What on earth is wrong with these reviewers?

Rating: 1/10 (24 October 2004)

There is a very strange fascination with this movie that I really don't understand, and in fact, I cannot even comprehend it so I won't even try. But somehow, the general consensus on this movie has been positive, which is bewildering to me because I don't think I've ever seen such a pretentious, worthless, work of a wannabe auteur gain such praise.
Zach Braff is a bad student moviemaker. It is a fact because he shares the exact same characteristics as other bad student moviemakers. So much so that I expected him to possess one of the NYU film school's certifications to make music videos. He aimed "Garden State" at people my age and believed that he could explain our twenty-something angst with his laundry list of blatant hypocrisies.
He blames prescription drugs, he blames his parents, he blames the broken latch on a dishwasher. Braff spends so much time analyzing what's wrong with life and family that he doesn't recognize that he depends on those same things to survive. The fact is, there isn't anything really wrong with his life. He's only trying to make us feel like there's something wrong with our lives, that maybe we're the ones that have spent most of our years in a drug-induced haze. Braff is wrong, and it demonstrates how bad moviemakers are the ones preaching an agenda rather than portraying honest characters.
And that's not to say his preaching is any good either. His scenes of calmly experiencing a plane crash, the sterile bedroom, and blending in against a wall pattern are obvious suggestions of his mental state, and so obvious that it takes away from the narrative of the movie. He spends all his time feeling sorry for himself and hanging-out with his shadow puppet friends, who seem so incapable of expressing any realistic emotions that they have to exhibit an array of absurdities in order to pretend to be plausible human beings.
"Garden State" is a demonstration of a young moviemaker trying to make an important statement by contriving meaning out of something that was a bad idea to begin with. Ian Holm plays an emotionless father in this movie, and I somehow believe that he was not acting in his role. I believe he was so bored by the quack pseudo-intelligence behind the script that he felt it unnecessary to put a mature adult in his scenes.
After all, does anyone on this planet know what the "infinite abyss" is? Does even Zach Braff know what the "infinite abyss" is, or is it just another spit bubble that looks like something that has substance but is really just the foaming hot air coming out of his mouth? One thing I do admire about Braff. He was able to convince so many people that he actually knows what he's talking about.
Out of the 1200 movies I've seen, this is one of the truly awful ones that scrapes the bottom with "Autumn in New York," "40 Days and 40 Nights," and Demi Moore's "The Scarlet Letter." This is one of those movies that I paid to see and felt so cheated by the end, that I snuck into another movie. Happily, that movie was "Napoleon Dynamite," which was like a pleasant breeze that cleared the stink that "Garden State" left in its wake.
People who like this movie need to grow up.