Hooray for you, Mari Sasano.

The title makes me gag (it’s about a guy who dates a girl named Summer!), but wow, I really love this movie! Zooey Deschanel! Joseph Gordon-Levitt! Cuteness! And yeah, it can be a little precious at times, but I don’t care. It’s sweet.

Joseph G-L plays Tom, a would-be architect who works at a greeting card company. When Summer (Deschanel) is hired as his boss’ assistant, he falls head over heels. Finally, he decides, this is the girl he has been waiting for. Sadly, he is a romantic and she is a cynic: she doesn’t want anything serious, and claims to have never really been in love. Tom, nevertheless, is smitten.

The smart thing (aside from the adorable leads) is that the film is told non-chronologically, starting with the inexplicable break up and jumping around in Tom’s memory, trying to find what went wrong. But of course, a few scenes after the breakup, it’s obvious: he refused to take anything she said seriously and got in over his head. When you’re determined to make someone love you back, it’s easy to let that happen. I know! I’ve done it!

Watching Summer enjoying herself in the relationship is lovely. And Deschanel does a wonderful job of inflecting her pleasure with a little sadness, knowing that she will have to hurt him someday. But oh, it is intoxicating to have someone love you so blindly. And you can tell there’s a part of her that wishes she felt the same way too. I know! I’ve done it!

There are also some very cute hand-drawn animations, a Hall and Oates fantasy dance sequence, and really, really good music. Well, good for someone who is a recovering karaoke addict and lover of mopey ’80s British pop. But overall, it captures the trajectory of love perfectly from two points of view– Tom’s in a more obvious kind of way, but Summer’s too, once you start to notice the little details. OK, so maybe it’s a little cute for some people. But I was in exactly the right mood for it.

And oh! Here’s a little extra thingy that the filmmakers made for you. Swoon!

Yeah, so sometimes I like to see a chick flick just for research purposes. You gotta know what your enemies are up to, eh? That and my sociology PhD friend has been teaching her students about gendered conversation and reaction to humour, which became useful later.

The Ugly Truth sounds terrible all-around: a seduction guru (Gerard Butler) is hired on at a struggling TV news show produced by neurotic overachiever (Katherine Heigl), who lock horns until they find that they are falling in love. BARF. But despite the awful premise, I got totally sucked in.

The problem with the movie is that it sets you up to hate it. If they dialed it down to an ordinary misanthropist who meets a regular control freak, it might’ve been a Katherine Hepburn/Cary Grant kind of deal. But I guess we live in an era of extremes, so why not lay on a few rape jokes. Ha? What was really interesting to my friend was how the audience reacted: men laughed hardest at the misogynist jokes, while women laughed at the sexual ones. It was really obvious!

But the meta-text of the film was that men and women are both hurt by traditional ideas about love. Well, doi. Here’s the thing: love makes you vulnerable, which is pretty scary to both men and women. Women get controlly and neurotic. Men react with aggression and anger. And why not? Little boys are taught stuff about how they have to be strong and emotionless and be the big caveman and kill the mammoth. This is not entirely possible. So boys grow up feeling inadequate. Girls on the other hand, are told that they don’t matter, so they overcompensate. Boys see this and feel even worse. Then girls wonder why boys aren’t the movie heroes that they’ve been taught to expect and get hypercritical.

Can we just get over this? It’s a shitty dynamic and nobody wins.

Also, I know what’s best for you, OK? Just listen to me.

PS It’s still a terrible movie. Watch The Philadelphia Story instead.