(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Director: Marc Webb

Producers: Jason Novack, Jessica Tuchinsky, Mark Waters, Steven J. Wolfe

Writers: Scott Neustadler; Michael H. Weber

Actors: Joseph Gordon-Levitt; Zooey Deschanel; Geoffrey Arend; Matthew Gray Gubler; Chloë Grace Moretz

Cinematography: Eric Steelberg

Music: Mychael Danna, Rob Simonson

Rated: PG-13 ( sexual material and language)

Running time: 95 mins.

      Love and architecture in downtown L.A.

      The movie begins with a statement warning the viewer that “this is not a love story”. But that’s definitely not so; it is a love story--- of sorts. It’s a romance involving a young man, a young woman and the city they live in. The young man, Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is a drop-out architect working for a greeting card company; the young woman is Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), the recently hired assistant to his boss; and the city is Los Angeles, or more exactly downtown L.A. where they both live and work. 

        Tom is a romantic who believes in destiny and a love that is meant to be. Summer takes a more rational, unemotional view of the subject; in fact, for her love does not exist; one just satisfies one’s likes and needs, and when these needs are filled one moves on. Through the course of the movie, which is viewed almost entirely from Tom’s perspective, we follow the two in their up and down relationship on a day by day basis, but not in any chronological order. The 500 days appear as apparently haphazard episodes, each highlighting an event bringing the couple together or driving them apart. When the relationship chills, Tom gets advice as to how to handle the situation from his two buddies MacKenzie (Geoffrey Arend) and Paul (Matthew Gray Gubler), but his main advisor is his precociously wise little sister Rachel (Chloë Grace Moretz). The friends’ opinions are of little help, but the sister’s is spot on--- “get over it and move on”. In the end, both Tom and Summer do move on, but in unexpected ways, proving that love is never what you expect.

          (500) Days of Summer  is director Marc Webb’s first feature film. His past work was in music videos; and he uses this experience effectively in several instances. There’s a delightful Bollywood-style fantasy dance number to Hall and Oats’ You Make My Dreams involving Tom and passersby between the court buildings in Civic Center Plaza. In another, at an epiphany moment for Tom, the L.A. skyline background to the scene is turned into an architectural impression drawing. He also inserts a talking heads essay segment on love, and a few fantasy foreign movie spots emphasizing Tom’s dejection and depressed state of mind. But the best touch is a sequence where Tom goes to a party hosted by Summer thinking they’re on the way to renewing their relationship, only to find out otherwise. Webb uses a spilt screen: one showing Tom’s high expectations, the other--- reality.

         The city serves as a background to this realistic “love story” and L.A.’s architecture  is highlighted throughout. Tom does his serious thinking on a bench in Angels Knoll Park, the last vestige of undeveloped land on Bunker Hill. From this vantage point he seeks inspiration by gazing at the architectural gems of a century before still standing between the Hill and City Hall. On their dates Tom and Summer visit the Fine Arts Building and the Music Center. Tom meets his friends, and Summer, at the Redwood Bar & Grill on Second Street. He works at New Hampshire Greetings Card Company on Main Street, just a couple of blocks from where he lives. He and Summer leave town from Union Station to attend a wedding. The wedding was filmed at Point Fermin in San Pedro. And the glorious Bradbury Building is the location for the last scene, a scene that restores Tom’s romantic belief in fate and proves one should never regret the loss of Summer---for Autumn may prove to be better.

         What this movie points out about today’s Los Angeles is that Tom, Summer, and their friends are examples of the young millennials who have reclaimed downtown and the entire east side of L.A. as their own. The once forgotten and abandoned sections of the original city are coming alive again after decades of neglect. They’ve brought new investment into an area that thirty years ago was a no man’s land for most Angelenos, unless they happened to work there--- but they would never think of living there. With the investment have come cafés, restaurants, bars and nightclubs, and a social life that hasn’t existed there since before the Second World War. And with these social amenities have come the music events, art walks, and street fairs that now occur on a regular basis. But most all they’ve brought back creativity to a district that was dying; artists and musicians now populate an area, the Arts District, formerly the Warehouse District, that not long ago was a suburb of Skid Row. 

