"Coincidence. That's all anything ever is."

Rating: 7/10 (25 February 2018)

Being well removed from the target audience for a film like this, I can only say I tolerated it for the purpose of posting a review, recommended as a Top 250 Movie for 2009, the year it was released. Like a lot of teenage/young adult heart throb stories, they're usually a one-shot affair as it's present rating wouldn't make the cutoff for the current year's listing. It's not that I have anything against films like this, I just find them mediocre at best with not a lot to say about anything, unless you're someone of the same age dealing with the kind of coming of age issues as Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel). I thought their portrayals were good by the way, though the way Summer came across seemed like she didn't care about herself very much the way she entered her non-relationship with Tom. And the way Tom burned his bridges at the greeting card company more than anything displayed his own immaturity. He would need a new job referral, wouldn't he?
The one creative effort in the picture I liked was the split screen, Expectations/Reality scenario which diverged and and then dovetailed back on itself during the party scene. The split screen technique isn't new, but I don't think I've seen it used that way before. Before seeing this movie, for the life of me I couldn't figure out how the five hundred days of summer was going to play out in the story, never thinking that it might have been a character's name. But at the finale, I had a pretty good idea what the new girl's name would be, because after all, what comes after summer. In Tom's case, we'll never know if he found true happiness with Autumn, or if he was headed for a big fall.