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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In Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, Larry David plays what most people refer to as “the Woody Role.” This means that he’s filling in for Allen, who for whatever reason is showing up less and less in his films these days. But the Woody Role isn’t merely about a substitute actor starring in place of Allen, it’s often also about that performer channeling the Woody character, that neurotic persona that too many viewers believe is Allen’s true self (as if he’s simply playing himself onscreen in what are also believed to be generally autobiographical works).
David’s performance as “Boris Yelnikoff” in Whatever is not completely Woodyesque, but only because David has his own familiar neurotic onscreen persona that is very separate from — though sometimes complimentary to — Allen’s. And yet he does still come across as a Woody proxy due to the fact that he’s speaking (ranting) dialogue written by Allen rather than improvised (as in Curb Your Enthusiasm).
A number of other actors have served as Woody surrogates, some better and some worse, including a few unofficial proxies in films/series not written or directed by Allen. We list them in order from bad to best after the jump.
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