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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I’m always game to devote one of these roundups to Ghostbusters 3 news, but when it relates to a personal favorite list I wrote 7 months ago, I’m especially interested. Maybe you remember I already cast the female version of Ghostbusters with Elizabeth Banks, Anna Faris, Tina Fey, Niecy Nash, Zooey Deschanel and (replacing the original female cast members) Adrian Brody and Jay Baruchel. But I guess Dan Aykroyd’s latest interview spew of G3 hype is worthy of continued casting ideas, because like Bill Murry before him, he’s focusing our attention on the prospects of girl Ghostbusters. Specifically, he’s proposing the names Alyssa Milano and Eliza Dushku as potential costars for him and the elder team.

Are they good choices? Most people are shocked at the bland suggestions. But remember these are just actresses Aykroyd thinks are “amazing.” Let’s see what the rest of the blogosphere thinks, after the jump.

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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.
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It’s strange to watch the transition of an actor from a bit part to burgeoning indie darling and whirling media-dervish. But it’s oddly appropriate for Paul Dano, the 24-year old who is well on his way to awkwardly smiling and shyly introducing himself into your life before brutally attacking your conceptions of what it means to be an unassuming actor.

Praised for his calculating and spastic performance(s) as Eli/Paul Sunday in P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Dano is a peculiar character. Not that anything he does is strange—it’s just the opposite. He’s on the verge of continuing a leap into mainstream audiences that started with Little Miss Sunshine and continues to grow with supporting roles in Where The Wild Things Are and Taking Woodstock. He sticks out in all his roles, whether it’s his flopish look that seamlessly translates from troubled teen to angry asshole such as in Weapons, or his voice that manages to make the same radical emotional turns.

In Gigantic, opening today in New York and Los Angeles, he’s transitioned into a leading man role with Zooey Deschanel as his love interest/”Magical Manic Pixie Girl.” But when appropriately brought against Dano’s quiet style, that “quirky romance” staple is torn away to reveal two people who are utterly afraid of what they’re turning into and unsure about where they’re going in life. There’s also a homeless guy trying to kill him–maybe.

We spoke with Dano over the phone, in-between radio interviews and filming The Extra Man, and had previously profiled him back when it was just as easy to walk into a diner on Avenue A to talk.

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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.

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Is romance dead? David Carr seems to think so, at least in American cinema (both Hollywood and “Indiewood,” as he inclusively clarifies). While celebrating the subway station meet-cute from the beginning of Milk, a scene he claims to be of an increasingly rare sort, Carr states that American filmmakers “can do romantic pathology and entropy, but the kind of love for the ages, a big-movie kind of love? Not so much.”

If you agree with him, blame the back-to-back Best Picture winners Titanic and Shakespeare in Love for feeding us the kind of romance that’s so cheesy it clogs our arteries and gives us a coronary. Left with a burst heart and a lack of quality Nora Ephron movies, most of us have been cynics when it comes to love stories these past ten years. Yet cynics can still be swept off their feet, and American filmmakers have adequately supplied them with new kinds of love for the ages.

Just take a look at these ten films from the past decade. They may be full of cynicism, but they’re also filled with big-movie love, in their own way. If you can’t see the romance, then the problem is with you, not the movies.

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In a new interview with MTV, City of Ember star Bill Murray has called for the makers of Ghostbusters 3 to introduce a female Ghostbuster. My first thought was that hottie who models the sexy Ghostbusters Halloween costume, but seriously it is a great idea. As long as the concept is to pass on the proton packs to a new generation, there really should be an actress in the bunch. And I’m not talking just a hot young flavor of the month who Hollywood thinks will get the teen boys in the audience (it’s Ghostbusters 3; they’re already sold). I agree with Murray that the main requirement should be a funny female.

However, instead of merely picking out one comedienne to appear in the sequel, SpoutBlog has decided to imagine a remake of Ghostbusters in which the entire team is made of women. So, here are some casting choices for a gender-reversed version:

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• Disney unveiled its through-2012 animation slate this week, with projects including “a sequel to Cars [and] an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story,” and a commitment to releasing nothing but digital 3D.
• Blair Witch Project star and Beautiful Losers co-director Joshua Leonard will direct Danny Huston and possibly 50 Cent in Spectacular Regret, a Crash-esque drama about “four Angelenos struggling to overcome past events.”
• Chloe Sevigny and Zooey Deschanel will star together in Divorce Ranch, a period indie written and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and “set in Nevada just after WWII, when a quickie divorce could be granted after residency was established.”

The Playlist passes along word that David Bowie has recorded back-up vocals for Anywhere I Lay My Head, Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits covers album. The record’s producer, Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, describes Anywhere as having a “‘cough medicine/TinkerBell’ vibe”––which, funnily enough, seems as good a description as any of Bowie’s performance as Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat.

In other indie-cred starlet-turned-pop star news, remember Zooey Deschanel’s album? Justin Wolfe, that smart-star who writes one of the blogs I mentioned in this post about The Hills, wrote an incredible post last week, in which he made the argument that, as “extension of their brand, from image to sound”  the She and Him stuff as a Zooey Deschanel product is materially the same as Hills star Heidi Montag’s much-reviled first single. Check it out here.

Maybe I read too much Curbed, but it seems we’ve been having a lot of construction accidents in New York City lately (actually, the Daily News has also taken notice). So, while watching the new teaser trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, I couldn’t help but think about last Wednesday’s tragedy in Brooklyn involving a man falling 13 stories to his death. The trailer, which features construction workers throwing themselves off a site due to some strange “happening” that causes people to suddenly commit suicide, may hit too close to home for other people, too. A few blogs and forums have noted the similarity to the images of airborne jumpers/fallers from the World Trade Center on 9/11 (this wouldn’t be the first time Shyamalan made a 9/11 metaphor).

Now, I’m not the kind of guy to normally get sensitive about trailers unintentionally evoking tragedy (I thought it was unnecessary for trailers for The Core to be pulled following the Columbia disaster, but I guess I’m heartless). But this one hit me differently. Maybe it’s because these accidents are more of an ongoing/continuing problem, and certainly I’m also letting my bias against most NYC real estate developers get me heated up. However, I don’t think the trailer should be pulled — no, I’d rather it be seen by enough locals who might also relate the imagery to the tragedies.

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Zooey Deschanel is so adorable that even I––usually such a knee-jerk skeptic when it comes to Things People Think Are Adorable––have to just give myself over to her absolute adorability. The indie actress, who sang in Elf and recently in a teeny role in The Assassination of Jesse James, is releasing an album with M. Ward under the name She & Him this March. The two will be playing at SXSW on March 14; in the meantime, Stereogum has an MP3 from the album, for a track called “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” It’s totally 60s, like something Serge Gainsbourg would have produced, but a little less breathier and a little more garage-ier. Above: She and Him perform the Ricky Nelson classic, “Lonesome Town.”