In case you haven’t already heard, I sort of loved the movie 500 Days of Summer but also sort of hated it for its attempts at making me feel like my boyfriend doesn’t wear enough sweater vests and for my unexplainable secret desire to see the couple in it fail.
Other than the female lead being a coldhearted jerk, I couldn’t pinpoint anything specific that caused me to not feel much attachment to them, but this morning on the train, I realized that what made me roll my eyes about them was the elevator scene, shown here in the opening of the trailer:
The problem is that I’m jealous. This exact scene is the stuff of my emo, music-fanatic, high school dreams, and it’s never happened to me . . .
My mom was an English teacher who had a special interest in mythology (something I know absolutely nothing about, go figure), so growing up, I watched a lot of Clash of the Titans (awesome!) and Labyrinth as my mom prepared her class lesson plans at home (usually the night before). She was known as fruitcake teacher, so finding films that were even casually related to her class subjects was de rigeur.
I didn’t know how important watching those movies as a kid was to me until I found out years later that my best friend, Tracey, was also a Labyrinth fan. We spent countless Friday nights in high school at her house, eating Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food, watching Labyrinth, and transcribing Bush lyrics from the closed captioning on taped episodes of “Saturday Night Live” because we didn’t know anyone who had the Internet and could look them up for us. Which probably explains why neither of us had boyfriends.
Later, I had a week-long love affair with a boy in Columbus simply because one of the approximately ten DVDs he had, Labyrinth was one of them. My ex-boyfriend Todd loved it, Kamran at least tolerates it, and my dear friend Bachelor Girl referenced it in a post just the other day. It’s probably important to you, too, which is why we’re such close blogfriends, right?
The other day, I read my friend Lorraine’s AOL Instant Messenger away message, and it said:
Hey, you remind me of a man.
What man?
Man with the power.
What power?
Power of hoodoo.
Hoodoo?
You do.
Do what?
Remind me of a man.
Which is, of course, from this scene in Labyrinth:
OR SO I THOUGHT. I IMed Lorraine basically to tell her that she’s an idiot and to quit jacking with my movie quotes, but she informed me (politely) that it’s actually from a Cary Grant movie called The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer:
Unbelievable, right?! What a massacre of everything I thought was true and right in the world. At least the David Bowie version is way better.
I went to see (500) Days of Summer with Kamran and my friend Beth last weekend. It was beautiful. And really, really depressing.
I knew that I was going to see the movie when the preview included a scene where Zooey Deschanel makes Joseph Gordon-Levitt take off his headphones in an elevator to tell him that she loves The Smiths. On one hand, I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, who doesn’t love The Smiths?” Please try not to base your entire relationship on one song, folks.
It’s just like in Garden State when that bitch Natalie Portman is like, “You have to listen to this Shins song. It’ll change your life, I swear.” And I was like, “Sucka, I was listening to The Shins before you were born.” But Zach Braff is all taken by her, because guys like chicks with mental illness.
But on the other hand, I also understand it, because I based my entire love of Kamran on the fact that while I was working at a science museum in college, he and his dad visited on their way to move him into Princeton, and I’m entirely sure we spoke to each other that day and somehow found each other six years later.
So, I knew it was going to be overly-indie, but you know I’m into that. I just didn’t know it was going to be so sad. I thought about it for days afterward, and I can’t even figure out why. I mean, for god’s sake, the director’s other credits include a Jesse McCartney documentary and a 3 Doors Down music video!
Maybe it’s that I secretly think of Kamran and myself as the Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel of Manhattan. Except even more adorable when in IKEA.
In conclusion: the costumes were awesome, the chalkboard wall was awesome, and the soundtrack was awesome. Summer was a bitch, although I’m sure I’d see it differently if the movie was told from her point of view. The girl at the end sucked. Please see it so we can discuss.
I saw Harold and Maude in Bryant Park on Monday night. And when I say I “saw” it, I mean it, because I heard exactly three lines in the movie:
1) “Sagging breasts and flabby buttocks.”
2) “Do you enjoy knives?”
3) “I love you.”
And actually, I didn’t even really hear the second line; Beth had to tell me what it said. See, I arrived at Bryant Park for this week’s installment of the Summer Film Festival a full hour and a half before the movie started, but when I met up with my co-worker Steve, he said the place had already been packed for a while. There was absolutely nowhere to sit in the grass, so Steve, Beth, Emily, Jeff, our new German intern Niko, and I ended up on the concrete stairs, miiiiiiiiiiiles away from the screen with our view partially blocked by the motorhome that the movie was being projected from.
I’ve never seen Harold and Maude, but even without being able to make out any of the dialogue, I thought I’d pieced the story together pretty well until I got back to Kamran’s apartment. It was then that he said, “Yeah, wasn’t it totally crazy how [that really important thing] happened?”, and I said, “Oh, I had no idea [that really important thing] happened.” And now the movie’s ruined for me. But not for you, because I save spoilers for the comments section. Love you!
From what I gathered, though, it’s a really lovely movie. Both because Harold is uber-hot in a pasty white boy way, and because Cat Stevens does the soundtrack. The audience was swooning all over the opening credits:
It felt sort of magical, I’ll admit, listening to Cat and watching Harold reject all of the college ladies who want him, surrounded by these giant buildings with the lights from Times Square reflecting off of them. The only problem I had was that there were homeless people there. I felt sort of weird for hating them, because I generally try pretty hard to keep my feelings toward the less fortunate in the neutral to hopeful range. And, like, the outdoors belong to these people, you know?, so it’s almost like I was watching my movie in their living room. But I pay my taxes and patronize summer film series sponsors, and therefore I deserve things like a decent seat away from the less hygienic, am I right?
My friend Beth and I went to see Brüno on Saturday afternoon. I won’t give anything away, but the movie can pretty much be summed up in the following question, uttered by the guy next to me:
Did that urethra just speak?
Basically, if you enjoy David Letterman’s Top 10 Reasons to See Brüno, you’ll find the movie ten thousand times funnier:
But if you thought Borat was offensive and belittling, you’ll find it ten thousand times worse.
Did anyone else see it/love it? Did you think it could be construed as offensive to The Gayz?
I'm Katie, a farmgirl originally from Ohio who moved to NYC in 2005 for no apparent reason. I like vintage-looking things that are actually new, filagree everything, people who don't make me feel awkward, meaning it when I say "no sleep till Brooklyn", and not trying too hard.
