Episode 104 - (500) Days of Summer

Film Snuff

Happy Valentine's Day! This time we tore apart the 2009 movie "(500) Days of Summer," an overly-stylized hipster attempt at an anti-romantic comedy. You can't spell parenthetical without pathetic.

This is one of the most pretentious movies in the last ten years. They bounce back and forth between timelines for no reason, make obvious literary, music, art, and film references to try and seem smart, and they even have films-within-the-film to seem clever.

It also hits the annoying montage trifecta: a sadness montage, a redemption montage, and a post-coital-skipping-around-super-happy montage.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom Hansen, man-boy who works as a writer at a greeting card company, but secretly wants to be an architect, his true passion. Well, he only decides to be one when he's told to become one once by a hot chick.

Zooey Deschanel play Summer Finn, a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl who makes it perfectly clear to this dude that she doesn’t want a serious relationship, and in a sense, is the real victim of this story—even though she’s made to be a pseudo-villain.

Join as we discuss how this movie is weirdly racist against Chinese people for no reason and how it's another modern movie about Los Angeles a la "La La Land" where L.A. is showed in a clean and idealized old-timey way.

Tell us what you think by chatting with us (@filmsnuff) on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or by shooting us an email over at [e-mail].

This episode is sponsored by Pariah Insurance.

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