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Is it evidence that I have become a grown up or that I am still a child if I spent $40,000.00 in one weekend?
Does what I spent it on matter?
A car, a computer, a coffee table, a pair of dress shoes.
Is that the recipe for "grown up" or simply a notch of maturity above "candy, candy, candy, candy"?
While I was preparing this post in my head over the past week (aka ~90 minute total daily commute time) I had envisioned it as a sort of eulogy to my car and compy of yore; I mean this IS the first xanga entry typed on something other than the legendary Alienware that served me well for so many years (6 if you're counting. This also means that this blog's sixth birthday is coming up soon.). It seemed appropriate in a lot of ways.
Then I went to see 500 Days of Summer by myself on Saturday morning (1130am crowd too old to judge this affront to societal norm), and good God. What a fucking mistake that was.
I had heard from a couple of semi-reliable sources that this movie was hella funny. It had been characterized (poorly, as I would decide about 30 minutes into the flick) by the movie reviewer dildo in the weekly freebie as a "hipster rom-com in the vein of Nick and Norah's infinite playlist". All of these things kind of put out my candle because they didn't match up well at all with the plot line I had decided the movie should have based on the obnoxiously widespread ad campaign (especially after you consider the whole "quirky, indie, summer rom-com" vibe the tone of the previews seemed to be BEGGING for (wuzzuuuuuuuuuuup Garden State, you pandering piece of shit)).
But we're talking about Zooey man. That girl has been Kryptonite to my flaccid wiener since old times. We're talking like, co-starring next to OG Eddie Griffin and DJ Qualls times. She is amazing. Amazing enough that it irritates me way more than it should (see: any, at all) to hear her talked about as a "rising star", see her on the cover of trashy magazines, and read about her frikken marrying some tool from Death Cab (GOD, if you are going to marry a dude from a shitty band, AT LEAST do it ironically, by which I mean dig up Nick Lachey or something... or get your rocks off with an NBA player (long list of exceptions available upon request) so I will have an 85% chance of seconds (look it up)). I was there FIRST! By which I mean "I was there after she made her first Hollywood movie!!!".
So whether or not I was going to see this movie was never a question of "if", merely "when".
But dogg, I should have thought harder on that.
Movies usually don't mess with my head; I laugh at some things I shouldn't, hang close with people on the way out to eavesdrop on their "reviews", and that is about it. I leave all of the baggage the movie may have found in the theater... and that is usually pretty easy, because most movies I see don't inspire thoughts of much reference as pertains to the meaning of life and such. I'm not saying that the sack on 500 Days of Summer carried that much weight, but JEEZUS, the keys it packed hit me in a way I can only relate to getting hit in the back of the head with a basketball at a wedding reception. Out of fukken NOWHERE, and with force!
The movie had funny moments, but all movies do (if you disagree with this, I don't know how you live, much less get along with me). Coming away from this movie saying "it was funny" is a lot like listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time and saying "I can really see where Billy Corgan drew influence from".
If two people popping their maiden convo over The Smiths, and the presence of a The Jesus and Mary Chain poster make the characters involved "hipsters"... well shit, then I guess Wilt Chamberlain was a hipster as well, all wearing Chuck Taylor's when he played ball and shit.
Both of these conclusions make me not only doubt the movie taste of those who render them, but the general cognitive ability.
I suppose if you had NEVER been in the presence of an opposite sex who excited your mind, provoked your imagination, and just gave you something more fulfilling than a decent piece to throw a fuck into from time to time, the only element that would hit you WOULD be the humor.
And I guess if you thought recognizing a Joy Division tee and having a passing familiarity with The Graduate and The Seventh Seal qualifies you as "indie king shit", then you WOULD be more than happy to liken yourself to the characters by christening them hipsters and just blowing off how irrelevant (and scant at that) the pop culture references were.
The movie did a pretty good job of telling the viewer what it was out to accomplish (by which I mean it literally told you this, and then bombarded you with myriad contrived story telling methods, because the viewer is OBVIOUSLY too dumb to match up two sides of a coin if they land more than 2 minutes apart, DUH), and even did a good job of toeing the line of its self-assigned ethos for all but like, the last 10 minutes.
