Exceedingly ordinary boy-meets-girl story...musically intuitive yet with little imagination

Rating: 4/10 (3 April 2010)

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber penned this rather basic screenplay about a young man in the greeting-card creation business who falls for his boss's new assistant, a pretty, independent girl who believes love is just a fantasy. The couple meet, get to know one another, date, and part in the course of five-hundred days, while director Marc Webb zips us through different stages of their relationship in a semi-random manner (which Webb probably intended as a fresh way to define the peaks and valleys of modern romance). Age-appropriate viewers, tired of Woody Allen or Nora Ephron-penned romantic comedy-dramas, will no doubt see traces of themselves portrayed earnestly here, yet the film is hardly inventive. The college-rock soundtrack is flavorful, and is usually around to pick up the slack, yet Neustadter and Weber fall back on some very derivative character-driven scenes and dialogue (while the proviso that leading lady Zooey Deschanel prefers being alone to dating is a lazy out, rendered inconsequential by the finale). The picture looks good and sounds good, though it is itself a fairy tale--one topped with a happy bow. Gullible teenagers are its target audience. ** from ****