Rom-com or vomathon?
Good job I was barefooted when I declared that Sol Campbell would return to Tottenham on Wednesday. Fearless German filmmaker Werner Herzog once vowed to publicly eat his shoe if his friend and fellow director Errol Morris managed to finish and screen his film “Gates of Heaven”, a documentary on the pet cemetery business (yep, there really is one). Morris succeeded and Herzog, a man of great integrity, kept his word. Mmm, leathery.
Speaking of cinema, 500 Days of Summer wasn’t anywhere near as annoying as it could’ve been. The signs are never good when a film is billed as ‘kooky’ or ‘postmodern’, especially if it’s a romantic comedy and Zooey Deschanel is involved. But actually, the “rom” was rather touching and the “com” made me laugh out loud more than once. The Regina Spektor-heavy soundtrack was a bonus, too.
That said, there was one thing that really grated on me. That thing was the film’s nauseating, misplaced and totally unnecessary narration. Instead of leaving the actors and music to do the talking, the film’s makers decided we needed a smug, Honda-style voiceover to tell us what we should be seeing and feeling at any given moment.
Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt: not nearly as annoying as they could have been
At one point, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character – whose job is to write greetings for a card manufacturer – stands up in a meeting and goes off on an interminable rant about our collective inability to express our emotions unless somebody else puts the words into our mouth.
Either this was intended to be ironic, or the film’s creators genuinely believe that cinemagoers are so stupid and unperceptive that they too need to have every bit of action and subtext explained to them. Luckily the voiceover didn’t feature often enough to ruin the film, but it was very nearly the difference between “go see it” and “get the rusty nails out”.