That is not the point though. The movie was cinematically solid, especially in the context of a summer filled with abortions such as Terminator 4, Transformers 2, and GI Joe 1 (dead fetus in powers of 2, dogg). I know it's not fair to compare a movie that actually tries to movies that just blow shit up, but 4realz, why does summer have to be a wasteland?
The point is... GOOD GOD, I thought my insides were going to eat themselves in the last third of this movie. I know it is a trite and quite possibly retarded observation to make, but this movie took words from the mouths of so many people I have known, and yet even after seeing things like those which went down in this movie occur before, I still get fucked up by them.
This is where the movie failed to me.
It gets a gold star for the semi fresh assembly of the end of summer indie romance movie. Double gold stars for that segment where Joseph Gordon-Levitt is running down his favorite Zooey features and the camera just fucking pans and zooms (future project: lay a mix of Kiera saying "you want to know what it tastes like" from pirates 2, "Take Ecstasy with me" by the Magnetic Fields, and "Hunted by a Freak" by Mogwai, and lay it over this video... YOWZA). But a giant lump of fucking Tungsten for the total lack of balls down the stretch.
By which I mean... Let's explore something and make a statement!
The characters initially clicked for trivial reasons. Their lives weren't really coinciding at all, they just liked some of the same shit and intrigued each other. Nothing wrong with that; happens to me all the time! Lets push it and have them address this!
Lets get into the mind of the guy when he has to balance the endless stream of hot and cold he gets from the girl. The whole "she says she wants casual, but acts like she wants serious" thing is VERY INTERESTING! How about we don't blow it off for a squeaky clean resolution?
Extrapolating on the backgrounds and/or futures of the characters would be extraneous (thx for not doing this btw), but could we get into some of the in between? I get that they broke things off kind of ugly, and then ran into each other kind of randomly, and then oh fuck, Zooey married some other dude who we only know as "dogg who made a comment in a coffee shop". I want more info so I can figure out why this schism made me feel shitty, but a similar gag in "Definitely, maybe" left me untouched. Do this please! I understand that the movie can't really stretch out much past 2 hours, and I am willing to cede the BEYOND corny ending to some blowjob producer. I am not however going to stand by and say "I loved this movie" when I feel like all it did was open doors. Some movies can do that crap, some of the philosophical "sign of the times" chit chat at the end of "No Country for Old Men" is a good example of this. A summer "romance that is not a love story" though? Fuck you movie. You can't do a dogg like that, all getting him to invest the emotions, correlate actions and quirks to people that have crossed his path, build it all to the sickeningly familiar rage of the beautifully done "expectations vs. reality scene"... and then just wipe it all off the table, for no reason other than to end on a note that I guess is high to the dimwitted viewer? Am I missing something here? Did I "tragically misread" the ending of this movie? Did I invest too heavily in other aspects of the movie? I mean yeah, I have played that game in IKEA before, had girls accidentally reveal they have blown off things I have made for them before, even things as specific as the whole snuggle up and have someone say "you're fuuuunnnnn" (with a frighteningly (ie erotic and wistfully intentional) similar timbre to Zooey's). It was easy for me to relate to this movie (I feel I need to point out that this statement is grossly different from seeing myself as one of the characters), so I am open to the idea of it coloring my vision. But seriously, would I be out of line to say anyone not irritated by the last 40ish minutes of this movie either has not experienced someone in the realm of special/interesting, or is simply (dare I say)... retarded? I'm not trying to ascribe more weight to this movie than it deserves, more than anything else I am thrilled to have semi-decent things to bitch about with a movie. While fucking up at the end is exponentially more irritating than fucking up at the beginning, it still makes for a better overall movie going experience. Even if that experience is alone, at 1130am, on a Saturday morning (natch).
EDIT: I wrote this in word and can't get the fonts etc. to match. It is annoying me a lot... so just hang with me until I get this figured out.
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