Word: summer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Mind you, there's nothing intellectually strenuous in the late-summer offerings. These are quirky romantic comedies in which dissonant figures struggle to achieve harmonic convergence. They take their cues from a pair of summer releases 20 years ago: When Harry Met Sally, which described a friendship that was sometimes a courtship, and sex, lies, and videotape, in which a man's impotence was the spur to romance. (Read TIME's 1989 review of When Harry Met Sally...
...people who hate each other and thus are bound to fall in love, as in The Ugly Truth, or strangers with complementary needs, as in The Answer Man, or, for a change, folks who seem simpatico but have trouble becoming a couple, as in (500) Days of Summer. What the new films share is an aim to evoke familiar laughs and perhaps a climactic tear. That's the difference between an action movie and a comedy: the first makes you gasp, "I've never seen that before!"; the second has you nodding, saying "Hey, that...
Meanwhile, (500) Days of Summer sweats like a dockworker to win your favor. All that labor could pay off: the film earned a bundle in its first week of limited release and will soon broaden its charm offensive, or assault, at a theater near you. The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, imagines that the perfect young man, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom, falls in love with the perfect young woman, Zooey Deschanel's Summer. But she's reluctant to commit; she refuses to think of them as a couple, even after they've become best friends...
That's the problem with a lot of indie films: covering all the bases. For all the charm of its two leads, there's a cool calculation in Summer's chocolate-valentine heart: the urge to be the next Juno. When little films strain to be big hits, they turn quirks into formula and lose the romance of independence. They may as well be Wolverine...
...display room's three staffers took the University's early retirement incentive package, Donnelly said, and the third was fired this summer as part of the 275 University-wide layoffs...