A “Summer” Kind of Love

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't.

Happens all the time—to me more times than I care to recall.

Nothing to be done for it. Nearly all of us have fancied someone who doesn’t fancy us.

But . . .

What if . . .

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl acts like she’s fallen in love, too.

Aye, there’s the rub.

Rejection I can take, but deception? Games?

In words best heard in the quavering voice of Aaron Neville—

If you want something to play with
Go and find yourself a toy
Baby my time is too expensive
And I'm not a little boy

Tell it like it is.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel star in director Mark Weber's wry, non-linear romantic comedy about a man who falls hard for a woman who doesn't believe in love and says she doesn’t want a boyfriend.

Tom Hansen (Gordon-Levitt) is an aspiring architect who currently earns his living as a greeting card writer (“You make me proud every day. Today, you get a card.”). Upon encountering his boss' fetching new secretary, Summer Finn (Deschanel), Tom discovers that the pair have much in common, (and not just that they both love The Smiths and the surrealist artist Magritte). From the very first moment, Tom is smitten. All he can think about is Summer.

Tom believes in the concepts of soul mates and one true love, and he thinks he’s finally found his.

Unfortunately, Summer doesn’t feel the same way—or so she says. Her actions seem to indicate she’s changing her tune. She says she sees true love as the stuff of fairy tales, and isn't looking for romance, that she wants to keep things casual. Undeterred, Tom pursues Summer, and for a while she seems to respond in kind, but ultimately, it is short lived.

The smart, interesting, funny film is told out of sequence in scenes that serve as kind of forensic flashbacks in Tom and Summer’s love autopsy.

It brings to mind the lyrics Drew Barrymore’s character batted around in “Music and Lyrics.” “Figuring out you and me is like a love autopsy. They can search all day long and never find out what went wrong.”

After it looks as if she's left his life for good, Tom reflects back on his yearlong relationship with Summer—and the audience gets to comb through the wreckage along with him.

It’s clear that although Summer said she didn’t believe in relationships or boyfriends or true love or anything serious, it’s obvious to everyone except Summer, she and Tom became far more than just friends.

Through his heartbroken investigation of his relationship catastrophe, Tom gets advice from his two best friends, McKenzie and Paul. However, the best, wisest counsel comes from Tom's adolescent sister, Rachel.

“(500) Days of Summer” is a well made film, worthy of your movie going time. The script is clever, the directing good, and the performances of Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel are outstanding. Still, it’s hard not to leave the theater frustrated. The writers and director so perfectly capture the pain and emotional devastation that occurs when someone in a relationship is dishonest or whose actions don’t match his or her words, that it’s difficult not to be angry at Summer (even as charming as Zooey Deschanel is).

Mixed signals.

Poor communication.

How much heartache could be spared if we would all just tell the truth—and make sure our actions match the truth we’re telling.

Actions. Not words.

No matter how much someone says she doesn’t believe in love or doesn’t want a boyfriend, if she acts like she does, if she exhibits all the signs of being “in love,” guess what the guy in love with her is going to believe?

And who can blame him?

Sure, there were little signs, clues to indicate her ambivalence that can be seen when looking back, but they were mostly hidden by the many other actions that contradicted them. And that they could have been spotted by a trained detective or relationship guru doesn’t mean an infatuated young man had even the remotest chance of perceiving them.

The entire film, I sat there thinking, Summer’s character is not so much aloof or ambivalent or free-spirited as wounded. Like so many walking wounded among us, her actions are defensive. She’s in self-preservation mode, guarding her heart from additional hurt, which only insures that’s what she’ll both inflict and receive.
Tom is open and kind and gentle and loving and honest. Summer is closed and defensive and dishonest.

Summer lied to Tom—with her actions if not with her words. Of course, Tom lied to himself, too—but I don’t think he could or would have if not for Summer’s deception.

In addition to a fresh, unique way of telling an age-old story, the writers do a sexual role reversal with the characters. Unlike, “He’s Just Not that Into You” and what is far more common in life, it’s not the guy saying one thing with his mouth and something different with his actions. It’s the girl. And who knows? Maybe male audience members will identify with Tom and not treat the women in their lives so casually and inconsiderately in future seasons of their lives.

With all that “(500) Days of Summer” has going for it, I can forgive its unearned ending and appreciate the writers and director’s mercy in giving both Tom and the audience a glimmer of hope as summer turns to autumn, and we prepare for the cold, cruel days of winter ahead.

