Version 1
"I don't like your jerk-off name. I
don't like your jerk-off face. I
don't like your jerk-off behavior, and I don't like you, jerk-off."
-Malibu Police Chief, The Big Lebowski
I've been wanting to write something like this for a
long time, but I kept telling myself "no, don't. Don't hate! Stop the
hate! Try and be nice." I've learned something very crucial: I suck at
being nice. I suck even more at acting like I'm being nice. Have you
ever heard something so stupid that you can't help but storm off and
rant at a wall in order to curb the urge to go on a homicidal rampage? Garden State did that to me.
If you hold the movie Garden State very dear to you, you
should probably stop reading right now, since I'm about to spend about
3000 words or so trashing it.
So here it
is:
I'll admit it. I watch Scrubs. A lot. It's on at least
six times a day in reruns on Comedy Central and Fox. What, you might
ask, would a person who runs a web page called "Zach Braff is a Giant
Douche" be doing watching Scrubs? It's
simple really: Scrubs is
funny. It's a 22-minute collection of scenes in which Zach Braff's
character is mentally, emotionally, and physically tortured. Braff is
good at looking like an ass.
And the rants by Dr. Cox are legendary.
My introduction to Braff's monumental douchery was
his 2004 hit Garden State, which
single-handedly did to independent film what MTV did to music. It
resulted in a trend of quirky characters and incredibly transparent and
dumbed-down messages. Never had I seen a film so deliberately packaged
for the ADD-afflicted teenagers of America, even though Braff himself
said that it was a "a big, life-affirming, state-of-the-union address
for twentysomethings." Twentysomethings my ass. When I meet a
twentysomething that likes Garden
State, I'll eat my hat. (It's a black knit cap, by the way,
which I claimed I would eat if Barack Obama won the presidency. I lack
the faith in my country needed to think that we could be that
progressive.)
Why is it that Garden
State is made, but it's entirely likely that Hobo With a Shotgun will never
exist beyond a 2-minute trailer?
The only people I meet that like this movie are
teenagers who feel smart because they were able to
pay attention long enough to "get it." It's a wonderful feeling to "get
it," and I only hope that some of these people will "get it" from a
"toilet seat" and lose their ability to reproduce. Seriously, just
because teenagers are the target demographic doesn't mean that
they know anything. In fact, there are numerous examples to the
contrary.
Anyone see that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry
David won't have sex with the woman because she's a republican? I used
to refuse to date girls who liked Garden
State, until I realized what an insane cultural phenomenon it
was (see: desperate) and threw the rule away. I realized that I can't
afford to have such high standards. It's like singling out women who
didn't like Beaches twenty
years ago. It was possible to find them, but you'd have to pay
attention to the release cycles of several women's prisons to do it.
Garden State has
all the elements of a chick flick; the sappy ending, the two feminine
lead characters, the improbable love story...
But then Writer/Director/smug bastard Zach Braff
throws more into the mix. He puts stupid little details into scenes,
creating a movie that's like something the Zucker Brothers would do if
they were making crappy melodrama. Look! The room's full of hamster
cages! Oh, shucks, that's wacky! Isn't he clever? No, dipshits, he's
just really good at getting the attention of people with attention
deficit disorder. I'll
never understand the "comedy" of Garden State, just as I'm sure that
there are people who will never understand the comedy of Meet the Feebles.
Apparently, unrealistic, shallow characters that
have some single
weird
trait to them are also very funny. Like that guy who's obsessed with
pyramid schemes. What about the black brother of Natalie Portman who's
upset because somebody pissed on his shitty console system? Or that guy
who works in a Mideval-themed restaurant and gets to bring his armor
around with him? Or that dude who got rich by inventing silent velcro?
Or any other fucking stupid, unfunny, random character that appears for
absolutely no reason? You know, like that guy who shows up and
contributes nothing to the story? Or that other guy who has no effect
on the outcome of the movie whatsoever?
Random can be funny, but funny is not always random.
Monty Python is funny and random, but they actually take an absurd
situation and go somewhere with it. This
movie just throws a bunch of unbelievable assholes in the mix and
expects uproarious laughter from the audience. I must concede, however,
that this was successful, since there are so many who think that this
movie has changed their lives.
That doesn't mean it's good, that meants it's popular - anyone remember
pogs? Little pieces of cardboard? They were popular, too. Vanilla Ice?
Once popular. The hair styles of the 80's? Ugly, and now extinct. That
gives me hope. Maybe, just maybe, ten years from now, I can
have a conversation such as this one:
Me: Hey, you remember "Garden
State?"
Them: Yeah. Oh, god. I remember
that movie. I used to love that so much.
Me: Yeah?
