Mellotron Sounds

Living in Florida like I do, I get to see about, um…I’m going to say 53% of the movies that I want to see. I’m talking about the ones I look forward to, the ones I used to mark on my calendar back when I still had a calendar and a decent amount of hope. The other 47%, they’re “limited release,” screened mostly in cinema meccas like like NY and LA. Now if it’s an orange grove mecca you’re looking for, a retiree mecca–Florida’s your guy. But culturally? To me this lonely 47 is nothing more than Netflix fodder, doomed to reach my non-HD, non-plasma, non-big TV in its depressing red paper sleeve only after its been paraded through the festival circuit and art houses, after all the papers and all the critcs on Rotten Tomatoes tell me how inspired and must-see it is. Woe is me! world. These low-budget treasures, I should be able to see them the way the creators intended them to be seen, huge on the silver screen, surrounded by people and their reactions–not the hum of my air conditioning and reflections of my alarm clock caught inside the glass.

(500) Days of Summer is one of the lost 47. Released (kind of) July 17th, it’s one of those that has a preview on TV that says “Now playing, in select theaters” at the end, the narrator’s voice cold and sharp like a knife to the heart. Sometimes, when I’m alone and the volume’s loud enough, I think I can hear him laughing at me underneath his smug professionalism…that prick.

Marketed as “Not a love story” the movie stars the both-great Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Brick, 3rd Rock from the Sun) and Zooey Deschanel (All the Real Girls, Almost Famous). Watch the trailer embedded at the foot.

I don’t know what it is about this movie. Maybe it’s that underneath it all I’m really just a big softie, a sucker for anything charming. I think it was Alan Ball who I heard say once that a cynic about love is really just a forlorn romantic. So maybe it’s that this movie, this preview at least, seems to get at that dichotomy a bit, those conflicting sides of logic and emotion and how the most sincere feelings of closeness and adoration can so easily turn to desperation and, inevitably, only memory and how we choose to remember. It’s that final scene in Annie Hall, the acknowledgment that something profound did happen to you, but when you walk off screen NY traffic keeps rolling on, noisy and constant and completely unchanged. “I guess we need the eggs.”

(500) certainly isn’t the first to explore love and loss and coping like this, but its scope feels right, and the actors feel right, and I just can’t stop thinking about it–thus, the write-up on a nearly two-week stale release. I’ll keep looking around and if it never pops up, hey, I guess I’ll be waiting for the DVD release again. But it could be worse. I could live in Wisconsin or Illinois or somewhere. At least sometimes we get the bigger indies down here, maybe a few weeks after their release or in one of the handful of art houses sprinkled around, but still. That middle bit, God, I couldn’t imagine. Must be a total dead zone out there. Woe is the middle bit!