Fox Searchlight’s latest pop-indie festival pickup, (500) Days of Summer, is promotionally packaged, as is typical for the distributor, with a hip soundtrack featuring multiple songs from The Smiths and Regina Spektor, as well as tunes from Feist, The Doves and the obligatory Simon and Garfunkel. Though heavily dependent on music, the movie is not a musical, yet like other Searchlight releases it has that one moment where the line between non-musical and musical is just barely crossed.
In the past we’ve seen this moment restricted to diegetic circumstances, whether a dance performance or an in-scene duet of a Moldy Peaches song. But this year Searchlight’s titles have been venturing even further, first with the non-diegetic, Bollywood-influenced song and dance in Slumdog Millionaire and now with an equally fantastical sequence in (500) Days, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt struts about to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams,” joined by a surplus of extras and an animated bluebird.
Musical numbers in non-musical movies can certainly work, as is evident in Citizen Kane and many David Lynch and Adam Sandler films, but there’s something very forced and cliché about the sequence in (500) Days. Never mind that it seems lifted out of Enchanted, a movie we very much despise, and never mind that we prefer our Zooey Deschanel movies to feature musical interludes performed by the singer-actress herself rather than lip-synced by her costars (director Marc Webb acknowledges the mistake of not including her in the scene); this number is just completely over-the-top and unoriginal.
In response to the scene, we’ve selected five of the worst musical numbers from non-musical films to show what kind of horrible company (500) Days of Summer is in.
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Who knew that the 1985 board game adaptation Clue had so many fans? These people certainly weren’t around 24 years ago when the movie opened 6th at the box office, behind even the terrible Santa Claus: The Movie in its third week (I’ll admit, though, Santa Claus is one of my dear guilty pleasures). But suddenly, via the internet, loyalists are everywhere, up in arms over news that a new Clue adaptation is moving forward as if the original were as popular a film as the 1985 box office champ Back to the Future (which grossed as much as 14 times more than Clue).
Well, I am with the devoted to an extent. I have loved Clue since seeing it in the theater, and am embarrassed to admit it was probably the film that introduced me to the comic talents of Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn and Michael McKean (what can I say except that I was 8 and hadn’t yet seen Rocky Horror, Blazing Saddles or Spinal Tap?). But I’m not joining the protest, because I know we’ll always have the original movie. Plus, I recognize that it was anything but an original idea (never mind that it was based on a board game; hasn’t anyone see Murder By Death?). And besides, the new version, to be directed by Pirates of the Caribbean’s Gore Verbinski, hardly sounds anything like either the game or the first film. “Global thriller and transmedia event”? I don’t know what that is, but it isn’t the Clue I played.
After the jump, the internerds weigh in on their love for Clue or (gasp!) their excitement for Verbinski’s effort:
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Are you walking around with your “I Voted!” sticker proudly adhered to your chest? If not, get out there and do some lever pulling, chad punching, and ballot dropping. Then take the rest ofthe day off and watch one of these movies that’ll get you through the rest of election day and away from the nail-biting edge of election return coverage. There are a few minor spoilers inside, but don’t view that as me messing with the ballot box. You’ll still love the movies more than CNN’s infographics.
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James Cameron is the sort of director who can make a movie just to prove a point. And he’s going to do so by making a straight drama that will be shot and exhibited in 3D — or as he calls it, in stereo (short for stereoscopic) — just to let the industry know that 3D is not only for special effects and animated pictures. He discusses the project in an interview with Variety:
I plan to shoot a small dramatic film in 3-D, just to prove this point, after “Avatar.” In “Avatar,” there are a number of scenes that are straight dramatic scenes, no action, no effects. They play very well, and in fact seem to be enhanced by the stereo viewing experience. So I think this can work for the full length of a dramatic feature. However, filmmakers and studios will have to weigh the added cost of shooting in 3-D against the increased marketing value for that type of film.
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Tropic Thunder held up much better than expected in its second week, declining just 38% to take in $16.1 million. Its $16.1 was just enough to overcome The House Bunny’s $15.1. Meanwhile, The Rocker, The Longshots and Death Race basically bombed, and 
