(500) Days of Summer [etc.]

I wouldn’t urge Marc Webb’s off-beat twentysomething rom-com on you -- unless you, like me, find Zooey Deschanel’s doe-eyed gaze charming, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt a sympathetic young actor. They meet while working at a greeting card company in downtown LA. He, in his own mind an architect rather than a dispenser of treacle, is utterly smitten; she, a no-bullshit free spirit, is willing to spend some time and have some fun with him, no strings attached. Her name is Summer and 500 is the number of days it takes him to get into and then over her. The days are literally numbered and help the viewer keep track through all the flashbacks and flashforwards that are part of the film’s enlivening gimmicks, along with animation and song & dance. You won’t learn much you don’t already know about life or love, but you are likely to be amused for an hour and a half. (2009, dvd.) *7-* (MC-76.)

Two other films of recent vintage could sneak in under the same umbrella description, though less fully satisfying within the parameters of each premise. The Invention of Lying (2009, dvd, MC-58) starts out as sharp, smart satire but then goes all mushy. In a world devoid of the concept of saying anything that is not so, Ricky Gervais tells a lie inadvertently and makes the astounding discovery of the utility of saying untrue words. As his mother is dying, he makes up a comforting story about what’s about to happen to her, and soon he is a celebrity evangelist bringing the word from the Man in the Sky. With someone like Alexander Payne directing, this might have been scathingly sarcastic fun, an equal opportunity offender, but with Gervais collaborating with Matt Robinson on script and direction, the premise peters out in a sub-Groundhog Day romance. To me, however, Jennifer Garner has even less appeal than Andie Macdowell, so I couldn’t buy into the relationship at all. Oh, that Ricky had remained true to the David Brent within, and not tried to imagine himself as a romantic hero!

Mike Judge followed up Beavis and Butthead with the cult hit movie, Office Space, and after several more animated tv series, is back with another live-action, workplace comedy called -- unmemorably -- Extract (2009, dvd, MC-61). It stars Jason Bateman – whom I have come to like through several recent supporting roles in good movies, but moreover from my belated viewing of the three seasons of Arrested Development – as the owner of a small factory turning out extracts, like vanilla and such. Ben Affleck is his druggy bartender buddy, who has all the wrong answers for Jason’s marital frustrations. Don’t ask -- but it involves a dimwitted pool boy gigolo and a hot little con artist trading on her sex appeal. The heart of the film is the real-life factory, where realistically humorous characters live out their worklives, disrupted by an industrial accident, hilariously-staged, and a subsequent wildcat strike. With so many good things in it, I’m surprised the whole didn’t leave a better impression – despite intelligent amusement throughout, it remains in memory as vague as its title.