500 Days of Summer Review

Rating: 100%

Now I wanted to see this film regardless because of how it got some pretty good reviews. But it wasn't until I started working on a scene from this film for part of my final in my acting class that I really decided to go borrow it from the library. The result; pretty darn good.

Plot: Tom Hansen meets Summer Finn during her first day as the new assistant for his boss. And after his friend and co-worker reveals to her that Tom likes her, they slowly but surely begin to become closer together. But they don't really form a relationship because Summer doesn't want a boyfriend.


Yes I know that I'm not telling a whole lot, but this is a film you're better off really seeing for yourself.  and it sounds more like your everyday, ordinary, cheesy romantic comedy roughly, but it's not. I mean it's more specifically a comedy drama film. and even then, it's actually a really good film. the characters were original, the story was more interesting as you get more into the film, plus - and what I'm going to say is quite frankly mostly coming from a lot of what I learned in my Film Expression class that I finished a couple of weeks ago - there's a whole bunch of subtext and symbolism in this film. there's symbolism in the colors primarily ( I think) usually in what people are wearing and also in Summer's apartment. and i think my personal favorite symbolism was how whenever Tom was sad, his hair was styled to look like Dustin Hoffman's hairdo for The Graduate. And then when he gets all happy the day after he sleeps with Summer, he styles his hair in the reflection of a glass window  of a shop and the reflection turns out to be Han Solo. That was just interesting in terms of symbolism but really funny when it got to the Han Solo thing. And for all I know, there's plenty more that I missed which is where I want to find the time to borrow the movie and watch it again, but just what I noticed from the first time with there actually being any symbolism at all just shows how this movie was more put together in closed form then what I was expecting.

Actors/Characters:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Tom Hansen: I liked his character. I would say he put it off really well. My favorite scene would definitely have to be the day after Summer spends the night with him and how he's being so happy that he's dancing with a bunch of civilians joining him and of coarse the Han Solo thing. He was just fun.
Zooey Deschanel/Summer Finn: I liked how she was so keen on her beliefs that there's no such thing as love and all that even though she was doing plenty of dating-like things with Tom. That did help in terms of really showing this character who she is even though she's going to a museum or the movies or watching porn or whatnot with this one guy.
Chloë Moretz/Rachel Hansen: Ah good ol' Hit-Girl. always nice to see her in something outside of being an 11-year-old killing bad-a. Granted she was only in a few scenes, but she still was being the really strong spirited preteen/young teenager we know her to perform as.

Music: The music was pretty nice.


Editing: I did really like the editing. I think for the most part, it worked to mix up which events to show from their whole time together. And I really liked how in the beginning, the narrator was talking about how Tom as a kid viewed The Graduate as a movie that shows what true love is. Then ben in the movie shouts "Elaine!" so that we know that Tom as a kid is watching the movie right now in that shot, and then it cuts to him as an adult in the middle of a meeting at work where you see he had the same hairdo as Ben which started off the symbolism in that. I really enjoyed that.


And that's my review for 500 days of Summer. It's actually a very well put together film that's hardly the usual romantic movie and it's more interesting in terms of it's use of symbolism and subtext than I thought there was going to be which made it much more interesting.