Summer Lovin'

Soulful, Zooey-ful, and with a dash of Henry Mancini:

For those of you who love music and live for the vicarious celluloid summer fling, check out the beating heart mix tape movie that is (500) Days of Summer, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and 60s ingénue-chic Zooey Deschanel.  It’s a ‘boy meets girl’ montage set strikingly against the Hallmark grain.  (500) Days shuffles the deck, leaving snapshots lost in time, like stars in space, hanging effortlessly in the darkness.  They’re groovy, serene, never truly silent even as they assault your dreams and flash tirelessly beyond the first days of a new love. The boy is pining.  The girl of his dreams breezes through his life with the blue-eyed soul of, well, Zooey Deschanel.  That bitch.  We love her.

For those of you who haven’t seen Deschenel’s classic first-love flick, All The Real Girls, I slap your wrist.  Shame.  It’s a doozy.  Here’s the trailer:

(500) Days is like a sky-lit marquee of light-headed joy. A familiar song brings with it the sharpness and clarity of a painful, perfect memory. Music is a trigger. Perception is distorted, and there is no reason behind the rhythm and the flow.  Fragments fly at the heart.  The soul is weighed down in dancing debris. (500) Days of Summer jumps around in time, zig-zags, brands the mind, lights up.  It’s an ipod shuffle of love.  It flips through tidbits, fractured joy, an essence of a relationship.  Here’s the trailer:

Aaaaaaaand, a great scene from the film:

If you long for the nonlinear approach to love, perhaps you’d enjoy a peek back at the 1967 film, Two For The Road, starring Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn.  The film ricochets around in time, a lot like (500) Days of Summer, only it spans decades with a similar effect: Enchantment and a swift and bittersweet oozing tune to strum the heart (classic score by Henry Mancini).  Here’s the trailer:

If you want the totally irreverent beat without the heartbreak, look back to the old Dennis Potter series, Lipstick On Your Collar.  For a quick pick me up on YouTube, you can ogle the young Ewan McGregor and his blue suede shoes as he attempts to lip-synch his way out of a drab office and dazzle us with his shiny teeth.  Yeah, he’s vampin’ it up, but good.  Check it:

and one more hip swivel for the mix tape:

What can I say?  Love is strange: