Same. The scene where Affleck isn’t paying attention at work and his boss asks him what he thinks and he says, “I think I’m going to leave my wife” is seared into my brain because of just how thick and oppressive the seriousness of the movie tries to be mixed with imagining someone saying that in a work meeting lol
Lol. I know Garden State obviously happened, but every so often I'm plagued by the thought that his mom's accident was caused by a freak dishwasher accident. Braff is a madman for that one Also, the African roommate - "Someone pissed on my GameCube!"
I loved The Last Kiss. Also fun tidbit, my parents were offered $20k to have several scenes of The Ex filmed in my childhood home. They came by like 5 times to take pictures and draw out how the filming would work, but then they went with some other house. Based on the cast we assumed it would be a huge movie, and when we never heard anything about it we assumed it just never got made......then like 6 years later we saw it buried in a Netflix category.
This ad just popped up on instagram for me. Not sure why they’d pay for an ad for a fake movie. But putting the R rating there got a chuckle out of me.
As evil as Garden State was, the central conflict in Wish I was Here was that Braff was so desperate to keep his kids from the horrors of public school that he home schools them after the grandfather stops paying for private school.
Garden State deserves to exist if only as a strange cultural touchstone, positive or negative. Wish You Were Here has virtually no redeeming qualities. Hard to think of someone I once enjoyed that now irks me more in a totally innocuous way.
That whole late 90's-early 2000's Sundance era is pretty embarrassing, but I am ashamed how much I loved Little Miss Sunshine back then. It isn't a particularly bad movie, but it is so cynically constructed to hit those emotional beats people were looking for back then.
Garden State also deserves to exist for its soundtrack. May be slightly meme'd out at this point, but it introduced me to The Shins and several other songs I still love today
The early-mid 2000s is when overwraught, over emotional, on the nose lyrics in songs became huge and popular and that music took off, I'm not surprised the movie equivalent of that also was popular among people that age at that time. My hot take is that as much as the praise for movies like Garden State and Little Miss Sunshine and etc was over the top back then, the hate for them now has reached over the top levels.
had this trailer from 13 years ago randomly recommended to me on youtube. absolutely no way this exists
I went to a free "mystery" movie last night and it ended up being Garden State. I enjoyed it, but I almost accepted it more as the main character's fantasy or inner monologue instead of what he was actually experiencing.
Tangentially related to Broken Lizard. I've definitely seen it and I don't remember anything about it.