(500) Days of Summer

On January 25, 2007, Onion A.V. Club critic Nathan Rabin inadvertently added a phrase to the movie lexicon. One that would eventually get it’s own Wikipedia page and it’s own NPR story. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In his review of Elizabethtown, Rabin said the following of Kirstin Dunst’s character: “Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example). The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.”