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Garden State
Director: Zach Braff
Screenplay: Zach Braff
Starrings: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Ian Holm, Peter Sarsgaard
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Release Date: July 28, 2004 (US)
May 25, 2005 (Germany)
My Rating: 10/10
favourite quotes:
-“I know it hurts. That’s life. If nothing else, It’s life. It’s real, and sometimes it fuckin’ hurts, but it’s sort of all we have.”
-“If you can’t laugh at yourself, life’s gonna seem a whole lot longer than you like.”
-“You gotta hear this one song, it’ll change your life I swear”
A film I could watch over and over again. Great story, great characters, great actors, great dialogues, great soundtrack. Basically it’s a boy meets girl story, but not in a cheesy kind of way.
After almost ten years, Andrew, a moderately successful actor who’s been on antidepressants since his youth, returns to his New Jersey hometown, to attend his mother’s funeral. He is emotional dead, until he meets Sam in a waiting room of a doctor’s office. Sam, a notorious liar, emotional, loveable and obsessed of being unique, recognizes him from a film in which he played a mentally retarded quarterback, and is kind of surprised that he is in fact not mentally retarded. In the same scene he asks her, what she is hearing, pointing at her headphones, and she tells him: “You gotta hear this one song. It’ll change your life I swear” (“New Slang” by The Shins). That’s the point, I just wanna give her a hug. Because of the Shins. Because of the song. And because it is Natalie Portman. She is just so adorable and huggable in that movie. Anyway, after the discontinuation of the antidepressants and with Sam’s help, he’s finally coming back to life.
Zack Braff truely has created a small masterpiece that is full of creativity and originality. It’s absolutely perfect. A proof that it doesn’t need special effects to create an unforgettable film experience
