I Can’t Wait For … 500 DAYS OF SUMMER
July 10th, 2008
Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. What, you need more reasons than that? Fine.
Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt sing! All right, all right, I’ll give you more.
Even though the long thought dead musical genre seems to be making an extremely welcome yet moderate comeback (MOULIN ROUGE, CHICAGO, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, HAIRSPRAY, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE), the genre is still somewhat on thin ice with jaded modern audiences who nearly killed it in the first place with their unwillingness to buy people can believably burst out into song. It seems musicals now either have two directions they can take to survive: go completely gung-ho with no apologies or pass all the musical numbers off as dream/fantasy sequences and with a fair amount of restraint.
500 DAYS OF SUMMER seems like it’ll fall in the latter, while taping into a good dose of (oddly enough) William Faulkner like stream of consciousness. According to an MTV interview with Mr. Gordon-Levitt himself, the film is told through the point of a view “a hopeless romantic, a love sick young man” whose non-linear memories of the 500 days involving the young woman played by Zooey Deschanel guide the course of the film, one memory bleeding into the other. Because “the movie is all from the point of view of this guy, and this guy has watched way too many movies and listened to far too many pop songs … his life becomes a pop song.”













