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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Next week, Vin Diesel returns (along with Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordanna Brewster) to the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he’d abandoned after the first movie (he did have a cameo in part 3). When news first hit that he’d be reprising the role of Dominic Toretto for the fourth installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, most of us saw the actor as returning under a veil of shame. Because he initially departed the series with an inflated ego — and with it unrealistic salary demands — it does seem obvious that Diesel is now only desperately crawling back because his career failed to take off the way he’d hoped it would.
This is quite sad considering not even Steve Guttenberg ever crawled back to the Police Academy movies, nor did Burt Reynolds ever get dragged back for a fourth Smokey and the Bandit. But there have been other shameful returns by stars to franchises they’d previously sat out of (whether the hiatus was of their own choosing or not). Only one of these may have been as desperate as Diesel now appears, but it’s worth looking at four additional actors and actresses who should be very embarrassed of their delayed reprisals.
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We at SpoutBlog love Jon Hamm tremendously, but we don’t get to write about him much because we’re primarily a film blog and don’t feature much discussion of either Mad Men or 30 Rock (we’ve slipped praise into posts here and there, of course). Fortunately for us, Hamm has made a new video for FunnyorDie.com, in which he references movies. Specifically, he portrays Lex Luthor and alludes to plot points from Superman: The Movie, Superman Returns and even Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
And as if this video (watch it after the jump) weren’t funny enough, we can now hopefully look forward to Hamm appearing in more Judd Apatow-related comedies — at least if the guys at Vulture have any influence. Or, maybe Hamm could actually be cast in a future Superman movie (was this video a response to requests for Warner Bros. to make him the new Man of Steel?), as either hero or villain — or both!?!?
Again, check out the clip and what other bloggers (some TV bloggers, but whatever) are saying about it after the jump:
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