Summer from 500 Days of Summer

[marlowe1]

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope became popular, overdone and finally named by Nathan Rabin in MYOF. I have to admit that I actually liked Garden State when I first saw it but the abundance of MPDG characters has rendered Natalie Portman's version egregiously awful. There are now MPDG deconstructions such as Charlize Theron on Arrested Development

Comments

[shipaholic]

I really like what this movie sets out to do. I don't know if I enjoyed it enough to watch it again, but it's still very clever.

At first I was annoyed by the girl at the end too, but then I thought maybe the point was that Tom hasn't learned anything and he's just going to repeat the same mistakes with the next girlfriend.

I do have a close friend who was moved to tears by the film... I don't think he was picking up on the satirical elements, unfortunately.

[animenutcase]

Mm. I haven't actually seen this movie, but I've read up on it and that is one interpretation of Autumn. But there's also the opposite: The idea that he has learned from his mistakes. Autumn means "change", after all.

[full_metal_ox]

Am I the only one getting the impression that the asylum director in the enclosed video is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who's shrewd enough to lock up (and dismiss) all the competition and then feign normality?

[kirarakim]

I don't know I liked what the movie was trying to do but it didn't pull it off for me. And I hated the ending with the girl in the interview (it would have been much better if he just went to do the job interview IMO). And I do get that the character might make the same mistakes...but I think it would have been better with him actually moving on & not doing the same thing again.

I think a similar but much better film (albeit also much shorter) is Antoine and Colette by Truffaut.

[schways]

JGL even comments that the one that should be hated in the movie is Tom. Yet there are a lot of summer haters. I'm not a huge fan of Zooey, but I liked the character of Summer as she was revealed more and we saw how Tom kind of adopted this somewhat Nice Guy attitude. He wanted her to be with him forever despite seeing her as just some fantasy girl.