"500 Days of Summer" & Movie Love

I promised my friend Sunny this critique years ago but I kept postponing watching this movie for several reasons:
- I have a love/hate relationship with any work by Zooey Deschanel (love her in "New Girl", hate her in pretty much anything else).
- I hate hipster anything! It looked like a hipster movie type.
- It seemed like it had a sad ending and nowadays I pretty much need for movies to end in something good and meaningful.

I don't know what else to say, sometimes I just delay for absolutely no good reason. Finally, Monday I had some time to kill and coincidentally the movie had just begun. I must say I have always enjoys a movie when it is told like a memory, it leaps from one moment in time to another and you can appreciate the sometimes blunt/harsh transitions and the very subtle shift in the character's frame of mind. I am thankful that I got to watch it, it is not going to become by all means, my favorite movie of all times, but it got me thinking about love, not real love, but love as a visual concept, love as art. There are a few movies that are so good at capturing what love feels like, in a moment in time, I could completely empathized with what Tom (brilliant Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was thinking and feeling, and how he was falling deeply in love. I loved the walking-out-of-my-apartment-and-I-just-had-sex scene, sometimes life does feel like a musical directed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. I can distinctly remember the love at first sight scene in "Big Fish" inside the circus, when time stood still (even the popcorn) when Ed met Sandra for the first time. I can feel the desperation in the rain scene from "The Notebook" when Allie reunites with Noah. All of these movies, and some particular scenes, have become part of my hopeless romantic vocabulary and they fill me with hope. Love doesn't always feels like this, but when it does it is important to acknowledge the moment.

There are a couple moments that I really enjoyed in this movie, like when the little sister tells him that maybe things weren't that great, that he only remembers the good parts; he needed to remember the other ones too. The human heart is so tricky, sometimes we just choose what to take into our hearts, and we choose love and happiness as supposed to indifference and rejection, we are very good at denial. I also enjoyed the last conversation between Tom and Summer when he asked how does a girl who didn't wanted to be somebody's girlfriend is now somebody's wife, she responded that she woke up one day and just knew, he asked what, she said, what I was never sure of with you. It reminded me of another famous movie line from one of my favorites movies of all times; "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" when the teacher tells Charlie that we accept the love we think we deserve.

Eventually we can't open another chapter until we are fully over the previous one and we can't see other possibilities until we fully open ourselves up to them. I also noticed the use of symbolism thru the color palette used in this movie, Tom was brown, Summer was blue, Tom's world became blue when she was with Summer but Summer's never became brown, a clear sign of rejection. I am trying to wrap this up but I keep thinking of many memorable scenes like the party after the break-up expectation vs reality, which has happened to all of us at some point in our life. Maybe I liked this movie, maybe a little bit more that I would like to admit.