(500) DAYS OF SUMMER (Marc Webb). 95 minutes. Opens Friday (July 17). For venues, times and trailers, see Movies. Rating: NN
The Sundance-certified indie calculation (500) Days Of Summer casts Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a once-aspiring architect who makes his living writing generic greeting cards and a dead-eyed Zooey Deschanel as his disconnected dream girl.[breifbreak]
An omniscient narrator informs us at the outset that their romance is not only doomed, but has already run its course, and that we will be flashing back and forth through their ups and downs to learn how things played out, with wry observations about the lovely pain of painful love and so forth.
If you’ve never seen Annie Hall (or, for that matter, How I Met Your Mother) and think that Little Miss Sunshine was a breath of fresh underdog air rather than a checklist of mainstream-ready quirks, you might enjoy this pastiche of other, far better material. It’s as though screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber fed every postmodern storytelling trick into a computer program: The omniscient narrator! Fractured chronology! Songs that comment on the action! a subtitled parody of French art films where Gordon-Levitt is annoyed by a mime!
They even rely on a classic movie as a touchstone – but it’s The Graduate rather than Annie Hall, and neither the characters nor their creators really understand it. Count me out.[rssbreak]
