Thoughtful film criticism
(500) Words on (500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, USA, 2009)
Nicholas Rombes says that Film Studies may well be in crisis because nowadays everyone already knows everything.
DVD extras make film experts of us all and kids grow up knowing about entropy, parallel universes, virtual reality, space-time, godlessness, and other heavy concepts that we others have had to struggle to get our heads around, because we were not born with them as givens of our everyday existence.
It is natural for young people to see films that slip and slide between genres, films that have unstable ontologies, in which we can move into a musical section and for it not to seem weird, for characters to rise from the dead, slip inside a film within a film, and so on.
In other words, what was once the preserve of high academia and the artistic avant-garde is now everyday and commonplace.
Some feel this is bad, perhaps because to say that kids know it all deprives them of their privileged position as sage in an otherwise idiotic society. But this need not be the case: the easy flow of what previously were complex ideas might also be deemed the triumph of general education, not least through films and the media more generally. We might argue that kids know about it but they don’t know it – another kneejerk defence to keep one’s job in academia justified. But we may just be wrong.
Step forward (500) Days of Summer. It breaks into music, has animated characters fly around, it slips backwards and forwards in time, it lampoons but also takes seriously The Seventh Seal and other ‘arthouse’ classics, it reflects on architecture and space, and it tells a love story that is not really a love story. Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) thinks he loves Summer (Zooey Deschanel), but really he is in love with the idea of Summer.
The two are in Ikea, where they baulk with tradition and do not follow the linear path through the shop that Ikeans are supposed to follow: playing with linearity and non-spaces already, the two then pretend to be in films in the Ikea house. Their romance, we are told, was all along a film.
Add in the constant need to quote – from songs and films and the like – and we have a canny film dressed as a mainstream film about the inability to express oneself for oneself in real life: love in a karaoke bar.
Tom’s friends gather around him and act as his soundboard, including his ‘wise’ little sister: film does not even bother to pretend that these characters are more than mere projections of Tom’s ego.
But where Fireflies in the Garden (Dennis Lee, USA, 2008) does this in earnest, Summer does it knowingly, and with a charming wink.
A scary thought: maybe films like this are so smart that these days it would be pointless to inflict The Seventh Seal on kids. They know the philosophy; they get it in entertaining films. Do they know the value of boredom?
DVD extras make film experts of us all and kids grow up knowing about entropy, parallel universes, virtual reality, space-time, godlessness, and other heavy concepts that we others have had to struggle to get our heads around, because we were not born with them as givens of our everyday existence.
It is natural for young people to see films that slip and slide between genres, films that have unstable ontologies, in which we can move into a musical section and for it not to seem weird, for characters to rise from the dead, slip inside a film within a film, and so on.
In other words, what was once the preserve of high academia and the artistic avant-garde is now everyday and commonplace.
Some feel this is bad, perhaps because to say that kids know it all deprives them of their privileged position as sage in an otherwise idiotic society. But this need not be the case: the easy flow of what previously were complex ideas might also be deemed the triumph of general education, not least through films and the media more generally. We might argue that kids know about it but they don’t know it – another kneejerk defence to keep one’s job in academia justified. But we may just be wrong.
Step forward (500) Days of Summer. It breaks into music, has animated characters fly around, it slips backwards and forwards in time, it lampoons but also takes seriously The Seventh Seal and other ‘arthouse’ classics, it reflects on architecture and space, and it tells a love story that is not really a love story. Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) thinks he loves Summer (Zooey Deschanel), but really he is in love with the idea of Summer.
The two are in Ikea, where they baulk with tradition and do not follow the linear path through the shop that Ikeans are supposed to follow: playing with linearity and non-spaces already, the two then pretend to be in films in the Ikea house. Their romance, we are told, was all along a film.
Add in the constant need to quote – from songs and films and the like – and we have a canny film dressed as a mainstream film about the inability to express oneself for oneself in real life: love in a karaoke bar.
Tom’s friends gather around him and act as his soundboard, including his ‘wise’ little sister: film does not even bother to pretend that these characters are more than mere projections of Tom’s ego.
But where Fireflies in the Garden (Dennis Lee, USA, 2008) does this in earnest, Summer does it knowingly, and with a charming wink.
A scary thought: maybe films like this are so smart that these days it would be pointless to inflict The Seventh Seal on kids. They know the philosophy; they get it in entertaining films. Do they know the value of boredom?
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