Director: Marc Webb
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel. Geoffrey Arend, Chloë Grace Moretz
Have I Seen it Before: Never. It’s odd. Had I seen it in while it was still making the rounds in the festival circuit, it might have been a High Fidelity (2000) for a newer, somehow more neurotic age. Had I seen it during its theatrical run, it probably would have meant very little to me.
Did I Like It: Seeing it over a decade and a half later, it becomew something of an interesting cultural artifact. I’ve been Tom (Gordon-Levitt), although I wanted to make motion pictures and was* the guy who had all the DVDs and would have followed a woman practically anywhere if she expressed even a tolerance for the films of Woody Allen**.
You watch this film and you’re supposed to either feel more deeply the fact that you are Tom, or remember the time in which you were him. Summer (Deschanel, evoking the pupa stage between the cynical bloodhound of her earlier work, and the guileless Gal Friday she metamophosed into during New Girl) thus becomes the perfect black hat for that time in your life.
But let’s be honest, people: Hasn’t there beena time when we were Summer, just as much as we were Tom? Where our armor was impenetrable and the only governing element in our lives was our suspicion of other people?
Didn’t we leave some people in our wake during those times? I missed this movie for the better part of seventeen years***, but maybe that’s the right amount of time to wait. During that entire time, Summer has been painted memetically as one of the great villains of the screen, but we are the villain, just as much as we are the hero.
Maybe I picked exactly the right time to watch the film.
Oh.
Wait.
I get it. Her name is Summer. Now I’m all caught up.
*Still am, technically.
*Don’t still do that, for the record.
**How in the hell have we gotten to the point where people born after the release of The Dark Knight (2008) are now able to go to R-rated movies unencumbered? Don’t answer that.