...And introducing Zooey Deschanel as "Anal Girl"

Luke and I have some thoughts to share on (500) Days of Summer, again published in SEE Magazine. The more this movie sits with me, the less I like it, to be honest. The best parts work very well in the moment, but the stuff that isn't so great is what stays with you. If I were still trying to be cutesy now, I would compare that to a bad relationship. And speaking of things that make you cringe, one thing that I didn't get a chance to mention in the piece is how much the very end (oh, say...the last three words) of this movie sucked. Anyone and everyone who wants to write, please never sacrifice the premise of your film/book/whatever to be cute. Duh. Read on:

Clara: (500) Days of Summer, the latest twee romance from Fox Searchlight (Garden State, Juno), chronicling a doomed relationship, is really targeted at twentysomethings like us. The content is a bit weighty for teenagers and the references just aren’t as pertinent to those who are older, though I’m sure it will have fans of all ages.

Luke: Right, and for here-and-now iconography, you could certainly do worse than Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel prancing through an Ikea. Even references to such things as The Pixies or The Smiths or, hell, even Ingmar Bergman come across less as throwbacks than as nods to contemporary hipster culture. Somehow, there’s something entirely 2009 about bonding over “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” playing over an iPod in an elevator.

Clara: Yeah, and compared to, for example, Juno’s cultural touchstone, the hamburger phone — well, I didn’t know anyone who had a hamburger phone until they saw that movie. (500) Days doesn’t create a fantasy world or promote its own quirkiness; it carbon dates a culture I think we’ll recognize if we reflect back 20 years from now, and that’s rare and refreshing. The story, unfortunately, doesn’t work as well.

Luke: You’re right, sadly. We’re told the film — 500 asynchronous days of Gordon-Levitt’s Tom being in love with Deschanel’s commitment-phobic Summer — is “not a love story,” but the script fails to live up to this promise. “Happily ever after” is simply replaced with a forced personal growth narrative, weakening whatever the movie has to say about the inexplicable frustrations of relationships.

Clara: The movie often betrays its own premise, and it’s also tonally inconsistent. There are a bevy of stylistic flourishes, some good: the Bergman spoof is hilarious, and the scene that split-screens Tom’s expectations versus reality is quite effective at showing his idealization of his relationship. But other things are too much, like the whimsical narration, reminiscent of Lemony Snicket or Pushing Daisies. It pushes a movie that’s already busy over the edge. Further, an omniscient voice is just a lazy way to tell us that Tom’s ideas about love are based on a misreading of The Graduate. Worse is Tom’s precocious kid sister — enough with the all-knowing children, Hollywood!

Luke: We agree that Gordon-Levitt is great, though. From broodingly belting “Here Comes Your Man” with a karaoke mic in one hand and a beer in the other, to pontificating about pop culture and greeting cards as a generational crisis, he really has a lot to sell. This could have been a full-on disaster coming from someone lacking his skill.

Clara: That greeting card scene is full of clichés, but Gordon-Levitt plays it with believable sincerity. He pulls off a pretty emo character by tapping into adult angst without making him seem like a petulant teenager, and that’s a tricky balance. I’m becoming quite the fan, and his career as an adult actor is really progressing, from Brick to (500) Days to ... erm, G.I. Joe?

Luke: Whoo!

Clara: I like Deschanel too, but she’s disappointing here, though it’s not really her fault. The script is semi-autobiographical, and I get the impression that the writer never understood why the girl Summer is based on left him, and thus the character isn’t fully realized or three-dimensional. We’re seeing her from Tom’s perspective, but a woman afraid of commitment is an interesting role that would have been great to see Deschanel really tackle.

Luke: The ubiquity of the male-perspective can be frustrating (cue new Judd Apatow movie), but that criticism may be misplaced with (500) Days. Sure, Summer is, as The A.V. Club suggests, a sort of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, serving little function beyond invigorating the brooding male protagonist. But the film is very aware of this, playing off Deschanel’s persona to create a character largely presented to us as Tom’s naïve, Graduate-inspired fantasy.

Clara: Going back to your point about iconography, Deschanel’s most successful in the role of Zooey Deschanel: Object of Every Hipster’s Desire. That’s something the movie seems aware of.

