Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt star in the Fox Searchlight film "500 Days of Summer." (Photo: Fox Searchlight)


This weekend I saw "500 Days of Summer", which features the tagline "Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't."

I had been looking forward to seeing this movie because I still harbor some of my elementary school crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt -- going back to his days of shoulder-length hair when he played an alien in a human's body on "Third Rock from the Sun." Oh, the trailer also looked pretty good.

The movie follows, as the tagline says, a boy (Tom, played by Gordon-Levitt) who meets a girl (Summer, played by Zooey Deschanel), and he falls in love with the girl, but she doesn't love him back. While watching the movie, I felt myself getting incredibly emotionally invested in the characters, cheering for Tom and feeling the same heartbreak he did as Summer used the dreaded F word: friends. Even several hours after I've left the theater, I'm still wishing I knew Tom so I could give him a call and let him know it's going to be OK and I'll be there for him if he needs me. (Seriously, I'll be here if you need me.) (Unless my boyfriend is reading this. Then I want nothing to do with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.)

Actors are harder to believe if they are always in the public eye, if you are exposed to every move they make in their private lives. And I think that idea is what made this movie so successful and what made Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel so believable as the not-totally-sure-if-we're-dating-or-in-love couple. I wouldn't be able to tell you much of anything about these actors as people, so I really felt sympathy toward Tom's unrequited love for Summer. And that feeling is part of what made me love the movie.


-- Cheryl Sadler
CSadler@News-Herald.com

(But seriously, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, call me.)