Zoe Kazan plays the perfect woman in Ruby Sparks and is the latest in a line of beautiful ciphers who bewitch men onscreen. From Natalie Portman to Zooey Deschanel, see more of film’s greatest indie dream girls.
In Elf, Deschanel played Jovie, a shopgirl who meets and falls in love with Will Ferrell's Buddy while working during the holiday season. While in All the Real Girls, Paul Schneider's character falls for his best friend's sister, played by Deschanel, an aloof girl home from boarding school.
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Zoe Kazan plays the title character in this year’s Ruby Sparks, a struggling novelist’s “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” come to life. As writer Calvin Weir-Fields (played by Kazan’s real-life boyfriend, Paul Dano) suffers from writer’s block, he crafts a story about his perfect woman—and is flabbergasted and infatuated when the girl turns into a living, breathing person.
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As Zach Braff’s seemingly settled Michael begins to feel suffocated by his live-in girlfriend in 2006’s The Last Kiss, he has a chance encounter with Kim, a carefree, flirty, and charismatic college student (played by Rachel Bilson), who shakes up his life and tears his relationship apart.
In 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Mila Kunis plays Rachel, the warm, free-spirited concierge at a hotel in Hawaii who inspires Peter, a jilted, heartbroken composer (Jason Segel) to move on with his life post-breakup and finally produce the Dracula puppet musical of his dreams.
Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation features Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, a young woman who finds herself bored in Tokyo with her photographer husband until Bill Murray's washed-up older actor falls for her.
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The prototype of this elusive creature is arguably Audrey Hepburn's charming, flighty, and troubled Holly Golightly, in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's.
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One of the best examples of the genre is Natalie Portman's Sam from the 2004 movie Garden State; she is saved only by Zach Braff and the music of The Shins. And Portman's Marty in 1996's Beautiful Girls was the 13-year-old neighbor of Willie (Timothy Hutton), who becomes the object of his desire.
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In 1999's American Beauty, Mena Suvari played Angela Hayes, the teenage temptress with whom her best friend's dad (Kevin Spacey) develops an obsession.
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Dunst has made a career out of playing this ethereal character. Some of her most memorable examples: the ingenue Mary, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who has an affair with the married doctor who does memory-erasing procedures; the bewitching teenage Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides; and the flight attendant Claire Coburn in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown.
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Another Cameron Crowe film, Almost Famous, featured Kate Hudson as the hippie seductress-slash-groupie Penny Lane.
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In 1972's Butterflies Are Free, Hudson's mother, Goldie Hawn, played a 19-year-old woman who has an uncommitted relationship with her blind next-door neighbor.
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