This week's clip joint is by Dominic Kelly, who blogs at somewhereimnot.wordpress.com.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls (MPDGs), a recurring trope in the romantic genre, are happy-go-lucky, free spirited, criminally underwritten co-stars who exist solely as a vehicle for the stuffy, angsty and usually white male lead to discover himself and appreciate the wonders of the world. They're archetypes that get consumed, as parodied in a sketch by US comedy group The Natural Disastronauts.

Earlier this year, movie writer Zoe Kazan spoke out against film criticism's discourse on the trope: "I think that to lump together all individual, original quirky women under that rubric is to erase all difference." She's completely right. Film needs challenging and surprising characters in order to bloom; the dismissal of any eccentric, remotely interesting female character as "just another Manic Pixie Dream Girl" is misogynistic.

An often cited example of an MPDG prototype is Diane Keaton's portrayal of the titular character in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. But Annie absolutely is not an MPDG. She's a complicated, slightly eccentric, powerful woman who, over the course of the movie, develops her own goals, has her own motivation, and pursues it with or without her partner. Her character doesn't only exist for her lover's self-discovery.

However, Kazan conceded in the same interview: "I'm not saying that some of those characters that have been referred to as that don't deserve it; I think sometimes film-makers have not used their imagination in imbuing their female characters with life." Below is a list of characters produced by what I believe is lazy screenwriting. The actors aren't at fault here – rather it's the writers, who do nothing to increase the presence of complicated, fascinating female characters in film. This is a list of emotional development McGuffins in human form whose characterisation is thinner than the pages of the coffee-stained script they roam in.

Elizabethtown

The term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" first appeared in Nathan Rabin's discussion of Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown (2005), co-starring Kirsten Dunst as the wide-eyed wildchild Claire Colburn, for whom Orlando Bloom's protagonist falls. Whereas Bloom's character has demons to bear and ashes to spread, Dunst's character exists merely to facilitate his self-realisation. She's basically a quirky GPS system, like if your Sat Nav was voiced by Christopher Biggins.

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A bout de souffle

This achingly hip slice of French new wave, released in 1960, is undoubtedly a classic brick in the wall of cinema history – but that's not to say Jean Seberg's character may not be the prototype for today's trope. She certainly ticks all the boxes with her quirky yet relatively undeveloped character traits, and THAT hairstyle is surely the pixie cut to end them all – and begin a million more. Plus, the writers who conceive these characters are more than likely to have seen it.

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Garden State

"It'll change your life, I swear." The lonely, emotional indie-boy crush of choice, Natalie Portman, plays the lovably/irritatingly quirky Sam, the ying to the depressed, emotionless Andrew's yang. Over the course of the film, this MPDG introduces Zach Braff's Andrew to The Shins, living for the moment and the indie filmgoing world, creating a whole new catalogue of cliches. See also: Rachel Bilson in The Last Kiss, making Braff a serial reoffender.

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(500) Days of Summer

Let's be honest, roles played by Zooey Deschanel could fill this entire list; her parts in Yes Man, Elf and New Girl are also prime offenders. But her role as Summer may be the quintessential MPDG. As well as being bubbly and impossibly impulsive, Summer incorporates another recurring characteristic: she " has issues". However, instead of the writer dealing with these and developing her as a character and a distinct voice, they are fetishised as some kind of edgy streak to make her an even more appealing, unattainable muse for the nuanced, alternative male.

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Beauty and the Beast

A bit of a left-field choice, but hear me out. One of the major telltales of an MPDG tale is the transformative effect the girl has on the man, whom she redirects from closed-minded cynicism to open-hearted optimism. In this Disney classic, the grumpy beast is literally, physically transformed from his old self by Belle, who's own character development is essentially none. Who knew the Beast was such a hipster?

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Last week, Helen Murdoch nominated her favourite trailers from the past year. Here's Dominic's pick from the thread.

1. Monkeybug celebrates the magic of the Muppet spoof trailer.

2. Littleriver celebrates this rightly applauded gem.

3. Haigin88 lays down a whole manifesto: "Trailers should be banned. They pack the whole film into two minutes, with faster and faster cutting, while slathering on the best parts of the musical score. They either convince you to see a film that you weren't otherwise going to watch (never, ever, trust the trailer for a comedy) or they show you too much of a film you were going to see anyway."

4. Mrskite draws the worryingly accurate rule of thumb that "the longer the trailer the crappier the film".

5. Mightymightyman sums up a whole movie: "Prometheus. Nice trailer, shame about the film."