Nobody's favorite Beatle's song is Octopus's Garden

Movies have a profound effect on me. I just watched 500 days of Summer and I was blown away. The casting for the roles of Summer and Tom was dead-on, the structure of the film was different, exciting, and effective, the soundtrack was lovely; it has humor and heartache- in perfect amounts. I loved it. The 500 days are the duration of their relationship- from meeting at work to going their separate ways. They meet in an elevator while he is listening to the Smiths- they break up over pancakes in a diner. We've all done it.

I loved seeing their relationship from Tom's perspective most of the time, and then only getting to see her perspective later- as he realizes it in retrospect. She didn't believe in love when she met him- and she didn't fall in love with him. But he fell hard, and couldn't realize why it wasn't mutual. But she never said it; she never even considerfed them a couple. She was young and having fun- and she never intimated anything different.

What kills him is that she fell in love with the next guy. After hating her for a few minutes, the viewer (and TOM) realize that he did play a special role in her life: he was the one to make her think it was possible; he was the one who helped to break down the wall she had around her in the beginning. She tells him later that once she had fallen inlove, she kept thinking "Wow, Tom was right."

It's bittersweet to hear her say this to him, because the viewer wants them together. He met her while working for a card company and during their relationship he wrote a card that said, "I LOVE US" on the front. The audience agrees. We love them. The way they pretend they live in IKEA and go around saying "Honey, our sink is broken" when no water comes out in the kitchen. The way they talk about their lives sitting up on eachother's beds. The way he draws the achitecture in his imagination on her arm when he doesn't have paper. Viewers long to know: Why don't you love him?

And when life just happens and puts her in a diner reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and her future husband walks in and talks to her- we are crushed along with Tom.

For me the film honors the mystery of love and life without simplifying it or over-packaging it for the big screen. It prepares you from the start. The voice-over tells you that while it's a tale of boy-meets-girl, it is not a love story. How perfect. With allusions to the Beatles, Sid and Nancy, and The Graduate it is so much more than that. And they were open about it from the start.

(He shoulda known something was up when she said her favorite Beatle was Ringo).