Winds of Change
500 Days of Summer is a kind of film which you’d love to write as much as you’d love to watch. It would be like how Levitt comes up with lines after he gets laid. You get that fluency while writing about this movie. That confidence you get when you know that you are a writer.
It’s an ideal movie to watch with your girlfriend if you are within the first 250 days of this Summer episode. It might work in a different way post that too but holding hands and watching this movie with popcorn and Pepsi to your side and arms in the middle would be like how Levitt and Deschanel move around the model apartment in the film. From a distance I feel as if I’m one of the younger couples being seen by an older couple while getting cozy and giggle about it. What a beautiful scene that was, in bed.
I didn’t find Summer sexy, nor beautiful but autumn, yeah, incredibly sexy. May be not my type of girl. But this guy Levitt scores big time. Huge fan of him. I should have put this as a disclaimer first up. I guess I was the only person who wrote about Levitt more than Bale or Tom Hardy or Nolan when I reviewed The Dark Knight Rises. I equally liked him in 50-50. He’s got something about him which would make you instantly connect with him. That Vijay Sethupathi effect that he has…
Like Ebert mentioned or I don’t know, somewhere else I read, the movie talks about 500 days of Summer. 500 in brackets, which means it’s not the 500 days in chronological order. That’s how you remember love, the best moments, the worst moments, and the moments. It’s only the moments and not the complete story. I think I’d have quoted this ‘n’ number of times, right from my lecture to stories to my book. That’s one favorite point about the movie.
The disclaimer at the start of the movie, if you remember, holds out for a good few seconds more than a regular disclaimer. It also ends in a pun. Bitch! It gives you a cue that it’s going to be a soup story but with films like 500 Days of Summer you can’t really be sure which side it would turn. It goes here and there till the final moment in the climax. But you got to accept that no matter how it’d have ended you’d have come out of theatre as a happy man..
500 Days of Summer is about a pleasant sadness, mild happiness, not a shout out loud moment as if you’ve won a trophy, it’s that feel that you get when you drive at a constant speed in a deserted road and a silent music without earphones.
Talking about music, if a movie could work so much for a person who has limited knowledge about English music, how lovely it would have been for someone who loves music and had enjoyed it like how we did for Ilayaraja. They’d have got the nostalgia that we get with Ilayaraja music in Subramaniapuram.
It’s not only that, even the references are beautiful. In music if it was about naming the pet dog after Springsteen, Bruce, of course. In movies it was about Before Sunrise, only that they end up in adult store instead of record room, and in movies within movies it’s Bergman which for Allen fans automatically draws inspiration to Manhattan scene and the park where Levitt scenes, without the parking lot of course. Isn’t it beautiful? Shouldn’t films be made like this, for joy, more than anything else? What’s more pleasant than getting a Kulfi at 10 PM when you walk home tired from office. No Häagen-Dazs or Baskin Robbins is gonna match that. Hopeless romantic that I’m, but, without spending a penny.
You don’t appreciate framing or cinematography out rightly in 500 Days… because that’s how it was supposed to look like. Rather you appreciate moments in film making as well, that opening and closing of lift when he initially sees her, the edit from some 100th to 300th day through lift, the way the number of days changes from 1 to 2 to 200 to 400 to 400.5 to 401 etc. etc. Just random sequence. Random! What’s best, the song after he gets laid. I’ve never felt so happy even when my friends got laid. Oh wait, is Manja Potuthan from Kakki Satti choreography inspired from this song. I’m not complaining. I’m a fan of the song. But with Levitt and his innocent happiness, it looked a lot cuter.
I sincerely hope that Levitt lived happily ever after with Autumn, if not for anything else, for hotness sake.
P.S: Look, how easily I can write. Didn’t I say it before.
constantscribbles 