The movie break up

My best friend and I were talking today about break ups in the movies and how much better they are than in real life.  The best part about the movie break up is many times the broken up get back together.  Whether in drama or in romance, something funny or chatastrophic pulls a couple a part so that by the end of the movie something fun and equally catastrophic puts them back together.  Whether a natural disaaster or a world war or a family, as an audience most of the time we are roothing for the couple to get back together.   I was thinking about examples of movies where this doesn’t happen and  (WARNING SPOILER) 500 DAYS OF SUMMER immediately came to mind.  Sorry for those that have not seen it.  I think the film is a brilliant journey into what happens when two people find each other and one person realizes that the relationship just isn’t working while the other believes he has found his soul mate.  When the girl, played by Zooey Deschanel breaks it off with the boy, played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, he does everything in his power to try and win her back.  The movie was not the classic rom com and in fact at a Q&A I saw with the writers, it was meant to be an anti rom com.  For me the movie was poignant, funny, heart breaking, and minus the animated segments, pretty true to life.  In life, as in this particular movie, we sometimes get our heart broken, stomped on, ripped to shreds and then with lots of time and some faith, move on hoping to find the one yet again.  It’s movies like 500 DAYS OF SUMMER that make me not only believe in filmmaking and the power of it, but also as a hopeless romantic who has had her heart broken, makes me realize that hopefully, sometimes movies can be like real life… I just wish I had an animated blue bird that would sing to me sometimes too!

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