What I Feel After Watching 500 Days of Summer for the Nth Time

"To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die."

I've come to realize there are two types of good films. One being your run-of-the-mill, critically-acclaimed, entertaining films; while the other not only shares the same qualities as the first, but also changes you. Such is the case for this movie. It alters moods, changes perceptions, and makes you feel its fictionalized world is somehow in tune with your own reality. And it helps that music is used to perfect effect here, guiding you through the different galleries of emotions throughout the film. It's a well-balanced examination of unrequited love, one that becomes more apparent on subsequent views. It's perhaps the best attempt at the subject matter by any movie.

Time and again, after subsequent views I emerge from it a little bit different. A bit altered. A bit off. A bit more grateful and enthused. And somehow a bit mad. It takes and gives back a piece of me each time, and it's remarkable to see such an exchange happen between a person and a piece of media.

It's been 5 years since the movie came out, and I've no doubt it will stand the test of time, never to disappear into the abyss of the post-contemporary. It's strangely depressing actually. In every respect a classic, the central characters are immortalized and frozen in time, always emanating youthful exuberance and delivering on the film's victory of fiction. The real world, in contrast, rots. And as the decaying world watches a joyful Tom walk through the park to "You Make My Dreams" and later joined by Summer huddled in a silly game of tourettes, we are eternally reminded of our own mortality.

I never get tired of this film.