To clear one thing up from the beginning--Summer is the name of the female character! :O)

I love being surprised by a film--this was a Sundance film festival winner and has become the darling of the critics which could mean a death knell for a movie but not in this case.

This
is a very sweet movie with two 'cute' stars in the lead. Joseph
Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, a greeting card writer who wants to be anarchitect. He is sort of nerdish looking and acting but integrates himself as an actor into
his role and your sensibility. Whether he is a nerd in real life I
don't know and as much as I hate to call a guy 'cute', he is! :O)

Zooey Deschanel plays Summer and has not only beautiful eyes but very expressive ones.
She mainly plays a passive role in this film but not as a typical movie
actress role but as a person who doesn't feel as much as her co-star
does.

I
find this movie 'different' in that it is a love story told from the
man's point of view. He believes in soul mates, 'forever after'  and
love while the woman doesn't. She wants him as a friend even though she
accepts him as a lover and doesn't want to make anycommitments nor does
she. Not giving anything away--as you know this from the beginning--she
dumps him and doesn't seem to have any good reasons for doing that.

Another
thing I appreciated about this film was that I once wrote a
book--autobiographical--about a relationship from the day we met
through the break up. Like Tom I knew the person was the love of my
life, but, like Summer, they didn't feel the same way. I identified
with many situations in the film from the highs he experienced to the
lows he went through.

The movie doesn't
go in a straight line but hops all over the place experiencing
different days during their romance with the days written on the screen
making it very easy to follow. You know they break up from the
beginning but how they get to that point is the journey of the film.

There
are a couple of jarring notes with one very hard to explain. There is a
musical dancing/singing number exploring Tom's joy in falling and being
in love with Summer. It is tuneful and has an animated blue bird and
would be a high point in a musical but doesn't belong in this movie.

The most jarring aspect of the film is the part played by Chloe Grace Moretz as the much younger sister of Tom and much too wise and knowledgeable about love and life with it not being explained where it came from. There is also an unnecessary narrator.

Matthew Gray Gubler--what happened to studios giving actors names that sounded like  star--and Geoffrey Arend are fine and funny as two of Tom's friends and all the supporting cast do their job exceptionally well.

This
is an excellent romantic movie, in spite of its faults, with two
excellent leads who draw you into their story from the opening scene
and some clever drawings throughout the film. As I said at the
beginning this is a sweet film and when was the last time you saw one?

Yes, it has sex and profanity but both are mild and though it has a PG-13 rating a teenager wouldn't be shocked by either.