We don’t mean to be curmudgeon’s here, but when we heard Marc Webb, Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt had created a complimentary short film for their “anti”-romantic comedy, “500 Days of Summer,” we were sort of excited or at least anticipating the clip.
It seemed like a creative and smart way to continue the online conversation about the film now that it’s in theaters and expanding wider into different markets.
But it turns out it’s mostly just a longform music video for “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” by She & Him, Deschanel’s retro-throwback group with musician M. Ward.
It is a neat looking bank heist/movie musical homage (we’re into all the musical stuff this week, it’s an unfairly maligned genre and we hope to correct that myopic thinking soon), but why can’t we just call a spade a spade and say this is just a music video? Maybe our issue is less of what it is — which is fine, it’s a creative little music video — and more how USA Today and perhaps more importantly, the web itself, are positioning it. But we suppose we’re probably the only ones nitpicking about the semantics and it probably does the trick in keeping “500 Days Of Summer,” on the minds of theatergoers which is never a bad thing. Lest you think we’re total pricks, congrats to Marc Webb for scoring a Best Director MTV Video Award nomination this week for helming Green Day’s “21 Guns” clip).
