Gossip Sauce Sundance Report: 500 Days of Summer

It’s so rare for a film to truly evoke or replicate the experience of falling in love and then, heartbreakingly, what happens when that love goes awry.

Delightfully, 500 Days of Summer is one of those extraordinarily uncommon gems.

The film explains from the beginning that it’s not a love story, it’s a story about love…one audiences will fall in love with. Not only is it one of best films we’ve seen at Sundance, it’s the most impressive romantic comedy we’ve had the pleasure of watching in a very long time. First time director Marc Webb has turned Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber’s phenomenal script into a piece with incredible humor, depth and insight while investigating the frailty of love as a relationship starts, grows, evolves, disintegrates and is eventually remembered, first through the pain of loss and finally with the clarity of reality. Meg Ryan’s throne has finally been claimed by the enrapturing Zooey Deschanel while Joseph Gordon-Levitt ran off with our heart like a thief in the night. 

Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt star as Summer and Tom, co-workers at a greeting card company who start a relationship despite Summer’s aversion to commitment. (Editor’s sidenote: What we can’t comprehend is what her problem is, as JGL serves up the most intense eye sex to grace the screen in a long time!)

Webb carries the audience back and forth in a non-linear zigzag across the transom of their relationship, using 50s style educational films, French new wave cinema, dashes of perfectly conceived animation, full-out dance numbers, Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like the Wind” (love, love, love it!), and the most ingenious split screen we’ve ever seen (sorry, 24). 

500 Days of Summer is visually stunning (Downtown LA hasn't looked this good in years), wonderfully directed and filled with pitch-perfect performances. It’s the most sincere, honest relationship movie since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The film is being released by Fox Searchlight on July 24th and we’re miserable we’ll have to wait that long to enjoy it again.

Not only is it a must see, we’re already reserving a copy of the DVD.