DVD Pick: (500) Days Of Summer

Director Marc Webb's sly, classic in the making rom-com, (500) Days Of Summer, penned by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, does for 2009 what Annie Hall did for 1977: it takes the aging, unimaginative romantic comedy genre into a new era with wit, insight, and an awareness of all that has come before. The film drifts whimsically along through a scrambled timeline as it follows the 500 days of the on-again-off-again relationship between hopeless romantic Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and cynical commitment-phobe Summer (Zooey Deschanel). That those actors and this film so neatly fit into the sub-category of "indie" style can seem a mockable and trite quality but the film itself is a friend and foe to formula, weaving predictability hand-in-hand with nuance. The film re-enacts so many film patterns we have seen a million times before and then magnificently departs from them at precisely the right moments