They're Tryin' 'a... Oh Wait, I've Done That One

[parma_violets]

I just want to let everyone know I'm still alive out here. Despite fighting against the twin handicaps of spending my first week at a new job and having a Roger-patented Week Without Booze, my week is actually going really well. The job is fractionally less dull than I expected, and I'm meeting some lovely people there, including this very

Comments

[mayaserana]

Where do you work now?

[parma_violets]

This.

[whiggles]

The Braff thing had me in stitches. Seriously, I quite liked Garden State, despite its pseudo-intellectual pretentious "I'm really deep but actually have nothing worthwhile to say" emo overtones, but bitch-slap articles like these are so dead-on it's scary. I have nothing against Braff, you know, and enjoy his work on the brainless but amiable Scrubs when I've got nothing better to do with my time, but his profound(-but-actually-not-really) everyman schtick is beginning to wear a little thin.

[parma_violets]

Weirdly, I also remember enjoying Garden State too - I say weirdly because I can't honestly remember what was so good about it afterwards. It certainly wasn't dialogue like "I know it hurts. But it's life, and it's real. And sometimes it fucking hurts, but it's life, and it's pretty much all we got."

Everything about it felt totally insincere, from the fake-alternative soundtrack (featuring those avant-garde masters of the contemporary counterculture, Coldplay) to Braff's character just deciding not to take his lithium, with no side-effects whatsoever, through the unrelenting self-absorbtion passed off as harsh realism, to the unbridled horror of Natalie Portman's character, the worst example of the "screenwriter's fantasy girlfriend" trope in cinema I've ever seen.

And yet, it goes down quite smoothly. I don't know how he's managed to pull it off, but he's made a film that's incredibly irritating in retrospect only.