           It may not have been Marc Webb’s intention to spotlight any of this when he chose L.A. as the location for the story he wanted to tell (the original location for the story had been San Francisco), but his choice was a good one.

          Note: This movie bears interesting similarities to Jacques Demy’s Model Shop(1969) released exactly forty years earlier. They would make a good double feature. See my essay on Model Shop  at a future date. 

Los Angeles and the Movies

         Los Angeles, America's second city, was founded in 1781 by a group of Spanish and Mexican settlers who, because of its ideal location on the banks of a sleepy little river in a grassy valley between two mountain ranges, thought it would be a good place to raise cattle and sheep. And it was. After 1846, when California came under United States control and the Yankees (Americans, not New York baseball players!) began to pour in, oranges and then oil became L.A.'s principal appeal. Then with the arrival of the twentieth century, another element was to be added that would give the growing city a certain mystique not shared with any other--- the movies.

          Movies have been made in Los Angeles for over a hundred years. In 1909 Francis Boggs and Thomas Persons founded L.A.'s first movie studio on Olive Street near Seventh and began turning out single-reelers. Soon after that several independent producers, evading the East Coast based Motion Picture Company, known as the Trust, set up shop in Edendale just off Glendale Boulevard a little to the west of downtown. Los Angeles turned out to be a perfect place for filmmaking; the climate was mild most of the year, sunny days allowed shooting (which was done mostly outside then) to go on for longer periods of time, and the surrounding area presented terrain and natural setting that could easily stand in for most places in the world.

           When Edendale became a bit too crowded some moved even farther west and established themselves in Hollywood. In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky began shooting The Squaw Man on the corner of Selma Avenue and Vine Street, and from that moment Hollywood--- and Los Angeles with it--- was on the way to becoming the heart and center of the American film industry.

             Film production soon brought the artists, technicians, and intellectuals who would give the city a quality not found anywhere else. This influx of creative people turned rather isolated L.A., stuck between the Mojave Desert and the Pacific Ocean, into a unique cultural center. It became an oasis of glamor and sophistication. Great writers like William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anita Loos and Bertolt Brecht; composers like Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Arnold Schoenberg; and painters like Salvador Dali all contributed to the creative and intellectual brain pool that existed in Hollywood during the first half of the twentieth century--- not to mention the thousands of actors, dancers, musicians, and singers who poured into, and continue to pour into the city to this day.

              Since the early days of Hollywood, L.A. has been a stand-in for many of the world's cities from Babylon

 (Intolerance 1915) and Casablanca (Casablanca 1942) to Tokyo ( Sayonara 1957) and Ancient Rome (Spartacus 1960). But the city itself has often been a character in movies produced within its environs. From the great films noir of the 1940s and 50s like Double Indemnity (1944) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) to a musical like Singing in the Rain (1952), and a comedy like Clueless (1995), and some great sci-fi films like Them (1954), Blade Runner (1982) and The Terminator (1984), L.A. has reached an audience that has never breathed its air, felt its sun, or endured one of its occasional earthquakes, floods or fires. Many have come to know it, whether fairly or not, as well as they know their own towns and backyards.

               My intention in the following posts is to present an overview (not a review) of approximately fifty (and maybe more) of the movies I think best express the essence of what it means to live in America's second city. All the films overviewed are accessible from Netflix, I-Tunes, and Amazon. There are no best and no worst in this series; some are well-known classics, others, I'm sure, most people may never have heard of. The order of presentation is random, and views of life presented can be either actual or imaginary: actual as in The Exiles (1961) and Killer of Sheep (1977), or imaginary as in Blade Runner  (1982) and L.A. Story (1991). Some impressions will be positive, some negative, and some neutral. But they all tell us something about how Los Angeles is perceived by the world and experienced by those of us who live here. Comments and suggestions are encouraged. Feel free to join in and let me know what you think.

                I also hope to include, in time, visits to studios, location sites (both past and present), and other movie related places of interest along with interviews, if possible. But my main intention is to spotlight this unique place--- Los Angeles--- and the part it played and continues to play in American and world cinematic culture.