500 Days of Summer is a film about how evil women are. Or at least that's what I got from it. Could be wrong.

The film stars Zooey Deschanel as Summer and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tom, and is about the rise and fall of the "friendship" between the two. It uses a non-linear narrative and has nice snappy and witty dialogue, though there are a few cheap gags in there. Summer says her nickname in high-school was "Anal Girl" and Tom laughs. Then Summer gets offended because she got the name for being tidy. Now I can guarantee that if she got that name in high-school, "Anal" did NOT mean she was a clean girl. Quite the opposite really.

The film features a lot of music. At the start and end, it's kind of orchestral which gives the film a fairy-tale feel, despite being very realistic in other aspects, and this is helped by the narration and how the back story is told and the film is wrapped up. The fairy-tale fantasy feel is very good for the film, as it allows the quirks and cut-aways to fit in more naturally. The middle of the film features more contemporary music, and for me the narration didn't work too well in these parts, but thankfully there isn't too much narration in those parts of the film, and the change in music helps it feel more modern and not as soppy and feel-goody as it could have been.

I love the quirks of this film. Not only do they tie in well thanks to the fantasy feel, but they are so creative. The random dance scene and the French film with Tom in it stood out to me, but the one which really wowed me was the split screen between Tom's reality and Tom's expectations. This is one of my favourite sequences of film ever. It's brilliantly executed and so emotive.

Around the middle of the film, it does a lot of jumping back and forth in time to contrast between how things are when the relationship is going well, and how things are going when it isn't. This is good at first, and using the day counter to keep track is very clever, but it's done to a point that it kind of gets boring, because it does little to move the story forward, and it's very formulaic. The middle of the film is essentially "Awwww look how cute they are in this situation." Cut to: "LOOK HOW SHIT THIS SITUATION IS NOW SHE'S GONE!!!"

The portrayal of a relationship in this film is so realistic, and really is what carries the film. It captures all the little things that couples do. At one point they play the penis game, which in case you haven't see the film, isn't as interesting as it sounds, though Tom is reluctant to play at first because children are around. We never really get to see what causes the relationship to fall apart which was kind of annoying though. The portrayal of women is very accurate as well. They don't make any bloody sense. Tom's character felt a little naive, but this could be because the film is from his point of view, and he's not really going to try and find out about himself. It could also be because I'm a man and don't want to see how awesome we are be undersold.

Both of the characters in the film felt really quite shallow. They are essentially "This is a man" and "This is a woman", and while the representations of their respective genders is generally very accurate, they feel very generic and impersonal. They don't feel like people as much as they do representations of their genders on the whole. The thing is, you can tell from how realistic the story is that this has actually happened to the writer, and the story is clearly what came first. This was a definite story that they wanted to tell, and they just made some generic characters to carry that story off exactly how they wanted to. However, I feel that because the film has an overall fantasy, fairy-tale feel to it, that it gives a reprieve to the generic characters, as they are carriers of a bigger message, and not really that important. This is particularly reflected in the names of the female characters; being Summer and Autumn.

On the whole, I loved this film. It tells a down to earth and contemporary story with a very traditional feel, but mixes it up with some creative and funny quirks. It's like if Quentin Tarantino made nice films.