Thank you for bringing that video over. It popped up in my you tube recommendations recently and it is the reason why I gave this movie a chance. I've been avoiding it forever precisely because I thought it was the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope played straight. Plus, when I see that actress, my mind goes “it's gonna be a ~quirky indie girl character, no thanks” (which is probably not fair, given I've never actually seen her in anything).

Can't say I ended up enjoying the movie too much, but it was ok. I felt it unnecessarily dragged at parts. It also could have used more and, sometimes, better humor. The narrator was funny at times. “[He] grew up believing that he'd never truly be happy until the day he met the one. This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie The Graduate.” The scene where Tom imagined himself as the protagonist of a European art film worked fine as a gentle parody of the character and the genre. I also liked the scene when Summer and Tom gave up pretending they were enjoying the museum exhibit and want to watch a dumb-but-fun movie instead. But some of the other humorous moments fell flat for me.

The non-linear narrative was a good choice for the story being told. The characters were not as annoying as I expected them to be. Tom was selfish and downright pathetic at times but still sympathetic enough. I liked how he finally learned to focus on himself by the end of the movie. Though I can't see the ending convinced me he wasn't gonna go and do the same thing with Autumn. When I saw the finally sun scene my first thought was “oh no, there he goes again” but maybe that wasn't the intended interpretation. Definitely isn't the only possible one. Summer's quirkiness was cringey, but it was a lot more toned down than I thought it would be. I liked that she didn't seem to participate in or encourage Tom's bland-but-pretentious indie boy tendencies and misogynistic tendencies. Like when she told him she hadn't heard of the band he was talking about in the most annoying way possible. Or when she essentially told him ppl/women dress how they like and not to please him. I found her change of heart about fate and romance at the end a bit meh, but people do change their outlooks. Maybe she just really fell in love for the first time and started, permanently or temporarily, seeing life in a more romantic (and fatalistic, for some reason) light.