“Start from the beginning, and tell us what happened.”

500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. It appears in theaters on July 17. Unless you enjoy being a codependent loser, it is definitely worth missing.

The synopsis of the movie sets you up for a heartbreak of its own: "Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t. This post modern love story is never what we expect it to be — it’s thorny yet exhilarating, funny and sad, a twisted journey of highs and lows that doesn’t quite go where we think it will." Okay, wait for the other shoe: "When Tom, a hapless greeting card copywriter and hopeless romantic, is blindsided after his girlfriend Summer dumps him, he shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days 'together' to try to figure out where things went wrong. His reflections ultimately lead him to finally rediscover his true passions in life."

Unfortunately, this happens only after going after you stop chasing the wrong kind of passion. In this case, what seems like a quirky, funny sort of elfin sprite of a girl, turns out to be an emotionally unavailable courtesan, probably abandoned by her father at an early age, and who spends the rest of her life getting even, by using her feminine wiles to mislead every young man who follows her around the block. (A girl with a hippie name like "Zooey" plays a girl with a hippie name like "Summer." What more do you need to know?) Until science finds a cure for these little vixens, the men of this world are on their own. The guy in the next cubicle who tells him, "Maybe she's an uppity, better-than-everyone super-skank" may be on to something.

This sort of stealth nightmare happened to me once or twice in my younger days, only without the song-and-dance dream sequence in the park. The soul-searching depicted in the movie only works, when you discover that your "reflections" on what went wrong are a waste of time, and you "finally rediscover" that your "true passions in life" require you to GET a life.

In every love story, there are two people involved. It takes both of them to make anything happen. When you are the last one standing, and if you manage to keep your wits about you, the hard part is already done.

And if knowing that won't help you, maybe this will: "Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised." (Proverbs 31:30)

No, it's not as easy as it sounds, which is why we continue to be inundated with movies like this one.

Until science finds a cure.
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