Despite (500) Days of Summer essentially being a film about how to make yourself miserable by living in your own romantic bubble and ignoring obvious warning signs about the character of your beloved, which makes it a partly intriguing but partly tedious thing to sit through because it’s obvious early on that the relationship between Joseph Gordon-Levittt and Zooey Deschanel can’t work because “she’s not there,” the film has caught on with 20somethings and that’s the bottom line.

I’m okay with that. Everyone is. Marc Webb‘s film has some mildly arresting aspects. Gordon-Levitt’s looks are still too Japanese dweeby for my tastes, but his performance is more tolerable in this film than anything he’s previously done. The Graduate allusions are well realized. The musical fantasy sequence is very nicely done. There’s a class of guys out there who regard Deschanel as hot stuff (Jett among them) so why not leave well enough alone? Because I can’t. If I was 25 and ran into her in a bar (and if she wasn’t “Zooey Deschanel”) I wouldn’t even turn my head.