Modern.
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From the New York Times and WBUR Boston.
This is modern love stories of love, loss and redemption.
I'm your host, Meghna Chakrabarti.
Have you ever thought of your life as a movie?
You're the star, obviously, and everyone else is a supporting character.
When it comes to real life romance, though, you can't predict what's going to happen.
But that didn't stop Madison Perry from trying.
Alex Karpovsky, best known as Rey on the HBO series Girls, reads Madison's essay uh, honey, that's not your line.
Moonlight from the window illuminated the tattoo of a phoenix covering the left side of her torso.
I traced it with my finger from just below her armpit over the speed bumps of her ribs to her hip bone.
I'd only seen tattoos like this in the movies, never in person, never this close, and never in my own bed.
I knew I had found my very own manic pixie dream girl when he was the film critic of the AV club.
Nathan Radman coined the term manic pixie dream girl to describe the love interest in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown.
Though the character type has been in many movies before and since, Natalie Portman and Garden State being perhaps the quintessential example, the man who picks your dream girl is now an indie film cliche, more a collection of quirks than a person who exists to be the perfect love interest for the male protagonist.
These weird but beautiful girls appreciate shy, sad, creative boys and teach them to enjoy life again through sex, love, and various activities done in the rain.
Though often perky, the manic pixie dream girl will be troubled as well.
She straddles the narrow line between quirky and crazy, mysterious and strange, sexy and slutty.
She is perfectly imperfect, and that imperfection is the key because a manic pixie dream girl must be messed up enough to need saving so the powerless guy can do something heroic.