Worst film of the summer

Rating: 1/10 (4 September 2004)

This is the first film I have walked out of in a decade. To call it pretentious is to call War and Peace a book. "Garden State" is a model of pretentious, maudlin, hackneyed screen writing and some of the most over-wrought angsty fake acting ever thrown up on the silver screen.
Zach Braff drops his numbing sledge-hammer points about how out-of-place he is. From the opening scene of him stiff in bed and his medicine cabinet of prescription mood-improvers the audience is left gagging. Likewise the restaurant scene at the opening of the movie is a cowardly and careless satire of the LA clientele- is it so unusual for a patron to ask for bread? Does braff know that bread actually exists in Vietnam and is common there? or does he want to show off that he is culturally sensitive (cf. zack's cheeky sobriquet "tim" for the African brother of sam)? poor little larch, like the real like braff, is an actor who can't fit in with normal folks- what a trial!
hold onto anything delicate because braff's clumsy exposition will shatter all in its path, including the gravity he so desperately injects into the film. has there ever been a more obvious and lazy introduction of a song than portman's dumping of her headphones onto larch's noggin at the hospital?
the most disappointing thing about garden state is how many saps were taken in by its fake pathos. lost in translation kicks its ass into the stratosphere