(500) Days of Summer - 2009

Indier than thou.

This film from 2009 wears its indie credentials on its sleeve and is all the more glorious as a result.

With a soundtrack that includes not one but two bona fide Smiths classics ("Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" and "There is a Light That Never Goes Out") and showings from the Pixies, Temper Trap, Regina Spektor, Doves and, gulp, Hall and Oates this is every indie kids dream.

As importantly it features the sort of boy and girl that indie kids are all desperate to be with...awkward, smart and witty Joseph Gordon Levitt and quirky, damaged and knowing Zooey Deschanel are perfectly cast. I always wanted to be just like him and to have a girlfriend just like her. Even now at this advanced stage in life I have a yearning to meet a girl in a lift who recognises the tinny sound of The Smiths coming from my headphones.

Sad isn't it?

This is NOT a love story.

This is the greatest story about love ever shown on the screen.

This is NOT a story of boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl live happily ever after.

THANKFULLY this is not a story of boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl live happily ever after.

(500) Days of Summer is about those people who waft into our lives on a breeze and then leave on the roaring wings of a hurricane (do hurricanes have wings?) tearing out our hearts, smashing everything we thought was indestructible and leaving us panting, sobbing, gasping, yearning, hoping and hopeless on a tear soaked mattress holding tightly to the pillow; the one that they dreamt on.

(500) Days of Summer is about finding someone who completes us and not caring about how corny that sounds.

(500) Days of Summer is about finding the ONE.

(500) Days of Summer is about realising that there isn't one...or if there is then it probably wasn't that one after all.

Levitt and Deschanel should both have received Oscar nods as should director Marc Webb because they delivered honest, moving, funny and dazzling performances in the only film that I went to see at the cinema six times last year.

Yeah, you heard me...six times.

I don't care what you think about that. At least I was smart enough not to go back and see "Avatar" again.