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.
…Read more

Shortly after Sundance 2009, Paul wrote a post explaining why he walked out of one of the festival’s biggest buzz-suckers, the romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer. “I figured I’d never write, “It was so-so” for a review, so I left,” he wrote. Acknowledging that he couldn’t “write a “review” of a movie I didn’t fully watch,” he instead decided to “write a review of my decision to walk out a half hour into it,” using a particularly glowing blurb about the film as a bounceboard. Pouncing on a much friendlier comparison to Garden State, Paul wrote 500 off as a weak copy of Zach Braff’s break-out: “It’s kind of like if Garden State had been turned into a TV series, recast, cancelled, then bought by USA network and restarted.”
I did see (500) Days of Summer all the way through (the parentheses were added to the title after Sundance, presumably in a nod to one of the film’s visual tics), so I can review it, but I can’t say Paul’s instinct based on the first thirty minutes was off the mark. The film begins with an on screen disclaimer, an “author’s note” declaring that what we’re about to see is not based on real people or events (punchline: someone named “Jenny Beckman” is nonetheless a “bitch”); shortly after the picture begins to roll in earnest, a deep-voiced gentleman narrator informs us that “This is not a love story.” The aggressive out-of-the-gate broadcasting of all that (500) Days of Summer is not foreshadows what it actually is: a film full of signs with nothing to signify, a mashup of a decade’s worth of Sundance cliche, a confirmation of the obsolescence of the notion that “independent film” could seek to subvert business as usual.

…Read more

A new Zooey Deschanel movie came out last weekend. But is it the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Paul Dano or the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt? It’s the former, and it’s called Gigantic, which is also not to be confused with this coming week’s new DVD release, Yes Man, in which she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Jim Carrey.

Sure, Deschanel has range and talent (see this fan-made montage of some of her more varied performances), but she also has a certain repetitive nature to her characters. And this “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” nature became all the more confusing recently when trailers for Gigantic and (500) Days of Summer (the Gordon-Levitt one, which is actually her second romantic pairing with the actor) appeared online around the same time. Maybe instead of worrying about people confusing her for Katy Perry, the actress should worry more about people confusing her characters and films for each other.

Or, maybe not. Plenty of us can’t get enough of Deschanel’s quirky, free-spirited performances. In his Yes Man review, Roger Ebert noted that two critics proposed marriage to the character at the end of the film. We wouldn’t go that far, but we have crushed on the actress since All the Real Girls and haven’t yet gotten sick of her or her similar, typecast roles. In fact, to us, the problem is not that indie films too often employ the MPDG character; it’s that they don’t cast Deschanel for every such part. So, instead of wishing she’d broaden her career to include other types of characters (it didn’t work well for her with The Happening, after all), we’ve selected ten MPDG characters that she should have additionally played.
…Read more

Typically at SpoutBlog, we rarely state the obvious when it comes to a mediocre movie, trying to instead direct our gaze toward a gem that deserves some advocacy. Unless, of course, there’s a danger that said movie is going to overshadow the much earned good buzz around a great film. Such is the case with 500 Days of Summer starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. It’s a movie I walked out of at Sundance 2009, not because it sucked, but because it was lukewarm. I figured I’d never write, “It was so-so” for a review, so I left. But in the past week it has, surprisingly, garnered ovations that threaten to eclipse so many excellent films coming out of that festival.

Case in point, it’s number one in Coming Soon’s Best of the Fest:

Clearly the biggest crowd-pleaser at this year’s festival was this romantic comedy from first-time director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Webber, which covers a year and a half in the relationship between Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Bishl (Zooey Deschanel), the latter a flighty woman who breaks the former’s heart. While some of the ground covered is stuff we’ve seen before, the film is told in an innovative and clever narrative style, jumping around in time from the height of their developing love affair to the months that follow their break-up. Gordon-Levitt creates an infinitely likeable character that both guys and women can relate to, much like John Cusack in his heyday…. What could easily be seen as a “…Say Anything” for the younger generation, the film’s Sundance premiere received a standing ovation from the audience, and one can expect that when it opens in July, it will be another Searchlight hit in the vein of Garden State and Once.

Of course, I can’t write a “review” of a movie I didn’t fully watch. I can, however, write a review of my decision to walk out a half hour into it. In fact, I’ll use the above blurb to record what was going through my mind in the half hour before I left.

…Read more

You might have seen the “Don’t Vote” PSA featuring Hollywood celebrities ranging from Leonardo DiCaprio to Jonah Hill attempting to use reverse psychology in an effort to get lazy, apathetic Americans to register and then take part in this year’s presidential election. It’s a bit long for something so urgent and potentially influential, but it’s cool that so many unrelated famous people came together for something so important. Anyway, the guys at MagicHugs.com have now re-edited some of the footage from that PSA to create their own campaign regarding the films of Nicolas Cage. And while I doubt Leo or even Jonah appreciate being made to appear so critical of their peer’s career choices, it’s pretty funny. The only thing I don’t understand, though, is if I’m supposed to come away thinking I should watch Nic Cage movies. After all, the other “Don’t” PSA is meant to actually get me to vote.

Also related to the “Don’t Vote” PSA is another political ad featuring another movie star who represents that apathetic young American demographic the other celebrities are speaking out to. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has created his own little commercial for Barack Obama, a candidate he considers to be that rare politician who isn’t “bullshit.” Levitt claims not to be a Democrat or Republican, and he admits he’s never really cared about anybody running for president before, but he just had to tell us that he’s “feeling pretty strongly on this one.”

I wonder which ad will speak most to the typically indifferent, the one from the famous people who simply want people to get up and vote, no matter how potentially uninformed they may be, or the one from an apolitical peer who wants others to notice a specific hopeful’s distinction.

[via Anne Thompson]

I don’t know why the people at the NY Times‘ Style Magazine shot the above video of Joseph Gordon-Levitt talking about Godard, and Russian clowns, and Guys and Dolls, but after Mysterious Skin, I’ll watch that guy do anything. Well, maybe not anything. Via WOW Report.