New Blog! The Little Voice has arrived

Hello all!

I have just created a brand new blog that will contain all of my opinion articles and editor's notes that are on the Baltimore Vinyl website. The first post is already up for you to see- it's a part in an opinion series called "Rachel's Rant". I tend to have some very thoughtful rants from time to time and I've finally decided to post them!

If you ever get the chance, please take a moment to visit the site and take a look. I will be posting another rant about my first year as a transfer/commuter student soon. Stay tuned!
Hope everyone has a great first week of the semester at Towson!
Later!
-Rachel

A lovely comical 'Summer'- 500 Days of Summer

Zooey Deschanel (right) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (left) stand in the elevator in the film "500 Days of Summer". AMC Theatres showed an advanced screening on July 22 before the movie was released everywhere August 7. (Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight productions)

If a comedy movie about love was made into a book, it should be placed somewhere between Tim O'Brien and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And that spot is especially reserved for this movie.

In fact, never before has a movie been taken into a form of a novel. There have been books made into movies, but there was never a movie that was made exactly like a real fiction novel that took a close look at real life. This innovative film was probably the first to create a novel theme to a comedy that examines romance and the bullshit of destiny and fate down to its core.

500 Days of Summer takes a close examination of real romantic love in great detail, showing how love can give a person very high highs ("I'm so happy I could dance and sing!") and very low lows ("So depressed I want to shoot myself."). It involves real life with the idea of a fiction book, teaching how fate and destiny are only in fairy tales and in reality, destiny and fate are only regarded as coincidences. The entire film explains that using the typical "boy meets girl" scenario.

The "boy" is Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stop-Loss), a man working at a greeting card company, who falls in love and becomes obsessed with the "girl", Summer (Zooey Deschanel, Failure to Launch, rock group She and Him). They begin as friends at work, but eventually become more than friends. And just when Tom falls in love with her, Summer leaves him as he spends months pondering over the last 285 days of their relationship to find what went wrong.

The film goes back and forth over the course of five hundred days that Tom spends obsessing over Summer, just like a typical story that follows a pattern similar to that of a classic American author. The story starts in the middle of the plot as there are flashbacks and fast forwards to what happens later on in Tom's life.

To add to the whole classic novel experience in the theatre, the opening credits begin after the author's note and a brief prologue from the narrator. The author's note states that everything in the movie is fictional and if anything had some semblance to things in real life, it was only coincidental. Then, the narrator entered with a prologue on the two characters' backgrounds before the opening titles rolled.

Another fictional fairy tale quality of the film was the scene where a smiling Levitt is dancing around to Hall and Oates's "You Make My Dreams Come True". His character just woke up after an incredible night with Summer and started dancing with the rest of the city. A marching band passes by and there's a small interaction with a cartoon, which gives a hillarious Snow White impression.

Yet, the film also has a strong closeness to reality. As soon as Tom entered the elevator on his way to work after the hysterical fairy tale scene, the story flash forwards to day 303 where Tom is totally miserable. Suddenly, Tom's clothes are sloppy and all of the grayness settles in to the workplace when he steps out of the elevator.

Also, the dirt, sweat, messy clothes and even the circles and bags under the actors' eyes were clearly shown to add to give a more realistic effect. There are split screen moments where there is a divide between what the main character expects and what really happens. It's basically the common, real life romance tragedy, told as if a classic postmodern writer would tell it, reminding the audience that everything is fake.

Clever, captivating, bittersweet, ironic, hillarious and surreal, 500 Days of Summer is probably the most highly recommended breakup movie that everyone needs to see. You will start laughing in the first minute guaranteed. If you don't laugh anywhere in the film or get any of the messages in the story, there is something mentally and physically wrong with you.

Rating: 4 hearts

Rating guide: 1 heart- Don't even leave the house, 2 hearts- Rent it, 3 hearts- See it in digital, 4 hearts- See it twice in the theatre, 5 hearts- See it twice and buy the DVD