NY Magazine: Have you seen any of the Sundance movies recently that get compared to Garden State, like (500) Days of Summer, or Josh Radnor's happythankyoumoreplease?
Zach Braff: I saw and liked (500) Days of Summer, yeah. Except for the very last sentence.
I totally agree.
A lot of people have been saying Garden State sucked. I found the movie rather charming and relatable. I love films like that. I call those movies "portrait films" --- films that have unsensational plots (or no plots at all) and just go for directness and openness about certain human emotions that we all feel at one point but never really articulate (and not for lack of trying either). I love films that have a rather undramatic and almost stoic approach towards these are sort of the "in-between" or "in a rut" emotions... the "Where am I? How did I get here? Where do I go now?" type of melancholia. I love films that end on ambiguous notes. It does not take a genius to observe that life is full of ambiguities. Those ambiguous points in our lives are rather underrated.
Examples: Lost In Translation, Somewhere, Marvin's Room