Shouting At Each Other: Garden State

Monday, August 09, 2004

Has anyone else seen Garden State? Here is a movie with definite flaws, but I think I still really liked it.

Cameron said...: Natalie Portman's in that one, yeah? I heard something about it on NPR the other day. Speaking of movies, I watched Audition the other day... Oh, shit.; 8:38 AM
Will said...: Cary and Greg and I saw it in D.C. (mere hours before our mugging, easily the most memorable event of our tour thus far, more on that to come), and we all responded to it quite favorably. Its heart was definitely in the right place, it had an arresting visual style, Zach Braff can REALLY act, Natalie was better than she's been in years, Peter Sarsgaard was terrific as well. And it just had a really nice feeling to it, sort of somewhere between Bottle Rocket and The Graduate, with Gilliam twists. And I'm as surprised as anyone by my having responded well to this, but I found it endearing that it contained as much "upspeak" as it did (for example, "yeah, my mom just died?" and "I kinda told Sam I was gonna hang out with her today?") Young people really do talk with that inflection, and yet you don't hear it a lot in the movies. Well, let me amend that: it's actually quite a popular device among douchebags like Gregg Araki, but whereas in his hands the upspeak delivery just infuses every line with ironic vacuity, Zach Braff used it to lend his dialogue a kind of naturalism and innocence that reinforced its content. It's a real tightrope, and he walked it pretty brilliantly.; 2:38 PM