If You Have a Good Appetite for Great Food and Film . . .

On the drive to the theater to see “Julie and Julia,” I was thinking about a report I’d read earlier in the day about the rise of obesity in America—how two-thirds of us are either overweight or obese, and how on average we’re 23 pounds overweight.

That was on the drive over. During and following the film, all I wanted to do was eat.

Of course, what I longed for was not what is making us fat—not poorly produced, corn-fed, high fructose corn syrup calorie and fat-injected food, but a fine meal—the kind that feeds the soul while nourishing the body.

What I settled on was three-quarters of an exquisite piece of key lime pie at Gracie Rae’s, which did feed my soul, but not as much as the late evening ambience, the sun-streaked bay, and the gentle kiss of evening on the soft, brine-tinged breeze.

The article I had read about how we’re eating ourselves to death, argued that obesity, like tobacco and alcohol abuse, isn’t just dangerous, but expensive. New research shows medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for an obese person and the overall obesity-related health spending is around $147 billion, double what it was nearly a decade ago (according to the journal Health Affairs).

We’ve got a problem. Our approach to food. Our approach to life. The hole in the secret depths of who we are can’t be filled with food alone.

Our great national sins, the ones so deeply a part of who we are they don’t get very many sermons, don’t get marches or signs or bumper stickers, and don’t decide elections, are greed and gluttony. But the film is the antithesis of our self-destructive behavior—a celebration of good food and of women and marriage and life.

The film is about the appreciation, not the aberration and exploitation of food. The way alcohol is not an issue for people who drink moderately, food is not an issue for non gluttons.

Food, like sex or work or religion or family or alcohol, can be both cause for an used in celebration—something that leads us into transcendence—or it can be merely something we do, mundane, thoughtless, animalistic.

For both Julia and Julie, food is far, far more than just fuel.

Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and Julie Powell (Amy Adams) are featured in writer-director Nora Ephron’s adaptation of two bestselling memoirs: Powell's “Julie & Julia” and “My Life in France,” by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme. Based on two true stories, “Julie & Julia” intertwines the lives of two women who, though separated by time and space, are both at loose ends . . . until they discover that with the right combination of passion, fearlessness and butter, anything is possible.

We live in a time and a place of plenty, which won’t last—it can’t—but what do we do while it does? Can we have the discipline to deny ourselves, the compassion to share our undeserved abundance, the wisdom and humility to be grateful, the spiritual insight to perceive what is beyond nutritional necessity? The answers are all too obvious, but we’re a young species. Maybe we’ll survive our adolescence to become who we’re meant to be.

We all have a relationship with food, and we all have to figure it out.
But food isn’t the only relationship that is explored in the film. There’s also Julie and Julia’s relationships with friends and family and society, and especially, their relationships with their husbands.

Both Julie and Julia became who they did thanks in part to the encouraging, supportive spouses in their lives. Rarely has marriage been so positively portrayed on screen. Not only does Ms. Ephron love good food, but, after a very public unhappy marriage and acrimonious divorce, she now loves being married. Both her relationship to food and her husband shine through her script and her camera and onto the screen.

“Julie and Julia” teaches ever so gently that the keys to a good life and relationship are genuine love, respect, and support given to and received from our significant others, authenticity, real purpose, fidelity to self and calling, hard work, good food, good sex—and a good appetite for all of these.

Like a consummate chef preparing a special meal for treasured friends and family, Ms. Ephron has taken the recipes found in both Julie and Julia’s books, added her own ingredients, and cooked up a near flawless film. All that’s left to say is bon appétit. Come with a good appetite to this good film about good people and good times and the good food that makes everything even better.

The Truth is Uglier than You Think

“Treat a hot girl like dirt and she’ll stick to you like mud.”

This bit of misogynistic venom spit out by Sam from “Slackers” seems less an explanation for his doin’ dirt to girls than the philosophy of a generation.

Recent romantic comedies—even those that purport to reveal how guys really think—too often justify, even romanticize sexism and misogyny.

It’s alarming how prevalent—check that—how celebrated bad behavior is (and not just in rap songs and man-child movies). It’s even more alarming how many women allow, even expect it.

Listen to how the studio is promoting the romantic comedy “The Ugly Truth.”

