by Philip E. Johnston
The opening night selection of this year’s 40th annual Nashville Film Festival was director Marc Webb’s Sundance hit 500 Days of Summer. Distributed by Fox Searchlight and set for a limited release on July 17, the film is Webb’s feature film directorial debut and proves itself a concise and entertaining treatise on young love in a postmodern world.
The first five minutes are immediately transporting. There is a narrator, there are attractive leading characters, the music is zippy, and Webb introduces his leading players as if they were walking in a narrative music video. It’s a beautiful amalgamation that can’t help but prompt an ear-to-ear smile. The story gets even more interesting directly following this masterful introduction when the narrator makes the audience a promise: “This is not a love story.”
So, in the spirit of the film, I’ll put an embargo on the word “love” from here on out. It’s just one of the ways this story is atypical – its a boy-meets-girl story the likes of which we haven’t seen before and one that is completely necessary to publicly state the romantic inclinations of millions of postmodern 20-somethings.