500 Nights of Sleeping Material

Rating: 5/10 (28 September 2017)

500 Days of Summer is a 2009 film directed by Marc Webb and stars Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The film is distributed by 20th Century Fox under their "Searchlight" division, being labeled as a Dramatic "Rom-Com". I've seen the film yesterday and will give my observations and opinions to you.
500 Days tells the nonlinear tale of Tom's seemingly magical relationship with a girl named Summer. Entangling in Fate, Coincidence, and True Love, their relationship goes through leaps and bounds in terms of events and all goes south. Also, Richard McGonagle plays Morgan Freeman as a narrator.
The characters in 500 Days are all hipsters working in an office. I'll give the film credit for giving the two leads chemistry that is very fitting for the film's emotional range. I couldn't exactly get into the Tom (JGL) character since he didn't feel like a good enough audience surrogate, though the narrative structure isn't to blame, maybe it is the writing. And Zooey Deschanel does a good job playing Summer, being an a good and equal counterpart to JGL.
500 Days of Summer felt half-and-half for me. I was completely fine with the cinematography as some shots and scenes are well done. But nothing about the film went above & beyond for me which other indie romance films like Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine did. Plus this breaks the filmmaking rule of never showing a better film in your own movie, which was The Graduate. As soon as our two characters were watching it, I said "Yeah, I should be watching that instead."
500 Days has it's feet planted in the themes of Love, Fate, Coincidence, and even Inevitability. Most of them play a part in the end and was disappointed the way it turned out, making the entire movie and concept into a pun. The movie felt to have a more somber mood than it should have since I would have liked it a little more if they had more fun with the script, acting, and tone in general.
After doing light research on the film, it certainly has found an audience. Kids will not be into this seeing as the concepts and story might not be understandable to them. People growing into adults will certainly have something to appreciate here. No matter what your opinion is on 500 Days is, I will respect it.
Overall, I give 500 Days of Summer a 5/10