Directed by: Zach Braff
Genres: Drama, Comedy, Romance
Cast: Zach Braff, Kenneth Graymez, George C. Wolfe, Austin Lysy, Gary Gilbert, Jill Flint, Ian Holm, Peter Sarsgaard, Alex Burns, Jackie Hoffman, Michael Weston, Christopher Carley, Armando Riesco, Amy Ferguson, Trisha LaFache
IMDB raintg: 8.0
My rating: 8.0 [rate 8.0]
Garden State is one of those movies that suck you in to the screen from the very first seconds. If it wasn’t for the last few minutes of the film, I would say that I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
The story is nothing special. It is a pretty much regular rant about how tough life is for teenagers who are becoming grown ups. They have to figure out a bunch of things and do that mostly on their own. They start to see that the world is not perfect, and that even one’s own family can be really screwed behind the pink glasses. The way the story was told in this film was excellent.
Thinking about it, there were three main components that made this film – acting, music, and attention to details. Acting came very natural, but there weren’t that many famous people in the film. Still, each character was a standalone person, fully pictured and developed. Music was almost the only thing creating the mood and swinging it back and forward. And there were a lot of swings, I’ll tell you that. Attention to detail helped to make this film really really like a real life. It felt very natural despite a whole bunch of strange things displayed.
Something that I especially liked about this film is how well the sadness of drama was mixed with fun of the comedy. It’s like both the drama and the comedy were happening simultaneously on every frame of the film. Also I was amazed by the choice of subjects for the drama and freshness of jokes. Actually I can’t call them jokes. They weren’t. They were just funny cirmustances and episodes from someone else’s life. Nothing made up.
As I have already mentioned, the only thing that went wrong was the ending. It felt totally different from the movie, like it was shot and cut from somewhere else and attached to this film. The shooting style, the dialogues and the atmosphere were totally different. If it wasn’t for the ending, I would give this film a 9+ rating. As it is – a firm 8.