(500) Days Of Summer

(500) Days Of Summer is best thought of as a series of isolated moments of greatness locked in a run of the mill indie quirkfest.

"3rd Rock from the Sun" castaway Joseph Gordon Levett stars as Tom. He's a greeting card writer and a sad sack hopeless romantic who's both simultaneously cooler than everyone else in his own mind and so painfuly shy he can't muster the courage to even talk to the object of his true love at first.

Zooey Deschanel is the quirky girl of his dreams who he falls in love with at first sight. She has her work cut out for her. When you're playing a girl this aggressively fetishized she needs to provide the audience with some clue into why she's loved the way she is. And Deschanel is happily up to the task.
And her charm goes beyond the scripts indie hallmarks; She likes The Smiths so she must be cool, and she sticks up for Ringo in The Beatles when few others will. Deschanel possesses a certain screen presence that may have you falling for Summer against your better judgement too.

The film's structure is primarily what sets this movie apart. It jumps all around and starts at the end first before jumping back and forth to joy, pain, and everything in between as we seem to be following Tom's mind as he tries to analyze what went wrong.

I particularly liked one sequence when after a breakup Tom and Summer reconnect and she invites him over to a party. The director Marc Webb uses a wonderful split screen to show what he expected to happen, and what actually does.

It's not quite the "Annie Hall" of the ipod generation as some other reviewers have raved.
But it does have enough wonderful and inventive sequences to make it worthwhile.

(500) Days of Summer: B