500 Days of Bummer

A lot of folks who saw "500 Days of Summer" had said it was a great movie. I had little motivation to catch it, but since its fame had spread through word-of-mouth and facebook, I thought, why the hell not.

So I gave it a try.

And I'm glad I did, not because I liked it, but because it added something to my small cache of film wisdom: mainly, it added points in my list of the ingredients of a bad movie.

In short, I was disappointed.

I think the movie had something to say, you know, all that shit about how we are all products of our upbringing and how our ideologies (which we might have carried with us for most of our lives) can be shattered by one brief, shining crash to the earth. The message being a cliche, there was more pressure on the part of the film-makers to make sure that the delivery was thorough.

As it turned out, there was a total lack of character development and the plot didn't make much for credibility. The script was, well, nondescript (beats the shit out of me why it's a front runner in the Oscars screenplay department--or so I've been told), short of like telling the viewer, hey, you're smart, you should be able to get it, we're even giving it a different spin (you know, that whole rewind/fast-forward thingie they did with the plot) and spicing it up with references to cool stuff like "The Graduate" and Dorian Gray (what was it doing there, anyway? Were we given any prior indication that Summer even read, in the first place?) and sprinkling the scenes with a good playlist (The Pixies, Regina Spektor, Carla Bruni), short of having that Tom guy say, "hey, I like cool stuff, I'm a cool guy, so you better think I'm cool and this movie, cool!"

To put it in a clam shell, this movie ends up undermining the audience's intelligence, and I hate movies that do just that.

Plus, it tries too hard to be cute, though its many attempts at cuteness--far too many, I have to say--end up streaking the place with 500 mismatched shades of mediocrity.

And that whole "Autumn" thing at the end? That was the last nail on the movie's coffin. Made me want to throw up.