Them: Yeah, who would have thought
that I would regret anything I did
or liked as a teenager?
Moving on:
Natalie Portman is hot. You would never notice from Garden State because all you see
is her mouth. She never shuts the fuck up. I swear, you can actually
see the muscles on her jaw expanding and becoming stronger with each
painful line. When you don't see her mouth, she's doing a "random act
of originality," which looks a lot like an epileptic seizure, and guess
what, she has epilepsy! Thank god that if she were to have a seizure,
you'd never know because it's not at all out of place to see her
flailing her arms and legs like a fucking spastic. I can't stress
enough how annoying her character is and how no one could possibly put
up with that unless they were on an entire galaxy worth of
anti-depressants.
What luck! Zach Braff's character in the movie is on
an entire
galaxy worth of anti-depressants. He accidentally crippled his mother
and was sent to boarding school, then he became an actor and had one
role in a TV movie as a retarded football player. He returned to his
home (New Jersey, like I didn't have enough to hate about that state)
when his mother died.
See the paragraph right above this one? It takes
ninety minutes for all of this to come out in the movie. That's right;
ninety minutes of exposition. That's great if it's an episode of Columbo. Even then, Columbo
probably would have figured it out within the first ten minutes.
Braff's steady
hand as a screenwriter and director keep
this festival of shit going for 101 minutes. That's 101 minutes of my
life that I will never get back. I could have been playing Shadow
Warrior, god damn it, but instead I was watching Garden State. Braff sets up entire
scenes around telling little snippets of the story to the audience. The
one that's the most obvious is the abysmal hamster funeral. There is a
scene in the movie in which a funeral is held for a hamster. Natalie
Portman gives the service. This is where Braff's character reveals that
he's back home for his mother's funeral. Yes, it's really touching, in
the same way that being skull fucked is a love tap.
And the scene where he reveals how his mother died?
In the very same tub that the death took place in, occupied by Braff
and Portman, both clothed? While the casual observer may think this to
be morbid, remember, when they do it, it's quirky and fun. Like in The Addams Family.
It's worth noting that Braff's face is on screen way
more than necessary, even for the star of the film. At least 80% of the
screen time is allocated so that Braff can stand in front of the
camera. Whoopi Goldberg did a one-woman show for HBO and was on camera
less.
So what happens in Garden State for the 11 minutes
after exposition? Braff falls in love, stays for the girl, gets off the
medication, and faces his father. There's shit before that about him
receiving a trinket of his mother's from a guy who lives in a boat in
the middle of a junkyard overlooking an abyssal trench, which Braff and
co. (including Peter Sarsgaard, who has the ability to act his way out
of an internment camp, but got caught up in this shitstorm) scream into
an abyss while wearing hefty bags over themselves as raincoats.
Interesting
image? Yes. Does is have any real substance? No. But the kids love it.
"Screaming into the abyss" is another one of those
lovely, hokey, hollow metaphors that Braff throws in. Yes, Zach, I get
it, I
just don't want it.
Let's get down to the heart of the matter: Zach
Braff is a shitty, shitty writer. I don't care how many episodes of Scrubs he wrote, there is no
reason that Garden State should even be considered anything more than a
mess of forced quirkiness. For most of the movie, the story goes from
here to there with not even a hint of substance, but then the audience
is expected to shed a tear at the last ten minutes when the two fall in
love or when Largeman confronts his father. I had zero emotional
investment, unlike people who are easily swayed from place to place
(see: gullible teenagers) and the only thing that could have brought me
to tears at that moment would have been a swift kick to the nuts.
For a more moving scene, watch the end of George A.
Romero's Day of the Dead, where
Joe Pilato gets torn in half by a horde of zombies, and while they
feast on his intestines (a running motif in any of Romero's zombie
movies) he screams "choke on 'em!" It won't make you cry, but something
will move inside of you (likely the last meal you ate.)
The father is played by Ian Holm, who you might
remember from the Lord of the Rings movies.
I remember him from Alien. I
wish he'd mirrored that
performance, grabbed Braff, beat the shit
out
of him, and tried to cut off his air supply, only to get beaten to a
literal pulp by Yaphet Kotto, who discovers that, holy shit, he's a goddamn robot. Largeman's dad is a
goddamn robot!
Then, everyone would meet in the dining room
where they'd reconnect Ian Holm and ask him how to kill that bitch
Natalie Portman. You can't... you
still don't undestand what you're dealing with, do you? Perfect
organism. It's structural perfection is only matched by it's inability
to stop making noise. I admire her purity - a survivor. Unclouded by
conscience, remorse, or delusions of sanity.
I
think it could work. Especially since Zach Braff is far less masculine
than Sigourney Weaver.
