A new Zooey Deschanel movie came out last weekend. But is it the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Paul Dano or the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt? It’s the former, and it’s called Gigantic, which is also not to be confused with this coming week’s new DVD release, Yes Man, in which she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Jim Carrey.

Sure, Deschanel has range and talent (see this fan-made montage of some of her more varied performances), but she also has a certain repetitive nature to her characters. And this “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” nature became all the more confusing recently when trailers for Gigantic and (500) Days of Summer (the Gordon-Levitt one, which is actually her second romantic pairing with the actor) appeared online around the same time. Maybe instead of worrying about people confusing her for Katy Perry, the actress should worry more about people confusing her characters and films for each other.

Or, maybe not. Plenty of us can’t get enough of Deschanel’s quirky, free-spirited performances. In his Yes Man review, Roger Ebert noted that two critics proposed marriage to the character at the end of the film. We wouldn’t go that far, but we have crushed on the actress since All the Real Girls and haven’t yet gotten sick of her or her similar, typecast roles. In fact, to us, the problem is not that indie films too often employ the MPDG character; it’s that they don’t cast Deschanel for every such part. So, instead of wishing she’d broaden her career to include other types of characters (it didn’t work well for her with The Happening, after all), we’ve selected ten MPDG characters that she should have additionally played.
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Perhaps Karina gave adequate attention to Jean-Paul Belmondo recently with her review of the Pierrot le Fou Criterion DVD (though she mainly focused on Anna Karina), but the actor turns 75 today, and according to David Hudson at GreenCine, he’s not getting enough love on this monumental occasion. So, here’s a fun clip of him duking it out with Alain Delon in Jacques Deray’s Borsalino.

My introduction to Belmondo was with Pierrot, and that is still my favorite of his films (I would love to paint my face blue in his honor today). Yet I chose this scene from the lesser known and lesser regarded film because Belmondo and Delon equally co-represent the epitome of cool in French cinema, but I prefer Belmondo’s more rubber-faced, gangly, comical kind of cool guy. And while the fight ends in a draw, I think Belmondo gets in the better blows.

The gorgeous Criterion version of Jean Luc-Godard’s Pierrot le Fou hits stores today. Because I’m date dyslexic, I accidentally posted my review of the film and the set a week early, but you can read it here. To get in the mood, watch the film’s original trailer above.

I watched the new Criterion edition of Pierrot le Fou, a film I’ve seen many times but not once in at least five years, with Glenn Kenny and Nathan Rabin’s wildly divergent reads swirling in my head. I am not in a place in my life where I’m particularly open to romance as either a nostalgic concept or present-day reality, but this recent viewing of a film that I loved long ago left me wondering how it could be received with anything but a swoon. Pierrot le Fou can be distant and opaque, for sure, but necessarily so––it’s about a couple’s inability to overcome the opaque distance that lies between them. More than that, its blend of cinematic Cubism and stylized hyper-realism is deeply evocative of a love that’s literally out to sea. There’s no question that it works as a romance about the death of a romance. In fact, what may be up for debate, is whether it works as anything else at all.

I was nudged down this path of questioning by two elements of Criterion’s special edition package, both of which illuminate Pierrot’s relevance as an extremely thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the disintegration of Jean-Luc Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina. The first is Richard Brody’s liner notes essay, “Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens,” which meticulously breaks down how a film ostensibly based on an American crime novel called Obsession, infused with two Balzac works which Godard conflated into one, became, through a necessity of casting, an accident of timing and a desperate need for catharsis, “an angry accusation against Anna Karina, and a self-pitying keen at how she destroyed him and his work.”

Godard, l’amour, la poesie, a documentary on the package’s second disc, doesn’t fully explicate that”destruction”, but it does offer some clues as to the mindset that transposed it into film. Filmmaker Luc Lagier introduces Anna Karina as “a woman to be filmed and loved,” which is our first indication that said accusations towards Karina’s almost mystical-sounding ability to drive Godard to ruin with her love will be taken at face value.

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So this afternoon, I’m banging my head against the wall trying to finish this thing I’m writing about the Pierrot Le Fou Criterion release, and as I always do in times of trouble, I turn to YouTube for guidance/inspiration/distraction, and I find the above clip from Pierre Koralnik’s 1967 TV musical Anna. I’ve never seen the film, but I remembered reading a Filmbrain post about it a couple of years back. Anna Karina, singing songs by Serge Gainsbourg, stars as a love-lorn, bespectacled ad agency illustrator who apparently fantasizes about transforming into some kind of comic book biker vixen … ? I don’t know, but this clip made my day.

Criterion is about to release a beautiful new edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou. I’ll have my own review of the two-disc set (which includes a new interview with Anna Karina, as well as a documentary about the actress’ relationship and work with Godard) next week, but others have already begun to weigh in.

Glenn Kenny sets to work dissecting the film’s literary references, both direct and indirect. At the A.V. Club, the less-enamored Nathan Rabin blames those references in part for making the film feel “at worst…like the product of a man rapidly losing interest in anything beyond politics and ideology.” Rabin cites the famous scene embedded above, in which Samuel Fuller reduces cinema to “one word, emotion!” as “bitterly ironic” because “it would be hard to imagine a film with less visceral emotion than Pierrot Le Fou.”

I have not watched my screener copy yet, but in art school I wore out a VHS copy of Pierrot Le Fou by watching it over and over again, falling obsessively in love with a film for maybe the first time, so I’m eager to watch it again and with Rabin’s assessment in mind. Still, after reading Rabin’s piece, I went back and took a second look at Kenny’s, and noticed that Kenny has very little to say in terms of an assessment of the film’s actual quality, or how it makes him feel––which is fine, neither is necessarily the goal of this particular piece––but it seems safe to assume that one doesn’t undertake such trainspotting in regards to a film that they could take or leave. Maybe the passion Pierrot inspires is more of the obsessive reference-catching and decoding variety; maybe that’s just not Nathan Rabin’s thing. In any case, I’m anxious to unwrap the DVD to see if it’s still mine.