This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know upfront, this is not a love story.
Spoilers ahead.
Please read on only if you have watched the movie, do not mind spoilers or do not intend to catch it.
If it’s (3), please reconsider it! 
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I love the movie.
I love how the story was told - non-linear, quirky, at times hilarious, at times sad.
Isn’t the way our memories work? We recall only the particular scenes, but we cannot seem to recall, with clarity, the sequence of those events. We look back and almost always manage to laugh at how we used to cry over split milk.
I love the characters.
Aren’t we, at different points in our lives, a Tom or a Summer?
Tom, who believes in true love and finding The One, who refuses to let go, who eventually moves on.
Summer, who scoffs at the word love and refuses to understand it, who just wants to be free, who eventually commits.
The entire scene at the bench where they met again, probably for the final time, was particularly moving.
The closure.
It no longer hurts, yet your heart feels that wrench all over again.
Why me.
Why not me.
“Are you really ok?”
“I will be. Eventually.”“I woke up one morning and I just knew.”
“Knew what?”
“What I was never sure of with you.”“You weren’t wrong, Tom. You were just wrong about me.”
“I truly hope you will be happy.”
Summer would eventually be over, and there’s (almost) always autumn to look forward to.
There would be a happily ever after, after all.
It’s just.. not you.
是有命中注定的。
只是.. 不是你。
(Photos from http://500daysofsummer.tumblr.com)
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The bf hated the movie. He basically concluded that it is a lousy movie (like how he concluded that that Lust, Caution was ’just about sex’).
He hated how Tom was portrayed to be the pathetic fool, how the movie seemed to be sending the message that guys are always the fools at the mercy of the girls.
I thought he was being biased and unnecessarily harsh on the film - he hates Summer, but this does not, and should not, make it a bad movie.
The story would be as real, even if the roles were reversed. Summer could have been Tom, and Tom could have been Summer. Yet, it’d just be like any other “great girl meets playboy” plot.. and no one would pity the girl because she is just too stupid for her own good to know that he is a playboy and yet still fall in love with him.
Moreover, the story was told from only one perspective – Tom, the guy’s point of view. Hence it really becomes inevitable that Summer is the evil one, and he is the victim and nothing but the victim who has nothing wrong to deserve this.
Isn’t that yet another oh-so true facet of life?
In the history that we piece together, the past that we see through our own eyes, we see ourselves as, more often than not, the victim.
He was the one who cheated. She was the one who lied. He was the one who treated me like shit. She was the one who dumped me.
It is his bad, her loss, whatever.
It is you, yes, you. Not me.
I enjoyed the debate with the bf. We have different views from time to time, but seldom this conflicting. I am not sure if he was convinced that this movie is really a gem, because at the end of our debate, he was still adamant about how lousy it is.
Yet, when we went shopping for furniture after the movie, he said to me, “Dear, I don’t know how to tell you this, but… there’s a Chinese family in our bathroom.”
LOL.
