quote:But the fact that so many of you are relating to the themes and subject matter is so comforting to me, because for many years when I was feeling all these feelings, I felt incredibly alone; I couldn't find many people who were "in it"... going through the mental puberty that your twenties can be. - (Or any time of your life that involves feeling long overdue for the next chapter of your life to begin.)
When I wrote Garden State, I was completely depressed, waiting tables and lonesome as I've ever been in my life. The script was a way for me to articulate what I was feeling; alone, isolated, "a dime a dozen" and homesick for a place that didn't even exist.
"Mental puberty that your twenties can be." Zach Braff is my hero.
Posts: 2689 | Registered: Apr 2000
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Katie, you might actually be surprised at Portman in this film. She's come leaps and bounds since Attack of the Clones.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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I'm feeling too lazy to actually compose new words for this film, so I'll just cut and paste my review (for those of you who don't follow them). I gave it 3 out of 4 stars.
quote:It's obvious when you watch Garden State that it's Zach Braff's first film--and by that I mean the first film that he's written and directed. There are a lot of things wrong with it, from sloppy cuts to dialogue that becomes a little pedantic at times. But behind these beginner mistakes is a story that is incredibly personal and honest. Garden State is a movie about growing up, about the lost feelings that people get in their mid-twenties after their childhoods have ended but their adult lives have not yet begun. Braff wrote this movie straight from the heart, and so even though it wasn't perfect, there was a lot that really resonated with me. Braff, himself was only so-so for me as the main character--although my wife thought he was very good. The really interesting performances for me were Peter Sarsgaard and Natalie Portman. Sarsgaard has this sort of Malkovichian quality to his voice that has been hit-or-miss for me in previous roles, but he was so natural in this role that it makes you forget that he's even acting. His character, an old friend of Braff's, is wonderfully complex, at once a complete scoundrel and a caring friend. As for Portman, I think that at some point between Attack of the Clones and Cold Mountain she must have taken acting lessons. Gone are the one-dimensional, wooden performances that have haunted every film she did after Beautiful Girls. In their place is an actress who I intend to keep my eye on.
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I just wanted to add to this thread that I saw it and really liked it, and thought it was really good.
What I liked about this film was what most of the critics say, that it is a 'generational' film, and so anyone between the ages of sixteen, seventeenish and thirty-five (?) will find much of the situations almost familiar and very believable. This film had elements of me in it, and that is something I rarely expect when I go to the cinema. If it wasn't me, it was someone I knew, or someone I could easily imagine knowing.
I also like that it wasn't overwhelmingly emotional. It was never sad enough to cry, and it was never very happy. It just was. There were bits where I laughed (but not to hard), and bits where I was sad (but no tears), but it was a film which actually takes place more in your mind than on the screen. When you watch it, it reminds you of something that happened, or somebody you know. Or it might make you think of the characters on the screen as people you could quite easily replace. Or you might go so far as to continue bits of the script yourself. Or look at the way someone is sitting, or working, or standing, and think, not about how the plot of the movie is unfolding but about little details that make you say "That's it, that's right."
You should see this movie, even if you're over thirty-five.
(Sorry about that age; I had to pick some cutoff point, just pretend you're under thirty-five. No one here is really over thirty-five anyway, in the way it counts)
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I've now seen it twice, and loves it just as much, if not more, the second time around. Go. See it. Now.
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Was she the widow with the baby? It's been a while, and that movie basically vanished for me almost as soon as I saw it
As for Garden State, I really liked it. The "beginner mistakes", as saxon termed them, did annoy me, but as usual, I skipped by them to see what else was there, and what was there blew me away.
Mostly, it just amazes me to see a Hollywood actor capable of something like this. I kept gawking, saying, "This guy is the star of a SITCOM?" I guess I've gotten jaded or something.
One thing I really liked — the way Braff handled scenes about drug use and pronography. It's depicted as something that people DO, but there is an uncomfortable edge to it that makes you realize that the hero doesn't want to be there, and only his apathy or his desire for company is making him stay.
But gone are the happy-go-lucky consequenceless drug scenes, where everyone is only a doobie away from nirvana. Braff showed the darkness of it without going over the top. I haven't seen enough of that, and now I really want to see more.
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Yep. She surprised the heck out of me in that movie, as the last one I'd seen her in was Attack of the Clones.
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No one is allowed to act in Attack of the Clones. I think George Lucas put that in the contract he made his non-actors sign.
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quote:What Garden State's really about is how short life is. And how we get caught up in so many entanglements and insecurities and worries and obsessions and trivial arguments while life races right by us shaking it's head at how seriously we take ourselves.
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I figured out why, to me, Garden State looked 'old'.
Zach Braff is 29. He was born in 1975. Assuming he first used the internet it 1998, he was 23 when he was first introduced. However much he uses it now, it hasn't been a significant part of his growing up, like it has for me. I was 12 in 1998, and so my entire teenage years have been consumed by the growth and spread of fast and varied knowledge, a broad sense of the world and an elimination of the 'alone in my small town' feeling.
