Oh, and thanks for explaining the joke.
No problem.
Thanks for the link to amazon. I never thought to look there but now have it on my wishlist.
It was a shorthand way of saying “This guy had one clever idea and got rich off of it, even though he’s incredibly friggin’ dim.” I got the message more effectively with the flaming arrow trick.
I finally got to see “Garden State” this past weekend and loved it. There were clunky bits but the parts that worked made up for it. For the past several days, every single person I’ve talked to has loved it.
I’m amazed by Natalie Portman’s performance. I thought she used up all her acting talent in “The Professional”. This movie convinced me that she’s an actual actress. Sam seemed like someone I could meet someday.
Peter Saarsgard was good in “Shattered Glass” and he continues to impress me in “Garden State”. He’s definitely an actor to keep your eye on.
Anyone else initially confused by the relationship between the knight and the mom? At first, I thought he was her son but she got WAY too proud about his Klingon then I clued in. I appreciated the ambiguity surrounding Large’s mother’s death: suicide or accident.
Another recommendation for the soundtrack. I bought it Saturday and haven’t been able to turn it off.
Love the soundtrack!
And yeah, the mom and her two sons (one of them the knight) had a rather interesting relationship.
Loved Portman but thought Saarsgard stole the movie.
Ending was a bit of a letdown but not terribly so.
Psst … one of them isn’t her son. Hence the line:
“He’s a motherf—er.”
“Pun intended?”
And yes, the soundtrack rocks.
I liked it, especially as a first effort from Braff, but a few things bothered me. Maybe it was because I was trying to hard to relate to the main character, but I didn’t feel like the whole thing about him killing his mom was necessary in any way to the movie. I didn’t feel any need to know why he was on medication. He could have just as easily been on lithium from his mom’s accident and constant depression without having to throw in his own responsibility for it. It was suddenly such a huge event that came almost out of nowhere that it unsynched me with his character for the rest of the movie. I’m hoping that very few people can relate to an event like that. But many many people probably knows what it’s like to feel numb or out of the rest of the world whether because of drugs or not.
I did like it a lot though. Natalie Portman’s character was great - I heard more than one person comment on how surprised they were by her acting. Lucas has ruined more than just Star Wars with his latest movies.
I think it’s funny how people critisize the film in this thread: Portman’s character was too random; it wasn’t necessary for the mother to die; there were scenes that didn’t drive the plot or the character.
Quite frankly, these are some of the main reasons I loved the film! Sure, I guess if you’re a screenwriter then not everything was “by the book”, but come on! Braff wrote it semi-autobiographically, and to me, it spoke droves, because it’s shown what my life (I have epilepsy and my mom died when I was five) and my friends’ lives are like like no other film that I’ve seen. Some of the scenes I enjoyed most were what others might consider “throwaway”, because they were… well, more real than most Hollywood films.
People really can be random sometimes, believe it or not, and Portman captured that in some of her best acting since The Professional. The fact that people question that shows just what they expect from a film: People who’s characters are defined in comic-book style origins.
And what’s wrong with the mother being injured and, several years later, dying? It happens! It can drive wedges between families even though it is an accident! The pain can be so torturing that you do end up taking so much medication that you go through life in a daze. Heck, my dad was in a daze for nine years after my mom died and he didn’t even need the medication. Largeman’s mother’s death was the only thing that was going to bring him back home… without it there wouldn’t have been a film.
As for the ending… I have to agree that it did seem a bit of a cop-out. However, leaving would have been an even bigger cop-out, it seems to me. He made the reservations back when he was still in his “blindly going with the flow of medicated life” phase and to me it makes sense that he’d go through with them. The fact that he got off shows that he has woken up; if he had stayed on the plane, it wouldn’t have been… well, real. 
I took the opening scene to be a kind of trick the movie played on me, thinking it was going to have the “haha the hero dies in the end” sort of ending, and making me misinterpret much of the movie in that light. When the movie “switched endings” on me in the end, it made me reevaluate much of how I thought scenes before had been presented, and their dramatic place in the telling of the story. I was pleased by this move. But my wife says she didn’t think that was actually something the movie was trying to do–there was no “trick” intended in the opening scene.
So… did my wife miss something obvious, or did I read too much into it?
-FrL-
Got it. Should have put quotation marks on sons instead of interesting.
Yeah, I think you read a little too much into it. Just in case, here are spoiler tags:
I thought the beginning was just basically to show how numb Andrew is to everything due to the meds. He could be in the middle of a terrible plane crash and he’d still just be sitting there calmly waiting for whatever was going to happen. I personally found it to be a bit broad for a metaphor and wasn’t really necessary to the film. It’s probably one of the only moments I didn’t care for, so it’s great that it’s the first thing you see - I have two hours of great moments to make me completely forget about it!
I think you were reading too much into it and that the beginning was just a shorthand way of telling us that Largeman is depressed to the point where something so significant as the plane he is on crashing would leave him nonplussed.
I didn’t notice that the thread had gone to two pages. Sorry to step on your toes, interface
My criticism wasn’t that the mother died; that, I felt, was very necessary to the film. Without it what reason would he have had for going home? I felt it was unecessary that he, himself, was the cause of her paralysis.
On preview, I see that the problem was my saying that he killed his mom. Oops… that’s not what I meant. I meant that I didn’t like that he caused her to fall. This is what I get for posting at work when I’m trying to hide the fact that I have nothing to do from my boss. Anyway, take my last post and change “killed his mom” to “being responsible for her paralysis” and then it should make more sense. For the record, I liked Sam’s impulsiveness. I know the feeling of wanting to just do something completely random for the sake of randomness.
Okay, I guess I can understand that a bit better. But if it had just been an “Oops, slipped on the floor” accident, then there wouldn’t have been any reason for Largeman’s dad to blame his son for everything, and thus medicate him so heavily and cause such a deep family rift.
Sorry to keep resurrecting this. My main point was that I just didn’t feel any reason for the rift/medication was even that necessary. Or that there should have been a reason that would be more accessible to people on the whole. Hopefully most people have no experience with causing their mother to become paralyzed. So why not pick something else, like just using the fact that his mother was depressed and thus he was depressed? After all, she was depressed even before her accident. And he was angry about her depression the entire time, which is why he pushed her. It just seemed like an unnecessary detail, one thrown in just to show how messed up his life was. It pushed me out of the film. Still a very well done film though. I think I’m going to get the Shin’s album based just on the snippet I heard of the song in the movie.