Can you see beneath the surface?
How many times you watched a trailer that seduced you and made you count the days till the official release of a film that turned out to be a mediocre crap? Endless times and apparently is impossible to get away from similar traps in the future no matter what sophisticated measures you seek. Some might say that reading movie reviews can help us save money but each magazine can follow a certain agenda and an author could be blinded by its own hidden traumas and wrong perceptions. A strange but original obscure independent film is sometimes labeled ruthlessly with 2 stars even if its true value is close to 5 stars. So choosing a good film is more or less a lottery and a frequently 12 dollars loss from your pocket.
Disappointment is what I was left with after seeing “500 Days of Summer“. The premise of the film was surely promising and resourceful but it lacked depth and sense of realism. It claimed to have all these elements but maybe it was just an initial attempt that disappeared along the way. Or just a beautiful lie to drag people inside the cinema. ..
A detailed analysis of the birth and death of a love story is surely a rich material but only if you have eyes to see below the surface. The screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Micheal Weber managed to portray the good part of the relationship but got lost when they had to show its slow deconstruction and the reasons beneath it. It could be because “500 Days of Summer” is their first feature and on a personal level both of them are still moving in the dark. At one point one might feel the authors became impatient to…simply end the story no matter what so everything turns out to be even more confusing and fake, bleached in a quick storm of random events. Is like watching an athlete running with full steam towards the closest wrong gate.
The director of photography tried his entire range of artistic artillery but his efforts couldn’t save a clueless second half of the story. I enjoyed seeing the film bathed in yellow and in blue afterward, in close connection to the character’ emotions, the extreme close ups that enriched the intimacy and sensuality of some tender couple moments, the graphic animation effects but it just wasn’t enough to distract me from the heavy flaws. The music hall park scene came in the right moment but it was too long and kind of stupid. When you see the cartoon flying bird you re temped to…kill the lovely creature in your mind.
“500 Days of Summer” is funny here and there but it’s a sort of bad mixture of fragments imported from “Sex in the City” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind“. When confidence and courage are missing the easiest solution might seem to copy from here and there. If you have the ability and knowledge to do that in a convincing manner.
