(500) Days of Summer is about a wannabe architect who winds up writing greeting cards and his relationship to the girl of his dreams, Summer.  The story chronicles from their first meeting to their breakup, although not in order.  The narrative skips around in the 500 days they were a part of each others lives.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about this movie and I absolutely love Zooey Deschanel.  She’s like the girl every single guy on the planet wants as his girlfriend, so she should have been perfectly cast here as the

Look adorable right?

essential girl of Tom’s (the greeting card writer, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) dreams.  Yet somehow in this movie she lost every single bit of that magic that she’s brought to every single part she’s ever played that required it (and off-screen too).  It’s the weirdest thing.  They write her to be the girl that you as an audience have to fall for too, but the character of Summer seems not fully formed and a major problem is we’re basically told from the beginning to hate her.  This drains the emotion from pretty much every single scene.

Other than completely wasting Zooey Deschanel in a part that should have been perfect for her the filmmakers committed many other sins.  Mostly going way too arty.  The film often went way over the pretentious line, with segments that didn’t fit of characters talking to camera and things like a narrator telling us how the characters are feeling at any given time.  We shouldn’t need to be told, and in fact without the narration any mildly intelligent person could have figured it out on their own.  I mean Joseph Gordon-Levitt did a good job, as did Zooey, but I felt like they were both being held back by both script and direction.

If only you knew how hard it was to only include a couple of Zooey pics.

Also another annoying thing was the movie starts with narration, then we get a scene basically taking us into the telling of the story by Tom, but we never ever come back to that scene and the film isn’t laid out like it’s a story being told.  It would have been great to choose one thing and stick with it.  That scene sticks out like a sore thumb.  It seems like a lot of this movie was supposed to be funny, but I found myself slightly giggle only once.  The rest was pretentious and annoying.

I really don’t recommend this movie to even the hardest of hardcore Zooey Deschanel fans, or really anyone.  Hipsters will probably love it though, because they’re told they’re supposed to.

Anyway it comes out December 22nd on Blu-rayDVD& Amazon Video On Demand