Luke: She’s a clever meta-reference to herself in a film attacking expectations fueled by greeting cards and pop culture; what self-respecting indie kid doesn’t dream of dating Zooey Deschanel? But this just makes the film’s failings as an anti-love story all the more disappointing. The cultural criticisms ring hollow when everything goes to serve Tom’s personal narrative regardless.

Clara: Ironically, some viewers may wind up misreading the film just as Tom misreads The Graduate, and come away dreaming of a tumultuous affair with some hot, aloof chick like Zooey.

Luke: Hell, I know I am!

Clara: Of course.

If you can't afford LSD, try Godard's new Criterions

Luke and I certainly have a lot more to say about Godard than this (ask us, ask us!), but alas, word limits. Here is a 'conversation' about Made in U.S.A. and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, both released by Criterion on Tuesday. This was published in this week's SEE Magazine:

Luke: We both adore Jean-Luc Godard, French New Wave star and one of the most important directors of the ‘60s. But before getting too excited about Criterion releasing Made in U.S.A. and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a warning to the Godard-uninitiated is in order: do not start with these films.

Clara: I agree. Two or Three Things, particularly, is a stylistic mash-up of Godard’s earlier films, such as Masculin Féminin, Vivre Sa Vie, and Breathless. In Breathless, Godard, ever the film historian, had Jean-Paul Belmondo dangle a cigarette from his lips, emulating Humphrey Bogart; in 2 or 3 Things, Godard has become his own point of reference, so having a grasp of his style and his place in film history will be pretty helpful.

Luke: Even having seen those films, Made in U.S.A. was hard for me to make sense of at times. I get that Anna Karina solves her ex-lover’s murder to the sound of (I think?) missiles. Jean-Pierre Léaud makes a delightfully bizarre appearance doing ... something. And it’s communist, or whatever. But as usual, the madness is a stylistic joy to watch.

Clara: 2 or 3 Things certainly shares its politics with Made in U.S.A., and it can be equally incomprehensible. It cuts between a Parisian woman working part-time as a prostitute, and abstract elements that depict the changing world around her. Godard uses shots of cranes, sounds of machinery, “interviews,” advertisements, comic strip panels, and the whole Godardian kitchen sink, to express the saturation of information that the modern person faces. That’s one of the most daunting things about Godard’s work in this period: he was really striving to make films about everything in the world at that moment.

Luke: It’s a daunting but important period. As paradoxically both a historian and an iconoclast, consuming the world around him yet critiquing it relentlessly, Godard’s development during the ’60s feels like a Marxist dialectic; these films are approaching synthesis. In the following year came the May ’68 general strike, and Godard’s decision to become an obscure pinko propagandist after divorcing Karina and making a movie about yuppie cannibals. Though not always good (or even bearable), Godard’s transformations were in his very nature as a filmmaker.

Clara: I love how 2 or 3 Things sits on the peak of that major transformation and shows all of Godard’s various sensibilities, from high to low to pinko. It features both banalities of everyday life, and the cosmos being recreated in a cup of coffee, and has a lot to say about both. The dialogue ranges from things like “Style is the man; therefore art is the humanizing of forms” to “My sweater is blue.” Though what really sets this film apart for me is that it feels like one of Godard’s most personal. He narrates it himself, often talking about the limitations of language and the impossibility of communication, but he whispers as if confessing secrets straight into the viewer’s ear. Godard is not warm and fuzzy, but I get strangely choked up by lines like “I can’t tear myself away from the objectivity that crushes me, nor from the subjectivity that isolates me.” You get a glimpse of some emotional core, I think — he’s just really French about showing it.

Luke: For all this talk of cosmos and emotion, the best reasons to love Godard are superficial, which is why of his many changes, these films represent the most tragic. Made in U.S.A. is the last of his films to feature Anna Karina — my pick for cinema’s most beautiful woman — and 2 or 3 Things is the beginning of his career without her. And really, for all his lofty credentials, is there anything Godard does quite so well as film a pretty girl?

Clara: No, and that’s the real reason I’m excited for these Criterion editions: pretty people in high-definition digital transfers!