The Last Movie I Saw

Marc Webb's new film (500) Days of Summer is largely a pastiche of a lot of other films. You can find in it various allusions, quotes, swipes, homages (whatever you want to call them) to numerous other films, including very overt references to Mike Nichols' The Graduate and George Lucas' Star Wars. But I also counted nods to Stephen Frears' High Fidelity, Zach Braff's Garden State, George Sidney's Anchors Aweigh, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, works by Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, even Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Mike Judge's Office Space and Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy. I'm sure there are others, but you get the idea. All of those films are better (well, Office Space is debatable) than this one, but I don't mean to imply this is a mere rip-off or a bad film; on the contrary, I was totally entertained from beginning to end, partly because of these connections and largely because of the appealing leads, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The point of the movie is, in essence, that we create for ourselves false impressions of the nature of love as a result of our immersion in popular culture (movies, TV, pop music, even greeting cards, all play a role), which defines an incredibly complex set of emotions in simplistic and deterministic ways. If you buy such illusions (and who doesn't, at least to a degree?), Webb suggests we really are only setting ourselves up for disappointment, not "true love." In the service of that message, the structure and all the quotes make a lot of sense as they define the core problem in terms that prove the point. The concern I have is that this is not so much by design but instead a reflection of Webb's tendency to view the world through a Hollywood filter, in which case his next film may not be so charming. I truly hope the level of imagination that went into constructing this movie emerges via different terms of expression in his future work-- which I'll be looking forward to with some optimism based on what he pulled off with this feature.