500 Days of Summer

The first time I read the title of this movie: 500 Days of Summer, I thought of Math right away. I mean I tried converting days in to years and months and days again. So if there are 365 days in an ordinary year, it's equivalent to 1 year, 4 months and 15 days.Hmmmmm... I think I'm complicating it. Anyway, I was thinking that summer don't happen the entire year. It's a season that usually starts from June till September in America and from April to June here in the Philippines. But either way, it's totally impossible to have 500 days of summer in a year. So I was wondering if this is one of those movies about summer flings.

But nah, of course I was wrong.

The story is just simple. This is a story of a boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't. And the girl's name is Summer. So this is the story of a boy named Tom and his 500 days with/with-out Summer. And though at the start of the film the narrator said that we should know upfront that this is not a love story, I don't think that's true.

Love though unrequited is still a love story for me.

For usual cases, it's always the girl who's portrayed as the hopeless romantic. The one who grew up believing in fairytales and the existence of prince charming. But in this case we get to see it in a guy's perspective. Probably because the writer and the director of the film are both from the male species alike. The story revolves over Tom's internal experience and naturally more on his experience of Love.

It had been proven time and again that everything in this world seems paradoxical but true at the same time. Oxymonoronic. A thing will always have its opposite. Of course there's the obvious: man & woman; night & day; matter & anti-matter; yin & yang; the heartbreaker and the heartbroken.

As for the latter part, once or maybe a couple of times in our lives we get to play that role: either you're the one who got dumped or you're the one who does the dumping. And yes you may think that we don't need another reminder of those experiences especially if your role was the former one but what the heck. Whether that heartbrokeness made you a misogynist or a misandrist or not, we all do look back. And this movie will make us look back because we should indeed must look (again).

It's the combination of how the story was presented, the charm of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, great OST, the great quotable movie lines, the truthfulness and the real-life scenarios that had made me fall in love in this movie. (I watched it twice now). So don't be surprise that maybe in the next couple of days I will post my take on some subjects raised in the film.

For now, first lesson I learned from 500 Days: we must show appreciation for those people who had broken our hearts for they had most likely helped us find ourselves in the process.

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So to John. Thank you.

Rating: ★★★★★