Unlike the stuff I see at the cinema, the DVDs I write about are picked totally arbitrarily.<\/B><\/p>\n
I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand my peers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 attraction to Garden State<\/I>. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get me wrong, I like it; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just that I had always assumed I held the monopoly on depressed, directionless people with emotional numbness that they are desperate to be rid of regardless of the pain that it inflicts upon them.
\n
\nAndrew \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Large\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Largeman (Zach Braff) receives a call from his father to say that his mother has died. Large makes his way back to New Jersey for the first time in nine years. He reconnects with his old friend, Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), and meets a new one: Sam (Natalie Portman), a girl who can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop with the talking.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve had problems in recent times with emotionless protagonists, but Braff\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Large is not such a problematic character; he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to be as he is and he tries to affect a change. By meeting Sam, Large sets into motion one of those only-in-the-movies instant love scenarios. Mark, by contrast, simply seems as if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s along for the ride.<\/p>\n
The thing about Large is that, while his circumstances are fairly specific, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s far from alone. He goes to a party \u00e2\u20ac\u201c one of those which either only exist in America and American movies, or that I simply don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get invited to \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and everyone is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153medicating\u00e2\u20ac\u009d themselves: on one side, people are smoking a bong, on the other they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing pills and snorting cocaine. This situation is an escape from reality, but reality is not the same for them as it is for Large.
\nAt 26, maybe he should be feeling something. At 26, maybe these people should have outgrown these sorts of parties. Youth, who are older than me, today: I just don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know.<\/p>\n
While Garden State<\/I> is a movie with which I thought I could identify, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not without its problems. Braff\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s script has perpetuated one of the greatest evils plaguing the youth of today: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153random\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Generally this word is used in this script in the most appropriate fashion, but it is used too often.
\nI don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if this is a phenomenon unique to Australia, but random now means nothing<\/i>. Anything even slightly abnormal came to be labelled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153random\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. In our educational institutions, students are plagued by this as their favourite adjective. The one time that I used it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I believe in a self-introduction \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it was all I could do not to jump out of the window and disappear forever.
\nIf you have done this, Zach Braff \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and you haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, because I heard strangers who turn up at parties called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153randoms\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a good year before this movie was released \u00e2\u20ac\u201c then you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a lot to answer for.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also strange to hear Zach Braff swearing all over the shop, because he comes from Teevee Land, where people can say essentially anything except four letter words. This is not much of a problem in the scheme of the movie but is worth noting nonetheless.<\/p>\n
The fact that Garden State<\/I> doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t try to offer any answers for its characters\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 problems, save to say that they must be confronted, is perhaps its greatest strength. Braff has not taken an easy way out and has created a much more satisfying movie than one with a conclusion more trite may have offered (this one is too \u00e2\u20ac\u0153chick flick\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for some, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not really a compromise).<\/p>\n
At times it feels like a film\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s film, as Braff appears to have subjected his colour timer to a series of strange filtration tests. Certainly it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always interesting to watch, even beyond the common image of Large in a wallpaper shirt. I can understand perfectly why I like it, even with its weird detours along the lines of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Everyone who just saw titties, put your hand up\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and especially<\/I> the quest of Sam\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s adoptive brother to discover who \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pissed on [his] GameCube\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a movie that I can recommend to everyone, because I no longer understand the zeitgeist. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a very specific film, and sometimes the speeches given are too pseudo profound, but maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll speak to something in you, too. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unlike the stuff I see at the cinema, the DVDs I write about are picked totally arbitrarily. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand my peers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 attraction to Garden State. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get me wrong, I like it; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just that I had always assumed I held the monopoly on depressed, directionless people with emotional numbness that they are desperate to be rid of regardless of the pain that it inflicts upon them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-23","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}