. Meanwhile, among those 3 distant days, it explains the situation amazingly.

You can't go wrong with (500) Days of Summer. The story is simple, which makes it great. It features tremendously talented actors and actresses and everything is seemingly down really well. It really was one of the best movies of 2009.

Rating: 5 out of 5