The battle of the sexes heats up in Columbia Pictures comedy “The Ugly Truth.” Abby Richter (Katherine Heigl) is a romantically challenged morning show producer whose search for Mr. Perfect has left her hopelessly single. She's in for a rude awakening when her bosses team her with Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler), a hardcore TV personality who promises to spill the ugly truth on what makes men and women tick.

The female character is “romantically challenged” and “hopelessly single,” the male character is “hardcore” and “truth-telling.” Relationships are framed as a battle—or at best a game. The problem with this paradigm is someone has to win and someone has to lose, someone has to dominate and someone has to submit. With the poster picturing the two would-be lovers as the kind of blocky black figures you find on restroom doors with red hearts—the woman’s on her head, the man’s on his crotch, the battle is framed in the ancient way of men only wanting sex and women having to withhold it until the man surrenders to her terms of marriage—or at least until it’s certain he wants more than just her body. In this oppressive and flat out wrong paradigm, men give “love” to get sex and women give sex to get “love”—men are only hounds and women are only virgins or sluts.

Chadway’s ugly truth is that men only want sex—lots and lots of sex. And while I only speak for one man, the problem with the caricatured formulation is that it’s only partially true. Truth is usually far more nuanced, subtle, complex. Many men, maybe most (even us good guy feminist types) want as much sex as we can get, but that’s not the only thing we want. And yet, that is the only thing some guys want from some girls, and the only thing other guys want from all girls.

The real ugly truth is that our culture is so sexist Sam’s and Mike Chadway’s mentalities (and that of the girls they’re involved with) shouldn’t surprise us. And it’s not just them. We have systemic sexism—justified by the powerful, sanctified by the religious, tolerated by all who thoughtlessly accept culture as not only the way things are, but the way things are supposed to be.

The uglier truth is the reason misogynists like Mike Chadway and Sam get so much play is far more a failure of parenting than culture. Succumbing to culture, they’re parents failed them as did the parents of all the girls allowing them to treat them badly. By what they said or didn’t say, by what they did or didn’t do, by what they modeled or by their absence, parents are raising entitled boys to use and abuse, to manipulate and take, and move on, and girls who keep kissing frogs and believing fairytales because they aren’t given the tools to imagine anything else.

Obviously, I found “The Ugly Truth” thought-provoking—but more because of its assumptions than what was on the screen. And though it provided a few laughs and a couple of “moments,” it’s dangerous propaganda.

“Yo, Lister, lighten up. It’s a comedy,” I can hear some readers saying.

And they’d have a point, but sexism, like racism or classism or homophobia or xenophobia, is only funny when being laughed at, not with.

Here are a few of my truths:

—He’s not strong and silent, he’s barbaric and emotionally stunted.

—Drama and sick dynamics don’t equal desire or passion, just dysfunction.

—It’s not just that he’s not that into you, he’s not into anyone but himself.

—There are far far far worse things than being single.

—If a person’s not growing and evolving on his or her own, he or she is not going to do it for you (for very long).

—Character is reality, charm is an illusion.

—If you find self-centeredness sexy, you need counseling.

—There’s a reason it takes several drinks to do what you’re about to do.

—It’s not that women don’t like sex as much as men, it’s that far too many sexual encounters are mostly (if not exclusively) about male satisfaction. (Just because those three minutes were heaven for you doesn’t mean it did anything for her.)

—If being treated badly feels good and being treated good feels bad, your operating system has a virus and needs deprogramming and reprogramming.

Like, “He’s Just Not that Into You,” “The Ugly Truth” claims to be telling truths about men, about how we are really sex-obsessed users (I for one am no user), but then end by reaffirming the sexists suppositions they claim to be exposing. Both films undermine everything they were saying with unearned, incredible happy Hollywood endings.

The guy who’s just not that into you, who keeps giving you all the signs that he only wants sex and not a relationship, realizes by the end of the movie that you’re his soul mate and Mike Chadway is only misogynistic because he has a woman-wounded heart. See, men really do have hearts hidden somewhere behind their enormous erections—all you have to do is persist, keep kissing frogs, keep hoping for the best, keep ignoring the signs and the guy who says he doesn’t want to marry you, eventually will, the guy who says he doesn’t want a relationship will realize he really does. All you have to do is keep playing his game—or the next guy’s game, or the next, or the next and eventually you’ll win. Am I the only one who thinks these are tragedies not comedies?