Garden State Abundant With Quirks

It's quirky. "Abundant with quirks, that Garden State," one might be heard saying.

Wait. Maybe it's corky? No, no, I'm thinking quirky. I'm sorry. Now I'm thinking about Corky Romano, and yes, falling into a deep depression. All right, I'm now remembering Garden State and all is well.

(I didn't really plummet into a deep depression just thinking about Corky Romano, not after months of counseling with my therapist, Dr. Weinberg, anyway. Dr. Weinberg, much to my demerit, turned out to be my milkman. We'll talk, Pedro.)

Garden State is so quirky that Wes Anderson movies (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), look banal and bland by comparison. Unlike Anderson's film's, though, there's barely any music score. Lots of songs in this film, spanning from miscellaneous rock bands, to even more miscellaneous rock bands. I imagine the 2 music supervisors had trouble using just the right amount The Shins songs.

Zach Braff, of television's Scrubs, is the film's crafty writer, director and star. Andrew (Braff) is a struggling actor in Los Angeles, with just one TV movie to his credit. Andrew had a performance so believable that some feel he might be as mentally disabled as his character role.

The oddly-titled Garden State (which in turn, made me hungry for a garden salad), is more about Andrew himself�-- a 26-year-old, thinly-guy, whose been in a numbed, James Lipton-like, haze since he was 9, due to antidepressants prescribed for him by his psychiatrist/father, played by fellow Hobbit and ring barer: Ian Hoam.

(I longed for scenes of him rummaging around Bag End, looking for his Ring of Power. I'm sorry... is it too late to make a Lord of the Rings reference?)

By the time I finishing my smuggled garden salad, I noticed that Braff often shoots himself with lots of shots of him looking into the camera, as if to say: "Soak it in folks. This is what your getting from me for a while."

That's a hard, monotonous, gift to pull off, and more so, to make it moderately compelling... nearly as hard as avoiding the band Dashboard Confessional, or connecting Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda.