(500) Days of Summer

Directed by Marc Webb

(PG-13)

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl.

Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer is “a gimmick flick down to its title,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. The director’s debut is “an Annie Hall for the iPod ­generation: über-designed, pleasing to the touch, making up in generic sweetness what it lacks in bite.” The film chronicles the 500 days following the moment that 20-something Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a blue-eyed darling who’s just arrived in L.A. from the Midwest. Webb’s film begins at the end of the relationship, warning audiences up-front that boy will eventually­ lose girl, said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. He even uses an onscreen counter to randomly shuffle through the days of their short-lived romance. While a bit too clever, this technique “accurately mirrors the post-breakup postmortem, that period when you’re trying to piece together what happened when, and what you might have done differently.” Webb’s unusual method captures romance the way it really is, said Desson Thomson in The Washington Post. He “understands that we mark our lives by our scrapes with love and our defeats.”