Perhaps I'm not charmed by Garden State because I
just don't appreciate "indie rock." Indie, roughly translated, means
punk without attitude; badly played, shallow garbage. But then again,
I'm a film student, I know nothing about music, except what I like.
What I like, incidentally, happens to be classic rock. You know, when
your parents decided to listen to rock to rebel against their parents,
sort of how it seems that kids today litsen to rap and really shitty
rock to rebel against their parents. Anyone who tells me that any band
today can measure up to The Who or Frank Zappa gets a complimentary
kick to the throat for being wrong.
But Indie Rock is popular. That's why Braff infused
every bit of the movie with it. "Indie" no longer means "independent,"
but has become a new word for "cool." Hoopdidamndoo. The soundtrack to
this movie is like the batter on a corn dog, except the fatty substance
surrounds a carnie turd rather than a tube of unidentifiable meat.
Fucking soft acoustic pseudo-emo fuck-stickery.
So what if the soundtrack was tailor made for
stupid, gullible teenagers (99% of them), that was what the biz guys
and executives did in order to draw in the crowd! Wait? What's that? Braff
did that, too? My bad, it turns out that Braff did it himself to
sucker in stupid kids. I mean, all of these
kids can definately relate to having caused their mother's paralasis,
left home, gone to boarding school, getting doped up on prescription
pills, becoming a starving actor in Hollywood, coming home, finding
their (intolerable) soulmate, and getting over mom's death. Right?
Well,
maybe the pills.
Popular Music is used in the movie to create the
mood. This is a fucking shitty tactic. Braff takes indie
music and makes the mood of entire scenes ride on it. Music is to be
used in order to complement the scene's tone, not make it. If the
director can't create a tone with setting, actors, or dialogue, he's
fucking incompetent.
Braff's grasp of how people talk to each other is evident
in the movie. Here's the Zach Braff school of dialogue: Lesson 1:
People actually talk nothing like real people do. I can't possibly
explain how bad the dialogue in Garden
State gets, but I can try.
Here are some famous lines from movies. See if you can tell which one
of them came from Garden State and which I would utter if I were
really blazed.
a.
"Nobody fucks with the Jesus."
b. "I
believe in America. America has made my
fortune. And I raised my
daughter in the American fashion. I gave her freedom, but I taught her
never to dishonor her family. She found a boyfriend; not an Italian.
She went to the movies with him; she stayed out late. I didn't protest.
Two months ago, he took her for a
drive, with another boyfriend. They
made her drink whiskey. And then they tried to take advantage of her.
She resisted. She kept her honor. So they beat her, like an animal.
When I went to the hospital, her nose was a'broken. Her jaw was
a'shattered, held together by wire. She couldn't even weep because of
the pain. But I wept. Why did I weep? She was the light of my life
beautiful girl. Now she will never be beautiful again. I went to the
police, like a good American. These two boys were
brought to trial. The
judge sentenced them to three years in prison - suspended sentence.
Suspended sentence! They went free
that very day! I stood in the
courtroom like a fool. And those two bastards, they smiled at me. Then
I said to my wife, for justice, we must go to Don Corleone"
c. "At
the time when America was hardly explored,
one of those early
French trappers went west from Montreal. He was the first white man to
set eyes on Niagra falls. When he returned,
he told of waterfalls more
vast and immense than people had ever dreamed of. No one believed him.
They thought he was a madman or a
liar. They asked him "What is your proof?" He answered "My proof is...
I've seen them."
d. "You'll see when
you move out it just sort of happens one day one day
and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get
homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean
it's like this rite of
passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a
new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the
family
you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe
that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same
imaginary place."
Now, tell me which one of these things sounds like me after
getting really really high. If you picked B or C, fuck you. Seriously.
Fuck you.
If you picked A or D, good job. I would, if high, claim that The Jesus
is not to be fucked with. But that's standard. Letter D is a quote from
Garden State, but you may not
be able to discern it from a stoner rant because of it's liberal uses
of "like" and "you know." The entire message of the movie is like this.
"It's awesome to, like, feel life,
you know." The post script on this statement, I would imagine, is
something along the lines of "Count Chocula is the shit, man!"
Among the nonsensical bullshit of that
quote, there is one phrase that encapsulates everything. "Maybe
that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same
imaginary place." After this quote, Zach Braff clicks together his ruby
red slippers and goes back home to Kansas. Or, in this case, New
Jersey, which is like Kansas clogged with shit.
It means jack shit in this
day and age. It is a speech
so cliché, so sterile,
so inoffensive, so lacking in substance and so easy to digest that it
passes through the public's system like bottled water. And if
it's marketed as
an art film, kids think they're smart because they get it. It's like a
politician
preaching change: they say that things need to change, they use a lot
of flowery language to say it, but they're still saying the same
fucking thing, just leaving out the important "how" or "why" that could
elevate it to a thought provoking argument.
