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.

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