In Garden State the computer, a staple part of my house, my world, my childhood, is conspicuously absent.
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If the idea that Garden State is trying to convey is "life is short," Teshi, I'm not surprised the computer is not shown. Do you how many hours I waste on this thing??
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quote: I've been using the internet since at LEAST 1994, and probably a little earlier than that, too.
I'd say that you were fairly unusual, in that respect.
I'm not bashing Zach Braff for deliberately or whatever missing out computers, and I'm not questioning his choice to leave them out. As I said above, I loved the movie and thought he did an amazing job. I'm saying that, to me, probably because I am ten years younger, and effectively live in a different era with regards to computers in my childhood/youth, his world that he creates looks not quite real, and one way to describe this for me, being young, is 'old'. To Zach Braff's age group, it looks perfectly real, to me, thinking about it fourty-eight hours later, it looks like he... forgot computers.
I don't know how to explain it any better than that. Obviously, computers have no place in the plot, and there's no need in any movie to deliberately stick a computer in to make it up to date, but the complete abscence (in the neurologists office, his home, other people's homes), as I said, is conspicuous.
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I don't think being a 22-year-old who remembers dabbling with the internet in 1994 (albiet through a text-only browser interface) fits the criterion for being unusual.
However, I'm definitely unusual in several other categories, so the title still fits. Just not in the way you intended Posts: 2689 | Registered: Apr 2000
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I'm about the same as Taalcon. I'm 24. I probably started using computers(at least at home) and the internet around the age of 14. 1993 or so. So while computers were a large part of my later teen years, they were pretty insignificant to my childhood.
And besides all that, they only played an important role in my life at home, by myself. They never played a part in my social life. When I hung out with friends or went places computers were a non entity. The movie portrays this part of life. A more social aspect. Meeting people. Doing things. That's why computers are absent.
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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I'm afraid I can't back myself up any more. I'm terrible at arguing. As soon as someone presents their opinion I can see that both sides have a good case; for instance, I didn't consider that Zach Braff may have intentionally left computers out.
Anyway, in the grand scale of things, whether computers play a significant part in a movie or not is very very small. Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Before about 1994, the Internet was non-mainstream (offbeat? unknown? what's the antonym I'm looking for?) enough that rather a lot of computer geeks still used BBSs instead, whether big and commercial--like Compuserve, Prodigy, Delphi or AOL--or small and local.
I think Teshi's viewpoint on the matter is pretty intriguing. I think about the place of computers in culture a lot, and it has always struck me as interesting how my computer knowledge was considered nerdy when I was younger, but my 14-year-old brother-in-law uses computers all the time and is still considered quite cool. What I wonder is whether Teshi is actually representative of her generation--that is, would the absence of computers stand out so strongly to all or most teens these days?
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When I had AOL back in the day, I played Federation, a text based space game, which was cool. There was also a similar game that was a mystery/detective sort of thing, anyone remember the name?
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The absence of a computer would stand out to me, and I'm 32.6 or so. I've always had computers in the house, from the bad old days of TRS-80s with 4k of RAM and a tape drive, to the Commodore 64, to the Amiga, to a series of IBM compatibles. I first got online in '94.
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I think it's somewhat refreshing to see a life in which computers remain a trivial part. God knows I'd like to have a life. Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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For a reference, I'm eighteen. My family first bought a computer when I was 7, or so. Ever since then, directly or indirectly, the computer(s) have been a big part of the house hold. Not long enough to be as much as, say, someone who has always had a computer in the house, but long enough that they have been significant.
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I'm 29, and have been on the 'Net since 1991. I was on BBSes before that, but it took college to introduce me to USENET and the Cleveland FreeNet.
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I liked it a lot -- the generational aspect is really its strength, along with the great acting.
One big thing that bugged me though = the characters of everyone over 30. All the parents are caricatures -- they're all shallow/annoying/unthinking people who don't get to be characters in their own right.
(There's a couple small exceptions to this -- the psychiatrist Braff goes to gives him good advice, and the geology guy in the ark looks like he's over 30. But otherwise, everyone over 30 is shown as annoying.)
It would've been a better film if Braff had had the parents be more realistic. Or if the young characters had still regarded their parents as idiots, but we got to see some things from the parents' point of view.
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If you have the DVD, watch some of the deleted scenes. One or two of them may be the best parts of the movie.
Posts: 1735 | Registered: Oct 2004
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I alternated between watching this movie and playing game boy advance. But considering my attention span, that's pretty good. I liked it, partly because I like Zach Braff, but also because it was a well put together movie with a solid feel to it. The music also rocked. I'm a huge Frou Frou fan.
In fact, hearing Let Go in the trailers was part of the reason I even wanted to watch this movie. AHEH. (shrug) And I'm not even usually a music fan.
I can't really identify quite yet with the ennui of being that age, but soon, soon.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Keep in mind that this way about 20 somethings, and quite often they feel like everyone oever the age of 30 or so IS annoying, or at least they are when a person is feeling out of sorts like he was in this movie.
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