And Half a Year Later...
I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain movie, lately. A movie nearly everyone I know just swooned over about six months ago and still recalls with fondness in their voices at parties. A little movie called Garden State. When I first rented Garden State, I was visiting my grandmother in eastern North Carolina a few months ago. And I liked it. The first thing I liked about it is the fact that the protagonist’s father creeped me out, right away.

"God, that’s some effective acting," I thought. "But why is this man giving me the jim-jams? Why do I not trust the way he skulks around the house and sneaks up on his son, Mr. Main Character – as if he’s been in that house for eleventy-seven years? Like his mind has been poisoned by the desire for something....a ring, perhaps? A One Ring...?" And then I realized: It’s fricking Bilbo! Bilbo Baggins is Andrew Largeman’s dad!

All LOTR-dorkiness aside, though, I came away from Garden State thinking it to be mostly a sweet little movie. My friends and I are all in the midst of all that career-life-trying to get some cognitive-confluence-goin’ struggle, so it feels poignant to see that played out onscreen. Even if certain aspects of the movie that did not sit quite right with me, simply will not leggo, months after I saw it. There’s the obvious Graduate-style plug for The Shins. If you haven’t seen Garden State--Well, if you haven’t seen it, you probably haven’t even read this far, who am I kidding. But anyway, dear Mr. Imaginary Henshaw, I say to my pretend reader, there’s this scene right near the beginning, when Guy meets girl, and her first Cute Bold yet Endearingly Insecure Move, is to slap her headphones over his head and say, "You’ve gotta hear this. It’s the Shins. It’ll change your liiiife!" Boom-! Soundtrack time! And it’s sooo clumsily done. This is Point A that suddenly I want to throw something at the screen. It’s funny: I go from being pretty much with this movie totally, to irritation, with that one simply turn of events: "Cute movie, cute movie....augh! Selling Me Things! Screw you!"

The rest of the movie, as I said, is fine. You have cutesy Girl Who is Flawed (capitol letters there on purpose) and Pensive yet Cute Guy Who is Flawed. And they’re hanging out, doing random things together in his hometown (where bafflingly, they’ve never met before), when all of a sudden, they meet a couple who lives a quirky life together in a trailer, it rains, and Guy has his cathartic moment for no reason I can fathom. But the cinematography is kind of pretty and there’s music too, I think, so this works all right for a movie. But it would never, ever hold together well as anything else. If Garden State were written as a short story, say, for this class I happen to be taking now, say, it might get some serious criticism on the no-build-up and then sudden, unexpected and unplanned-feeling climax. Just say. And yeah, I know you all probably read criticism of this movie months ago, when it was actually in theaters, so sorry for standing here holding up my index finger in this six-month-later "Eureka!" But I had to say it.