– (500) Days of Summer (2009)
This film was sweet, with some really imaginative touches (I really enjoyed the split-screen “expectations vs. reality” segment) and a richly musico-centric point of view. But at its core, this is still just a boy-meets-girl romance…which, of course, didn’t take away from my enjoyment of it. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt reminded me of Heath Ledger, with those same low-spoken, squinty-smile mannerisms (good thing, not a criticism).
Joseph Gordon-Levitt discovers that love is a lot like a Hall & Oates song, a marching band, and Disney’s Song of the South:
– Golden Days (2009)
Great band making great music gets record deal and hits a wall. I feel like I’ve heard this same story hundreds of times, though I imagine it has happened thousands of times. And, despite the fact that I was really hoping to see more than that 2.5 seconds (which was a literal “shout-out”) of Birmingham footage (I know the filmmaker accompanied The Damnwells here on at least one of their many visits), this was an engaging film document. My favorite scenes in this film were the long conversational takes in which frontman Alex Dezen spins a yarn, either about his father or his crumbling relationship with his girlfriend. He has always been one of my favored songwriters, and one of the supplements tells that he has moved on to the Iowa Writers Workshop now, and is teaching rhetoric there – that seems a perfect fit to me.
The Golden Days trailer:
2 responses so far ↓
1 GV // Apr 9, 2010 at 10:33 AM
Just so happens these two movies have a link to each other (if you didn’t know) so I think it’s funny hehe that you posted them together. Alex of the Damnwells’ wife Angela is also in (500) Days of Summer 🙂 I haven’t seen 500 yet (my DVD is waiting to be watched) so I don’t know which part she’s in, but it definitely made me giggle when I saw these movies together.
2 spitballarmy // Apr 9, 2010 at 4:08 PM
GV –
It’s nice to know of that ‘other’ link between the films. I had paired them because they are both very musically-minded films, but also because I kept thinking of “(500) Golden Days of Summer” as a blog post title.
It is a very small world.
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