Hot weather has only arrived in fits and starts this summer, and it's been the same at the cineplex. It's not been a great season for blockbusters or much else. ( The Harry Potter movie screened after my deadline so the jury's still out on that one. ) So, is there anything out there for a movie lover this summer?
Well, there's Bruno, for one. Sacha Baron Cohen's in-your-face comedy is raw, hilarious and a great time for an open-minded audience; Public Enemies is an old-fashioned gangster picture complete with an irresistible antihero in leading man Johnny Depp and gorgeous eye candy in leading lady Marion Cotillard; and The Hurt Locker is ( finally ) the great Iraq War picture precisely because it's not a typical war picture. And for romantic fools ( like myself ) the sweetly delicate 500 Days of Summer, opening this Friday, is not just the best film of the season—it's one of the best of the year. Moreover, Dead Snow, a Norwegian zombie picture also opening this weekend at the Music Box, is the chiller-thriller guilty pleasure that gore fanatics have been waiting for.
In 500 Days of Summer, cutie-pie indie star Joseph Gordon-Levitt ( Stop-Loss, The Lookout, Brick, Havoc ) —familiar to gay audiences from his fearless lead performance in Mysterious Skin—plays Tom, a greeting-card writer who falls hopelessly, madly in love with Summer ( Zooey Deschanel, another indie star ) , the new assistant to the boss who takes his breath away. Yet, the narrator says "This is not a love story" as we watch the lovestruck Tom making goo-goo eyes at Summer. The sardonic tone is set in place, and what follows in this "anti-love story" is one of the most delicious film versions of boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl that I can recall.
Tom, we quickly learn, has been looking for "the one" but just as quickly we discover that Summer, though ready and willing for some romance, has not. The two find a shared affection for The Smiths and Bruce Springsteen after a night of karaoke out with their co-workers, and start dating. Tom, one of those straight-up guys who plays things close to the vest, knows that he's found something very special in Summer. She's an individual with a mind of her own ( confessing that her past lovers included a woman and a guy with a big penis nicknamed "the puma" ) but she's also relationship-phobic and wants things to stop at "I like you."
The familiarity of the romance between the two is turned inside out by a wonderful gimmick worked into the script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. 500 days of Summer—from the initial attraction to the breakup and the aftermath—is shown a day at a time, with the time frame thrown in the air like a deck of cards. Tom's infatuation with Summer alters, depending on his mood and whether we're seeing something before or after Day 290 ( when Summer tells Tom over coffee that he's Nancy and she's Sid, and it's time to go back to just being friends ) .
We see everything through the eyes of Tom who, one day, is besotted by the nape of Summer's neck as she sleeps and enchanted by her tattoo and then on another day, disgusted by both. This charming, canny device takes the mundane, overly common details of courtship and brings them added joy and poignancy. When I realized where first-time feature director Marc Webb was going with this device I thought to myself with hope, "Can he sustain the mood? Can he maintain this emotional balancing act?"
Delightfully, he does, he does. Webb's facility with the numerous emotional tones and look of the picture ( which changes on a dime ) isn't surprising ( having come from the world of music videos ) and, both visually and emotionally, the movie's just endlessly delightful with one perfect little sequence after another—a French film parody, a blissful dance that spontaneously happens the night after Tom gets laid for the first time ( it's the hilarious high point of the movie ) , etc. The result is a film that has the same light yet bittersweet tone of Jacque Demy's '60s French musical romances—The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort—but it feels very contemporary. And Gordon-Levitt—who has played a series of emotionally dark, complicated characters—shows a new persona that is very winning while Deschanel's role fits her sardonic but winning talents like one of the vintage party dresses she wears throughout the movie.
One hates to overpraise a little film like 500 Days of Summer so as not to set expectations too high and there is one groaner that comes briefly at the end of the movie—the film's only cutsie-poo misstep. But it's easy to overlook one tiny flaw after having experienced such a stylish treat and throw caution to the wind to get the word out: This is one not to miss.
In brief: Who knew there were so many uses for human intestines? This, my gore-loving fans, is just one of the things I learned while watching the terrifically fun Dead Snow, in which a group of comely Norse medical students on a skiing holiday encounter a pack of bloodthirsty Nazi zombies. The snowy scenery makes for a gorgeous and refreshing backdrop to the usual mayhem and carnage that ensues when the students are—of course—stranded in a remote, mountainous cabin. The splatter is plentiful; the deaths are creatively, hilariously staged; and there's even a modicum of a plot ( something to do with stolen treasure—a sort of mix between The Fog and Leprechaun ) to liven things up. The movie, which falls neatly into a category that I'm dubbing "gleeful gore," is a horribly satisfying guilty pleasure—quite literally.
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