(500) Days of Summer is quite simply the best film of the year so far.
It is absolutely perfect in any aspect I can think of: intelligent script, ingenious story construction, excellent acting, clever direction, you name it. After I saw it I was seriously tempted to get a ticket for the next immediate showing so that I could watch it again to study its structure. I’ve been sitting down for the last half hour trying to find faults in it and I just. Can’t. Do. It.
It’s more than just a postmodern take on Annie Hall,, and every reviewer saying it “takes the tropes of romantic comedy and satirizes them” needs to be taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot.
PS. Also contains the best last line to a movie since The Apartment.
PPS. No, I’m not kidding.
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Sounds worth seeing. Have to get on that some time very soon.
(You seen Moon yet? Pretty good. Not a bad summer for movies, all in all.)
Really? Because its ad campaign: “A movie about the two types of people in the world: men and women” is such a hoary cliche that I figured they couldn’t be selling anything good with it.
If nothing else, it has the one flaw of that absolutely excruciating elevator conversation about the Smiths that appears in the trailer.
That scene alone concerns me that it’s going to be too self-conscious by half.
Shut up, really?
It’s what MGK said. I saw it on a date, and when back the next day to just drown in its perfect everything.
So damn good.
Anyone who uses ‘Tropes’ to apply to ANYTHING in the real world deserves to be taken out and bloody eviscerated.
The grouping of things into tropes is the enemy of good writing. Hell, it’s the enemy of good entertainment.
The words of Stig are true.
But Stig, we wouldn’t have TVTropes.org if we didn’t.
Gosh, it’s been so long… What was the last line of The Apartment?
Best last lines:
-Some Like It Hot
-Casablanca
-King Kong
I thought Annie Hall was a postmodern take on Annie Hall.
if memory serves: “shut up and deal”
which is cool, though i admit not getting the whole “best final line in the history of film” thing (not a critique, it’s probably just one of those things were i’m probably not trained/artistic enogh to get). If anyone could enlighten me, i’ll be more than greatful
i wish that the boy was a little more queer and the girl less conveniently bisexual. but yes. v. v. good.
Wow. Stunning bit of homophobia out of left fucking field.
Canadave, that website is a compilation of uninteresting, uninformative, unfunny twitterings of teats with nothing better to do. It’s akin to the pointless task of elderly Peter Stillman in Paul Auster’s “City Of Glass”, who spends his days making up a new language which only he can understand nobody else ever gets to hear. It breeds people like the Newsarama poster, Herald, who is in all truth the nearest real incarnation of Superboy Prime on Earth. And it’s an intellectually bankrupt way of enjoying and criticising something compared to…actually experiencing and enjoying it.
Bottom line is, I worked like a fucking mule to finish my English Lit A-Levels and get a chance to do a degree in Comparative Literature, and I don’t like the idea of a bunch of barely-coherent nerds thinking they can do better because they noticed a similar plot between two shitty anime series.
Anyway – MGK, I dare you to say the film is better than Before Sunrise & Before Sunset. Because it is not, and in no way could be, and I very rarely see you lying on this blog.
Hey! I actually DO spend my days making up a language that nobody (well, certain members of my RPG group, but really—4 or 5 people) gets to hear!
Handy for passwords actually, but I have no particular need for security since I can’t do e-commerce.
Anyway – MGK, I dare you to say the film is better than Before Sunrise & Before Sunset.
It’s better than either film individually. I’d have to see it at least once or twice more before deciding whether it’s better than the two combined.
Of course, ranking a pair of films like Summer and either Before is an exercise in nigh-futility; Summer is a highly stylized work that frequently plays with the ideas of being a movie itself, and either Before is more like a short story that just happened to occur in front of a camera. They’re at completely opposite ends of the creative spectrum.
You’re right – in fact, to further my above point, even the simple process of ranking one film or book or play against another damages your perception of it, because they were made at different times in different ways.
Although you’ll note that all three benefit from having extraordinary lead female performers – both Delpy and Deschanel benefit from not only being maddeningly pretty but also maddeningly intelligent, especially by the standard of modern film actresses.
Stig: I get where you’re coming from, but I always felt that site was just fluffy, tongue in cheek analysis of mainly pop culture things, who never took itself too serious. Though I admit to be somewhat irked once in a while, basically whenever I read an entry of someone trying to explain with the same tools fit for sci-fi series, Japanese fiction and videogame plots, things that shouldn’t (from the top of my head I can only remember a maddening entry on Hector Mann from “The Book of Illusions”). But when the site maintains its focus on the things it should, it can be good fun (and a huge time waster).
actually, my comment was not homophobic at all, but seeking for more sexual freedom for all. opposite of it.
TVtropes is all in good fun. I don’t feel that the tropes contributors are looking down on their subjects.
Hell, the front page says “We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.”
Tv tropes are just that: tools in the TV writer’s toolbox. When you are putting out between 20 and 30 scripts a year, even the best writing team is going to fall back on cliche and reliable, if not overly creative, story elements.
Good shows are the ones who manage to make those tired elements seem fresh by putting their own spin on them, or having interesting enough characters that you don’t care.
As a writer, it can be very useful to be able to analyse a work and “break it apart” as it were, and see where the author used narrative devices and tropes to good effect, and where they failed.
I don’t think tvtropes actually considers itself an actual authority on literature, at least I don’t see that way. I was amused that all ‘tropes’ I noticed as a child were noticed by other people (egotism!)
I do love the site, because I find it fascinating how so many people use the same ideas, and how differently they apply them. How someone screws it up, and how another makes it work for them. It’s like a list of creativity categorized for me, and I adore creativity. Intellectually bankrupt or no, it makes me happy to see so many ideas being used.
> “even the simple process of ranking one film or book or play against another damages your perception of it, because they were made at different times in different ways”
You needed a Comparative Lit degree to come to the conclusion that different works are different? *grin*
Okay, actually saw it, and it is in fact very good and insanely resonant. And the Smiths bit is better in context.
BUT.
The little girl that Joseph Gordon-Levitt talks with throughout the movie feels like something from Quirky Indie Cliches 101. So unexplained and inexplicable is she that I was inclined to think her a figment of Tom’s imagination, until my date pointed out that she interacted with other characters in the first scene of the movie.
MGK wasn’t kidding. He might even have undersold it.
If I had to summarize the movie in one scene, it’d be the scene where he just got laid, and it’s the greatest “I just got laid” sequence in film, beating the 40 Year Old Virgin by a mile. And then, the very next scene, several hundred days later he emerges from the elevator dead to life. The whiplash-inducing juxtaposition communicates the movie’s theme perfectly to me. In my relationships there are days I think the other person walks on water and days when I want to shoot them into the sun. I’ve never seen a movie communicate this so well.
He’s not kidding about the last line, either.