500 Days of Summer

Release Year: 2009
Review: '500 Days of Summer' is a romantic comedy which breaks many of the normal conventions and delivers a more touching and funny film than most of the drivel that gets pumped out by studios these days. Right from the beginning, from the first scene, you know that this isn't going to be the standard fare. In many ways this is the anti-romantic comedy. It begins with the breakup and with a genius collection of mixed ordered scenes tells the story of the relationship leading up to that point. This is the films strength. Individual scenes are absolutely perfect and capture the essence of different phases in a relationship perfectly.

The directing by Marc Webb is fantastic, putting a unique spin on each scene, elevating them from what could have been very average filler. Also propelling potentially average scenes is the acting by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Both of whom have been great in other movies, but really click together here creating a natural feeling chemistry. There are some cliched elements to the story which seemed even more glaring since the rest of the film felt so original. The know-it-all sister, the oddball friend, his job as a greeting card writer and his aspirations of being an architect all seemed to be completely generic, but because the rest works so well that these elements didn't bring it down. It manages to be completely honest and brutally frank, without creating a depressing feeling and succeeds at breaking out of a genre box to be fresh and endearing.
Rating: 4/5