"garden state is the kind of near-perfect treasure of a movie that you want to hug and never let go. not only is there unmeasured poignancy in the journey large (zach braff) goes through to reclaim a hold on his life, and a transcendent love story between large and sam (natalie portman), and a wholly unpredictable plot trajectory to what occurs, and how things happen, but, technically speaking, one would never be able to guess this is a low-budget independent feature."
"garden state is the kind of love story that opens us to the mysteries of life and the fact that we cannot control anything. it is better to surrender to the big, brawling, and noisy messiness of lovers who reach out in the darkness to us and friends who go out of their way to get us gifts that speak to our hearts."
it sounded wonderful, it sounded like it would be a contender for top ten status. it sounded like it would combine the best themes of reality bites and lost in translation. in short, it sounded perfect. but as the release date crept closer, pessimism set in. what if the movie isn't good? what if the movie is cheesy and unoriginal? what if natalie portman's character is annoying? i saw ms portman on a few talk shows (and converted a few of my male peers to become natalie fans) and she represented herself well. but some of the film clips looked not so promising. what do you do at this point? you do what any parent does when faced with a possible bad seed, you lower your expectations for your child.
i lowered my expectations from a five out of five movie to a three out of five movie, hoping that it would fall neatly in the four and a half star category after viewing. christina, more pessimistic than me by a mile, decided to drop her expectations to two stars out of five. essentially she was ready for anything, even crap as bad as spiderman two. but i was still holding out hope that garden state would become a new favorite. then the bad reviews started rolling in.
"garden state is one of those movies that fails to stay with the viewer for an extended period of time. it's a forgettable film featuring a throw-away story with unmemorable characters and unremarkable performances. that's not to say it's bad, because that would be an unfair description. but it's hard to figure out why this movie caused such a stir at sundance. it's a generic story about how a 20-something loser returns to his roots, makes peace with his inner demons, and finds himself and love at the same time. tell me we've never seen that story before… ...as long as you go into garden state with reasonable expectations, its capacity to disappoint will be limited."
and although a few bad reviews aren't enough to dampen my excitement -- especially since i've decided movie reviewers are, for the most part, about as accurate as weathermen -- word of mouth can kill my buzz pretty quickly. some people who have already seen the movie have told me that it was only so-so. christina has withheld sharing her judgements and opinions until i've seen the film. isn't this all a bad sign? should i be lowering my expectations to two stars? why even watch it then? i mean, natalie portman is prime time number one but even i didn't go rushing off to see where the heart is (although tragically i saw it much later on cable).
i really want to love this movie. it's got all the ingredients to be one of my favorites: a favorite actress, relatable themes, good characters, good dialogue, memorable scenes. but most of the reviews keep on applauding zach braff for his hat trick (writing/directing/starring) rather than saying how great the movie was. it's like everybody was so impressed that the guy from scrubs could do so much, rather than impressed by the movie as a whole. which leads me to believe that i'm in for yet another summer flick that disappoints. why is it so hard to find a decent movie nowadays? should we always lower our expectations and settle for what is given to us? i can't settle for that. dammit, my heart can barely go on like this.
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