You think this is what you want, but it is not.

[Okay, so here's how a "Local Review" works: It's like a movie review, except the writer takes what he or she thinks is the message of the movie, and applies it to this area, and/or his or her life in this area. (With a short "film review" at the end.)  Anyway, here goes...]

“You should know upfront,” the ominous baritone movie voice over man announces to start (500) Days of Summer, “that this is not a love story.”

Sitting in the frigid air of the theater at MacArthur Center, that line reminded me of how I was greeted when I first moved to Norfolk late last August. Some locals said it was an okay place to live. Others told me that it was good here, you just had to pick your spots. More than one other person simply asked me, “Why would you move here?”

Pretty much everyone I met in Hampton Roads told me upfront that no, life here is not a love story.

Those people were right, as was that throaty movie announcer guy. (500) Days of Summer is not a love story, at least not in what we’ve come to think of as the classic, love-conquers-all love story pattern. I’m gonna straight up tell you: The boy gets the girls, she dumps him, and he’s never able to win her back.

But maybe the problem isn’t the two characters in the movie, or the movie itself. And maybe the problem isn’t the 757 area. Maybe the source of all our disappointment–with love, with movies, with this place we now live, with our puppies running away–is how we’ve come to look at this concept of ‘love.’

The most sensible line in (500) Days of Summer comes from a C character who doesn’t even have a plot line of his own. He’s talking about his dream girl (and I’m completely paraphrasing here):

“She would probably have a killer rack, big pouty lips, and be more into sports,” he says. “But I’d rather have my girlfriend, because my girlfriend is real.”

Which is kind of a distillation of the classic syllogism of “real love” that has long been espoused by grandparents and this song from the beginning of, well, at least Lifetime movies: You don’t have what you don’t have (duh), and what you have is probably half OK (you sought it out for some reason, didn’t you?). Thus, stop Wanting and start loving what you have as much as you fucking can.

Here’s the part where I get personal. Before I lived here in Norfolk I lived in places like Cape Town, South Africa; San Diego; Brooklyn, and Florence, Italy, to name a few. When I got here I was looking for this area’s answer to Table Mountain, or to the 101, or to Brooklyn’s art scene, or Florence’s cafe culture. When I didn’t find any of them I was pretty damn bummed out. I got a little like the guy in (500) Day of Summer when he realizes it’s not going to work out with the girl, and his bedside table ends up filled with Twinkie rappers and empty fifths of liquor.

I wanted Norfolk to be a love story. But it was never going to be, at least not in the cliched, movie sense.

I had to accept that this area was never going to have grand natural beauties, and it was never going to be a world cultural hub. It was also never going to have great tits (sigh).

But it does have sports, with the ODU football team starting up this fall. But forget I said that, because it isn’t about what it will have or what it could be. Because what it is, is well worth loving. And that’s one big reason why I’m now editing this website. I want to love the one I’m with.

As for the movie, I found it to be indie filmmaking by numbers. You had the cutesy graphic elements; the underappreciated singer-songwriter (Regina Spektor) who will soon be overappreciated; the doe-eyed lovely ingenue in Zooey Deschanel; the faux-hipster boy who wears sneakers with his suit in Joseph Gordon-Levitt; there’s a convention where the fourth wall is broken down just to enter a different sort of cinemantic third wall (see musical-type scene, noir scene, etc.); and everyone ends up happy, just not in the kind of happy they originally sought in the first act. Overall the movie had the consistency and taste of a Slurpee, which isn’t the worst thing for the summer. I recommend this movie for girls (Hannah liked it MUCH more than me) and boys who like Zooey Deschanel.