2. Tom Deserves Our Sympathy In 500 Days Of Summer
500 Days of Summer emerged as a surprisingly great romantic comedy that defied expectations and actually had something intelligent to say about relationships, dating and falling in love. It's a shame, then, that almost everyone who came out of the movie missed the point entirely, in the sense that we all hated Zooey Deschanel's Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Summer, and sympathised with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's awesome hero Tom when she broke his heart. Thing is, 500 Days of Summer isn't supposed to be about a seemingly perfect girl who refuses to start a relationship with our protagonist and ends up emotionally abusing him so that we can say: "Oh, man, Summer - what a b*tch." The movie is actually about Tom's own selfishness, and how he falls in love with the idea of Summer as an idea, but not Summer herself, which is the exact reason why she breaks up with him and marries somebody else. Joseph Gordon-Levitt actually summed all this up brilliantly when he was asked to clear up some of the misconceptions associated with the movie: "I would encourage anyone who has a crush on my character to watch it again and examine how selfish he is. He develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies. He thinks she'll give his life meaning because he doesn't care about much else going on in his life."