Review of the Reviews: (500) Days of Summer (2009)

 (500) Days of Summer--Official Trailer 

                 In the 2008 romance film, (500) Days of Summer, Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt play out a romance that from the beginning the audience was told was going to end, making it an interesting point of interest for this review project, as many critics either go one way or the other in their opinions for this particular movie.

               
                                                          First Review--Roger Ebert

         The first review I found of this movie was one of the Chicago Sun Time's late Roger Ebert, who, to my surprise, gave this movie a 4 out of 4 stars, and an upliftingly positive review (as I am a rather big fan of the film myself). Ebert opened by describing the detail that makes this movie rather individual--a "love or hate" aspect that, for him, was rather appealing: the fact that it is out of chronological order. Ebert explained how director Marc Webb's reasoning for this was that we ourselves remember love not as a strict order of events, but as a collection of happiness and pain, and that is how the hero of the story, Tom, remembers Summer. This is one of the ways he gets to the main reason the movie scored so high--the way it portrays love, truthful and relatable. He goes on to show how the characters portray this through the impeccable acting of the two stars. He comments on Deschanel's way of making Summer so mysterious, and genuinely sweet, smart and beautiful--and above all, unattainable. He later applauds Gordon-Levitt's acting, as well, complimenting his genuine, easy-going way of acting, calling him, "a little Tom Hanksian." Considering Webb's directing, he praises the versatility of the film's satirical spectrum, from a musical number to a black and white french silent film.

                                                   
 Second Review--Anthony Quinn

     The second review I found was Anthony Quinn's, an independent critic, who found the movie much less appealing, giving it a score of 1 out of 5 stars. He found the narration at the beginning which Ebert found so appealing, warning that the movie would not end in perfect love, cliche and simply frustrating, as well as the supposedly cute parenthesis in the title. Holding a negative attitude throughout the review,
he went on to criticize the characters of Tom and Summer, and how their love story was more dysfunctional than dynamic. He didn't find Gordon-Levitt's acting anything but irritating, and called out Deschanel on not being genuine in her portrayal of Summer (although he did find one positive aspect in the honesty of Summer's intentions as a character). Quinn surprisingly doesn't say much particularly about Webb's directing, but instead takes a few shots at the writing of the movie, done by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, which he found more pathetic than funny, relating it to a "middle episode of Friends" in terms of lack of humor (which I found not only insulting to the film but also to Friends). He closes with a harsh slap in the face to the entire film: some call it the Annie Hall of our time, or de nous jours, as the saying goes in French. But, in Quinn's words, "That's a slut on a great movie, not to say on nous jours."