Lhude sing cuccu!

[freckles_and_doubt]

Yesterday was suicide hot. Ungodly hot. Possibly apocalypse hot. Hell may have opened, briefly. The English cricket team folded completely against South Africa, it was that bad (SA innings 312/2. Gawsh). Today is better, cloudy and slightly cooler. It's also the Evil Landlord's birthday, so anyone who knows him, please do the usual email thingy! it's his big 40 and he's trying to pretend it isn't happening. To which I say, bollocks.

Yesterday's heat also means I retreated cravenly into the arms of the air-conditioned cinema as soon as I finished work. It's a bit difficult for me to review 500 Days of Summer because I think the Pajiba review nailed it so cleverly, but hey, it's that or actually get on with reviewing excluded student transcripts, which is uniformly depressing. 500 Days, despite being a cute, quirky movie about falling in love, watched by me, single for the last 8 years, all on my own in the cinema¹, surprisingly wasn't.

It's actually not a happy love story, and I really didn't like the Zooey Deschanel character, who seemed to me to be damaged and rather irresponsible, unworthy of the geeky charm of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who was, as usual, excellent). But overall the film is happily imbued with the quirk, goof and zan of actually being in love, and is sympathetically amusing about the reciprocal devastation when it stops. It's also a film about Tom, i.e. about the slightly nerdy male viewpoint on relationships: I'm not quite sure, for various socio-cultural reasons, whether the nerdy female view would be analogous. Summer herself was a cipher, an emblem, her importance mostly in the effect she had on him, which is possibly one of the reasons why she annoyed me (insert feminist growl here).

Things I Loved About The Film:

• The fragmented narrative, all messing around with time and stuff. Clever, and enabled deft and nifty thematic linking.
  
• The extended fantasy sequence in Ikea and the random dance sequence. Such sensitively joyous representations of the essentially private world of lovers.
  
• Tom's whole dreamy and endearing arty-architecture thing, plus the film's occasional descent into pen-and-wash drawings.
  
• Rudeness about greetings cards.
  
• Pixies karaoke. In fact, the soundtrack as a whole, which I loved and have ordered posthaste, possibly in order to aspire to indie cred. Apparently Tom listens to almost exactly the same music I do, too, apart from the Smiths fixation. I Never Got the Smiths.
  
• Tom's little sister - hilarious. Watch out for this young Chloe Moretz person, She Will Go Far, or should.

Things that didn't gel for me:

• The film's opening text-over - very contrary in tone to the film itself. I'm wondering, in retrospect, if my whole inclination towards "Summer's an immature bitch" was at least partially shaped by it.
  
• Summer's lack of decent motivation, backstory, a chance to explain herself - anything which would allow me not to dislike her so much.
  
• Drunken karaoke. Wince. Also, is it obligatory for all Sensitive Geeks, TM, to have friends or co-workers who are Sexist Drunken Assholes? (Although Paul is cute and very, very sculpted).

This has been a good decade for indie whimsicality. Shall add this one to Eternal Sunshine, Waitress and the rest on the Must Acquire list. The one Pajiba identifies as "whimsyquirkalicious", and about my fondness for the movies on which I am completely unashamed.

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¹ This is a rhetorical whinge, I actually love watching movies on my own.

Comments

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I am officially jealous of anyone experiencing snow. Today has heated all up again, sigh. Jealousjealousjealous. My faint pretentions at actual intellect shut right down in this weather.