This is not what Braff wants to do. Thought provoking arguments or
statements are hard to digest. Thinking is too hard for the audience
he's aiming for. This attitude is not one of an independent filmmaker,
since easily processed bullshit is in great demand in Hollywood.
Other gems:
"And I'm not gonna take those drugs anymore,
because they have left me
completely fucking numb. I have felt so fucking numb to everything I
have experienced in my life, OK? And for that... for that I'm here to
forgive you. You've always said that all you wanted was for us to have
whatever it is we wanted, right? Well, maybe, what Mom wanted more then
anything is for it to all be over, and for me, what I want more then
anything in the world, is for it to be OK with you for me to feel
something again, even if it's pain." - followed by - "This is my
life, Dad, this is it. I spent 26 years waiting for
something else to start, so, no, I don't think it's too much to take
on, because it's everything there is. I see now it's all of it. You and
I are gonna be OK, you know that, right? We may not be as happy as you
always dreamed we would be, but for the first time let's just allow
ourselves to be whatever it is we are and that will be better. OK? I
think that will be better.
"
-Ok? Ok? They left me numb! They left me
numb! The audience didn't already know that from the first minute or so
of the movie with the plane crash dream or the completely white room or
the driving away with a gas pump still in the car. This is the extent
of Braff's subtlety as a writer. But the kids get it because they're
beaten half to death with the whiny, badly worded point. And that's
what's important.
"OK, so... so...
sometimes I lie. I mean, I'm weird, man. About random
stuff too, I don't even know why I do it. It's like... it's like a
tick, I mean sometimes I hear myself say something and think, Wow, that
wasn't even remotely true."
-Ok? Ok? Man, like, I mean, remotely. Whoa.
Sam:
You don't realize, this is good, this doesn't happen often in
your
life. We can work this stuff out. I want to help you, you know? We need
each other...
Andrew Largeman:
This isn't a conversation about this being over, it's, it's... I'm not,
like, putting a period at the end of this, you know, I'm putting, like,
an ellipsis on it, cause I'm- I'm- I'm worried that if I don't figure
myself out, if I don't go like land on my own two feet, then I'm just
gonna to mess this whole thing up, and this is too important. I gotta
go... you changed my life in four days. This is the beginning of
something really big. But right now, I gotta go.
-Wasn't there a time when excessive expository
dialogue was viewed as the mark of a shitty writer? Oh, yeah, that was
when the target demographic wasn't a large group of gullible, infantile
shitheads. Yeah, I'm talking to you.
Maybe I just don't get it. I don't miss imaginary places. I can visit
imaginary places whenever I want to, right? Because they're in my head?
Can you visit a place that
doesn't exist? Can an entire family have the same idea of a place that
they miss that doesn't exist? If you move away from home and get
homesick, does that automatically make the house you grew up in
nonexistent? I left home for college, and yes, I occasionally get
homesick, but does this mean that when I return back to my home town,
my house won't be there anymore?
So I have to create a new idea of home for myself, for the family I
start, for my kids, etc. And this is like, a cycle or something? Like,
a cycle of life? Parents, kids, grandkids? Get the fuck out of here! I
hear that there's a circle of life, you know, one that, like, moves us
all, through despair and hope. Now, give me another toke, you crazy
motherfucker!
As if the most common and understandable theme in motion pictures, art,
literature, radio programs, religious pamphlets, war propaganda, porno
mags, and cookbooks wasn't the cycle of life. No, seriously, are you fucking kidding me?
Anyone else remember when independent film wasn't aimed at the lowest
common denominator?
So fine, Garden State is one
long rotten shit fest designed to make money by taking advantage of the
reliable market of stupid kids. I never said Braff was stupid. He is,
in fact, quite smart in the same way that Karl Rove is smart. He may
not know exactly what people want to see, but he knows how to get them
to want what he wants them to see. He may be a Subgenius too,
following J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' undying quote - "You'll pay to know what
you really think."
Final Thoughts:
Anyone feel used yet?
And no, I'm not seeing The Last
Kiss.
And, before anyone asks, yes, I am better than you.
No, I don't care how much it changed your life.
No, I don't care how sweet or touching you think it is.
No, I don't care what critics say.
No, I don't care.
Really, I don't. Stop talking about it. Any other complaints can be
sent via the e-mail link below. Just to warn you, the words "dick,"
"asshole," "bitch," and "you just don't get it" set off the spam
filter.
-Reverend Pinko J. Jones
people know that this counter gag was stolen from Maddox.
