(365/524) days/recipes of Meryl

(500) Days of Summer

Crit

OK, I'm feeling unusually effusive about this film, but much of the effusion will of necessity be in the form of spoilers, so let me just say up front that it's a terrific film that I highly recommend. Now I'll hide much of the rest of this in invisible ink and warn that if you're planning to see it and don't want to know too much, keep your mouse away from the blank spaces. If you want the whole thing, drag your mouse over the holes.

But let's face it: that parenthetical 500 in the title is a bit of a spoiler itself, isn't it? A finite number, bracketed with a defined beginning and end? If you're paying attention, you know going in that this is going to be a sad-bastard romantic comedy.

The number in the title makes possible a very skillfully exploited narrative gimmick, a sort of game clock that appears on the screen at various intervals, clicking through the numbers, leaping far forward or backward--or, sometimes, incrementing only a bit: always orienting you specifically in the narrative, unlike some chronologically jumbled stories that pointedly want you to be disoriented from time to time. The obvious narrative touchstone (without the gimmick) is Annie Hall, the all-time greatest sad-bastard romcom, and in fact this can be viewed as an Annie Hall for Gen Y (or whatever generation today's 20-somethings are). It even has a pair of scenes analogous to the lobster wranglings, except here it's faucets at Ikea, and the critically different reactions are by the same woman.

Another explicit source is The Graduate--the filmmakers may be a little too self-satisfied about recognizing that the classic final sequence of that film is often carelessly misread, but that misreading is nonetheless crucial to this one, and other allusions are nicely done.

In short, there's nothing brand-new here, but the echoes are fresh, the characters (erstwhile indie angels Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel) are people we care about, and the jumbled narrative is handled with panache. Moreover, Geoffrey Arend is a twenty-first-century Oscar Levant (complete with musicianship, of a sort) as the best friend--and, oh, yeah, my new musical crush Regina Spektor has two songs on the soundtrack, including the opening-credits track.

So if the final scene suggests the happy ending of Alvy Singer's first play rather than the deliciously bittersweet conclusion of Annie Hall, well, cut director Marc Webb and writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber some slack: hey, it's their first feature.

Julie & Julia

Crit
OK, there's no denying a certain number of sweet-and-sour Nora items on the prix fixe here, but good lord, with a main course like Streep, and with side dishes like Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, and Chris Messina (you'll remember him as Claire's conservative boyfriend in Six Feet Under) , who's going to send anything back? If you can resist it, you have a more disciplined palate than I, my friend.

The weekend's trailers

• Bright Star--Looks very breast-heavey, but hey, Keats? Gotta be interested.
• The Damned United--Oh, my: English football, Michael Sheen, Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent, and Timothy Spall? Problem is, who else in New Haven will be up to see it?
• A Serious Man--Looks questionable, but one word: Coens. (Though in truth, I'm more eager for the one after this: Hail Caesar.)
• World's Greatest Dad--Bobcat Goldthwait directs Robin Williams--and yet I am in.
• Whip It--Could be awful or could be a quirky gem: Ellen Page discovers roller derby and sees it as a way out of honor-student ennui. Directorial debut for Drew Barrymore, who (duh!) also plays one of the rollergirls.
• Nine--Rob Marshall directs a fabulous cast in a musical adaptation of Fellini's 8½. Need I say more?
• My One and Only--Looks pretty iffy, Zellweger and Bacon notwithstanding.
• The Lovely Bones--But for the literary novel pedigree, this would look like just another creeper for teens.
• Did You Hear About the Morgans?--Oh, golly, but this looks dreadful.