500 Days of Summer
Just fucking shoot me. This is an early contender for worst fucking movie I
will watch all goddamn year. I haven't wanted to murder both protagonists in a
romance so early on in my whole life. I hate using the term
"hipster", but it seems I am finally forced to define to it, use it,
and hate two characters for being it.
Hipster (noun) A hipster is a person who defines his or herself by a group
of tastes (usually musical) which they consider to be offbeat and obscure, but
really they're into a bunch of shit that everybody has heard of and has been
less self-aware and less image-affecting in terms of their opinions on said
shit. A hipster strives to live in a permanent adolescence by being
non-committal to anything and forcing an identity based on counterculturism
while striving to succeed by the standard of the culture which they officially
oppose.
This was like Hiroshima if they replace the Enola Gay with a plane that dropped
Wes Anderson on my head from a thousand feet. Upperclass self-obsession and
indie movie reality-warping go into fifth gear with this film. Like usual, we
are presented with a universe were people fall into dream careers in their
early 20s and have all the time in the world to self-obsess in their cutsiepoo
luxurious hipster-decorated flats set to music that is designed to illicit an
emotional response from the hipster audience provided that the New Music
Express approves along with their kewl friends at the record store.
The film samples shamelessly from Amélie
for almost all its stylistic devices but strips it of its earnest cuteness and
replaces it with self-aware taste-sensitive self-obsessed whiny garbage. Amélie
was clearly a movie with cartoon characters in a fairytale story that didn’t
aim for social observation. It was being
one dimensional because it didn’t for one second pretend to be observational. Also, the characters in Amélie were overgrown toddlers whereas the characters in 500 Days of Summer are overgrown whiny
teenagers. And I think we can all agree
that kids are cuter than teenagers.
Zooey Deschanel has had a career out of playing men’s
ideas of women but not actual women, and she finally hits jackpot with this
role. Her character is designed pull at
the heartstrings of every Wes Anderson-loving self-obsessed record store
employee across the world (North America).
Joe-Gord Levitt follows her lead
and plays not a hipster, but how hipsters see themselves. If you want to see a movie in which the main
character is obsessed with Zooey Deschanel, and Zooey Deschanel is obsessed
with herself resulting in a Zooey Deschanel obsession that is folded over
multiple times like the steel in a samurai sword, see this film.
The Zooey Deschanel obsession is just so way out of
whack. I realize hipsters would drool over her, but this film’s depiction of
her as the ultimate sex fantasy who turns every male head and makes every man
want to become a hipster just to get close to her is pretty goddamn silly. I
mean, she’s cute, I’d fuck her, but don’t tell me she’d inspire obsession in
all these hair gel-abusing MBA jock Wall Street pricks. You could put Zooey Deschanel in the middle
of the room, aim spotlights at her, set her on fire, and if there was something
blonde with implants standing behind her all the jock guys would magically not
even notice Zooey was there.
But this is a hipster movie set in a hipster
universe. At one point Joe-Gord asks “These days it’s all these big sunglasses
and little dogs in giant handbags, who okay’d that???” and his hipster
entourage laugh heartily. Who okay’d that? I dunno, maybe the same guy who okay’d spending hours on making your
hair look like you spent no time on it.
Maybe the same guy who okay’d you
to put on your necktie, tie the knot, and then preciously self-consciously
crumple it. Maybe the same merciful God
who allows us all to look however the fuck we want and like whatever shit we
like thankyouverymuch.
I know it might be mathematically possible to admire
this film for telling its story from the perspective of its characters and not
some dry Kubrickian probing. I mean, I
saw the film Bronson, which showed
this guy’s life the way he saw it as one big circus in which he was the
ringmaster. But that film didn’t need to
step in and comment because I think we all know that unprovoked nude violence
and the theft of established film star’s names are both wrong. I feel like 500 Days of Summer has no trouble taking jabs at the dorky yuppie
boss character, or the fat cat lady character, or the stockbroker asshole, but
it never once jabs the hipsters in a way they wouldn’t like.
This film never comments on the superficiality of the
characters or their romance. The film
romanticizes their relationship that seems to be built entirely on liking some
of the same shit and various cute physical stylings of each other. And the film strives for a similar
relationship with its audience. We’re
supposed to like this film because it references things we’re supposed to
like. It’s kinda funny that this film
strives for the same relationship with its audience that its characters have
with each other since, well, things don’t work out between them. But hipster are big irony so it’s probably a
calculated move.
And either I live in a really weird subculture or
something or this film, which presents itself as being observational, is
completely off the mark and the result of typical Hollywood *indie*
screenwriting garbage. The film's presentation of architecture as a career is
beyond laughable. The fact that this film tries to present careers in
architecture as more creatively rewarding than working in the greeting card
industry goes against all experience I've had. Every architect I know spends
their day designing big rectangles that will include several small rectangles
and one corridor down the middle for humans to file into the small rectangles. It’s a profession made up mostly of
meticulous detail, math and science. Which steel to use in the ventilation shafts.
Where to place the support beams. What costs less than brick? How many centimetres should the electricity
outlet be from the floor. Cheap. Efficient. Ugly. The one in a million architects who gets
to design a cool museum would long for the professional odds of the one in 20
greeting card writers who get to write a funny original greeting card. But like
in all Hollywood films, if your heart’s not in it, you can just quit and your
rent pays itself while you sort out your personal shit and self obsess.
Also, this film presents us with a reality in which it is really weird to like
Ringo Star. What are you going to try to
slide by me next, that nobody likes Fozzie Bear? So yeah, Marc Webb, your movie sucks, go fuck
your mother, that is if Wes Anderson and Zach Braff aren’t already on her.
I think our problem as a society is that we let
hipsters drag us into defining them by their terms. They think in terms of specific tastes and
trick us into debating them in this way and so a lot of the time they seem to
win because they do like some decent shit.
But the problem isn’t the shit they like, the problem is their
superficiality and it needs to be addressed.
There’s more us humans than lists of likes and dislikes and there is
more to the connections we share than the overlap of those lists. The whole midset that you can achieve
sincerity through irony and achieve depth through having the right group of
superficial interest is just so joylessly juvenile and wrong that there is no
way I can excuse it as the driving philosophy behind a movie about adults with
adult themes.
You're hearing
this from the guy who liked Juno.
Avoid this shit like the plague.
If you like
this here is (some) more shit:
I talk about a corny jazz
romance movie I rented.
Things that make you go
‘Whoops!’
(300)
Spartans
It’s a lot of guys.
Is it a lot of movie? You bet you bottom three hundred dollars it is!