The film ‘(500) Days of Summer’ has been getting quite the critical buzz.  With 88% approval on RottonTomatoes.com, many have been hailing it as a unique, inventive, and charmingly romantic comedy.  Well, the critic whose article you are currently reading thought quite different.  He thought the film was standard, clichéd, and tragically tired.  It’s not new, it’s very old and quite often used.  It’s the story of boy meets girl, they fall in love, they don’t see eye to eye on an important matter, they break up, one of them over reacts in a “comical” fashion, and they either get back together or stay separated but become stronger.  Sound familiar?  It should.  You’ve seen it in ‘Little Manhattan’ ‘Ghost World’ ‘She’s Gotta Have it’ and countless other romances.  If you like the formula, you’ll like the movie, if you’re tired of the formula, then you’ll REALLY be tired of it here.

      The film is told from the out of order memories of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tom, a hard working young man who falls in love with Zooey Deschanel playing Summer, who is wide eyed beauty with a sassy song in her heart.  They both work at a greeting card company and seem to fall “quirkily” in love by discovering they like the same things and then pretend like they’re not into each other.  Of course one of them finally makes a move (she kisses him before they even go out on a first date) as they decide they should become an item…sort of.  Summer it turns out doesn’t believe in love, she believes in dating and having a good time, but actually marrying someone or even becoming a girlfriend makes her feel more like property than a human being.  Tom of course feels different but figures they can work past that as their time together continues…big mistake.

      For the closer Tom gets to Summer, the further away she is being pushed.  Even though they share small, charming, comical moments together, their chemistry seems to be getting weaker and weaker.  Thus she finally breaks it off with him, which results in the typical overreaction where the boy gets drunk, snaps at people who don’t deserve it, and tries to date others yet can only talk about his previous girlfriend.  The two talk veer back and forth through the rest of the movie between almost getting together but one of them over reading something the other does.  We of course also get some support from Tom’s geeky yet “wacky” best friends who try to give him advice about dating while constantly having their own comical misadventures with women as well.

      Yep, pretty basic and pretty dull.  Nothing new, inventive, or intriguing about this spin on the romance story at all.  The only refreshing moment which seems to ring true to life is when we get a split screen representation about how Tom thinks the date is going to go and how it really went.  This was clever and seemed to serve the character’s emotional state, but everything else seems to just re-enforce every other ‘young love’ story you’ve ever heard.  With the exception of a cute performance from Tom’s cynical younger sister (Chloe Moretz), it offers very few laughs that seem genuinely fresh.  Even the jokes that are laughed at seem very familiar or even stolen from other romantic comedies.  So from the sound of things it seems like ‘(500) Days of Summer’ is as rehashed and unimaginative a romance as you can get, right?  Well, to me it was.

      To many viewers, particularly younger viewers, ‘(500) Days’ may ring familiar bells of relationships they might have had, and thus sympathies with the movie.  The formula is old, but it still borrows from what makes relationships so loving and painful as well, and tries to incorporate as much of a true life romance as they can.  That’s not really a bad thing, I’ve just seen it before, but many people will not have, and could be looking for a younger/more current romance that can speak to them easier than some of the great romances of the past.  I personally would recommend the films of the 70s or 80s where this formula got started, but if you’re looking for a younger and more familiar take, you might enjoy this film alright. 

      So who’ll like it?  Younger romantics will enjoy the pain and joys these characters go through, also people who aren’t tired of the quirky yet detailed boy meets girl formula I stated up above.

      Who won’t like it?  People who’re tired of the “personal” love story filled with overreactions, off beat dialogue, and the investable life lesson.

      My thoughts?  I can’t say the film was so bad I was waiting for it to end, but I was waiting for something, anything to be new.  The ability to predict the films story and even bits of dialogue at times was painful, and yet you felt the film makers really believed they were bringing you something new.  This is certainly someone’s personal story, whether it be the director’s, the writer’s, or whoever, which often means there is an audience out there who can relate to it because they went through something similar.  Sadly I have gone through something similar too, and I went through them in much better movies with much fresher writing.  I supposed this could be rather harsh on the movie, after all it’s just trying to give you an innocent love story (even though it tries to tell in the opening it’s not).  But for me, that heart rushing sweep of lust and chemistry some will be feeling for this movie was mutated into a headache of annoyance that constantly had me asking “When is day 500 finally going to appear?”