Tonight, three of us went to see (500) Days Of Summer. Using pieces of High Fidelity for the elements of cultural name-checking and parts of Garden State for the sake of being needlessly precious (even in supposed unpreciousness) and gratuitously stylized, the movie actually holds on for most of its run time. In fact, it's good. And then the last scene happens. If you need to see it, see it. Like any artistic car-wreck, I understand. It's fascinating. But for a film that handles certain elements of relationships with relative care, the final scene is a categorical insult.
But the movie's best moments are the quiet ones. The moments that each relationship collects, wears smooth and keeps. These are the secrets, the meaningless minutiae. These are pretty and painful and over time, we become curators of a collective memory. And to be certain, after a relationship ends, it is this safety deposit box that is both hardest to open and hardest to throw away.
(500) Days handles these moments, and their crushing consequences, with incredible deftness. So I'll leave you with a song by Share about reading a girl's journal - it's got a little of Beck's Sea Change in it. It's about studying someones hand-writing. It's about distrust. It's about discovering nothing. If we can get mistaken for strangers by our own friends - just imagine what a significant other can do.
Listen :: Share - "Penmanship"
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