(500) Days of Summer (2009)

One of these days I'll find a link to a list of movies with punctuation in the title. There has to be someone as obsessive-compulsive-disorderly as I who would maintain one. Meanwhile, this charming bit of entertainment is the latest addition to that list. Mix together a first-time feature director (Marc Webb), a couple of screenwriters (Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber) whose only produced credit is the much lambasted Steve Martin sequel The Pink Panther 2 (2009), and two remarkable actors: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the young alien in the TV series 3rd Rock from the Sun and variously damaged young men in the excellent indies Mysterious Skin (2004), Brick (2005), and The Lookout (2008)) and Zooey Deschanel (see my description of her in Yes Man), and the unexpected result is delightful. Some reviewers have complained about the voice-over, the animation, and the musical number (you must have seen that in the trailer), but Jack & I liked just about everything in this. We followed the ups and downs of Tom's (Gordon-Levitt, who finally gets to be happy on screen, at least part of the time) and Summer's (Deschanel) relationship easily, even when the action jumped to non-sequentially-numbered days in the chronology (grateful for the numbers clearly displayed so we didn't have to guess). Good music, including The Smiths, Feist, Black Lips, Hall & Oates, Simon & Garfunkel, and Deschanel singing "Sugar Town" in a karaoke scene. Back to our old practice of seeing a movie on opening afternoon, we had a fair amount of company in the mall multiplex. Try it, you'll like it.