Multimedia Post

[ase]

Yesterday I gave one of those oddball "I hated this book, but you might like it" book recommendations. It's an unusual recommendation style, but if done with respect and affection can introduce people to stories they might otherwise have missed. (The novel in question was The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, about which I have previously written.)

Not entirely by coincidence, I watched 500 Days of Summer this evening. Blurb: nonlinear story of boy-meets-girl, dating/friendship with benefits, breakup, depression, and moving on - with another girl. I think my blurbing betrays my sympathies: I am Summer Finn (ha ha, yes, I get the pun, this movie is not what I would call subtle). It's a technically pretty movie, with an attractive, consistent limited-palette theme and a deliberate cutsieness, hangs together at the "would I redbox this" level, and has a likable soundtrack, but I want to scream at Tom, "for a grown man, you're acting an awful lot like a 10 year old girl who didn't get a pony for her birthday!" so it's not a movie I plan to watch twice.

Comments

[ashcomp]

Interesting--we just watched that in the last couple of weeks, and I felt pretty much the same way. But then, I have problems with the whole boy loses girl thing anyway.

[ase]

Problems how? As in, not your (married for many years) experience at all, or not how it happened?

I think the part toward the end where Tom's sister (?) told him to remember the bad parts as well as the good said a lot about how he was skewing reality. Tom never really "lost" Summer: she was frank and honest about her friends-with-benefits expectations, and he deluded himself into believing he could change her mind. I think you could make a parallel movie about Summer's experience with Tom and how being in a relationship with him 1.) made her feel like she could take on the M-word, but 2.) clarified what she wanted in a long-term partner in a way that ruled out Tom. But I may be projecting heavily here.

[ashcomp]

I just like happy endings. I suspect that the new romantic possibility they threw in at the end was a sop to somebody like me whose sensibilities were offended. There may have been all sorts of "creative differences" about how to end that story.

My actual favorite character was the young girl who was (I think) Tom's little sister. The function served by that role could have been cast with almost any age or gender, but it was kind of poignant coming from a child. Out of the mouths of babes, etc.

[ase]

Tom's sister was ridiculously cute. If only everyone's little sister gave such hard-nosed advice! Oh, wait, mine does.