500 Days of Summer - the chick flick it's OK for guys to like.
And why not?
For one reason, it stars the gorgeous Zooey Deschannel -- Manic Pixie Dream Girl extraordinaire. She is playing to type as one of her classic girl-next-door-with-a-twist-characters. Previously it was an astrophysicist dressed as a sexy Charles Darwin in Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This time, she is Summer, a girl that doesn't believe in the whole idea of "the right one", or indeed love and marriage and life long monogamy in general.
And for another reason, it resonates with the guy's experience of how things don't go as well for him as he hoped in the whole area of love and romance.
It's also a great date movie, as guys will enjoy it, and you can use it as a handy diagnostic tool to check out her opinions on the themes it tackles.
Summer meets Tom, a guy that never really fulfilled himself as an architect, and instead writes the inscriptions in greetings cards. Although he has no passion for this work, he is exceptionally good at it, so he has ended up stuck in it indefinitely.
Never underestimate the problems of The Comfort Zone!
The principal quirk in the movie is that the 500 days of their relationship aren't told in a conventional linear order, so sometimes you have to figure out what happens in between on the days you don't see, sometimes you know what is going to happen to the characters in a scene but they don't yet. Other movies like this would be Pulp Fiction and Memento, neither of which have a particularly compelling lesson for people interested in dating advice for single guys, but this one does.
They embark on an affair that she propels faster than he ever expected and pretty soon he is head over heels and realises that he loves her, but she is convinced that this can't be the case as there is no such thing as love in her world.
Things go up and down and eventually it all comes crashing around their ears, but it resolves when she discovers there is such a thing as true love. But it is with another man, not Tom. So the movie approaches the end ( don't worry, I won't spoil it) with her blissed out and preparing for a wedding, and he is single again.
And the lessons -
- Sometimes it isn't the guy that doesn't want to develop things, sometimes it is the girl, although this is one of the few movies that will deal with that idea.
- Try as he might, he doesn't evoke the feelings in her that she does in him.
- But some other guy does, seemingly with no effort at all.
- And that hurts. And most of us, if we have truly lived, have been there. But he can count on his friends and family to support him through this.
- And he just has to dust himself off, move on, and get back into the arena.
This article is brought to you by Dating Advice Blog.
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