Synopsis
Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) receives a message from his estranged father that his mother has died. Wrapped in a cocoon of anti-depressant drugs, a sterile Los Angeles apartment and a thankless job waiting tables at a chic Vietnamese restaurant, “Large” returns to suburban New Jersey for the funeral. Confiding to his icy psychiatrist father (Ian Holm) that he’s been getting headaches, Large is booked an appointment with a neurologist. An actor whose claim to fame was playing a mentally retarded football player on a TV movie, Large reunites with a buddy named Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), a funeral park worker who spends his time smoking pot.

Even with street drugs he’s given at a party, Large is unable to relate to the people back home, including a buddy (Armando Riesco) who got rich off his patent for “silent Velcro.” Large remains in his stupor until he meets a patient at the neurologist’s office named Sam (Natalie Portman). With her taste in music (The Shins), messy family and manic affinity for lying, Large emerges from his funk. He opens up to Sam about why he got as far away from his family as soon as he could. Obsessed with tracking down the perfect going away gift for Large, Mark takes the couple on a wild goose chase that ends in an infinite abyss dug into the suburbs.

Production history
Zach Braff graduated Northwestern University film school in 1997 and made his way to Los Angeles, where he went out on acting auditions. Cast in the NBC sitcom Scrubs in 2000, Braff quit his day job waiting tables and spent the four months before he was due to start work finishing a script he’d been scribbling since college. “I’ve been to maybe a dozen funerals in my life and I was always struck by how there’d be all the people mourning the death at the gravesite and twenty yards away, there’d be two guys on a tractor checking their watch. That was always really upsetting to me. It also showed how different two people can be as far as where they are in their minds. So that was one of the seeds for the idea of the movie.”

With Scrubs, Braff became a client of the powerful Creative Artists Agency, which circulated his script - Large’s Ark - through the industry. Braff recalled, “Almost everyone had passed on it. They all said, ‘Make it a three-act structure movie.’ If I submitted it to a screenwriting class, I would have failed.” A 28-year-old president of production at Jersey Films - Garden State native Pamela Abdy - read the script and championed it. She introduced Braff to her bosses Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, whose producing pedigree helped attract Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ian Holm to the cast, with Braff both starring in and making his directorial debut.

Dropping the cryptic title Large’s Ark and renaming the film Garden State, the search for financing came next. Braff recalled, “I had envisioned in my head that being in Scrubs, having Natalie Portman starring and Danny DeVito producing that it would be a cinch. I was like, ‘I’m not asking for that much money. C’mon!’ I couldn’t find anyone that wanted to take a risk. It was a risk. The screenplay is not a traditional three act structure and it’s not a movie a studio would ever generate … People then said, ‘Okay, if you do this to it, if you do that to it.’”

“One thing that freaked them out, for example, was introducing a character that doesn’t come back. I’m like, ‘Well that’s life. I go home for four days. I meet somebody. They’re not going to teach me a lesson by the time I leave.’” With time running out, Gary Gilbert & Dan Halsted of Camelot Pictures agreed to finance a budget of $2.5 million. A 25-day shooting schedule commenced April 2003 in Braff’s hometown of South Orange, New Jersey, with cinematographer Lawrence Sher and production designer Judy Becker - stalwarts of indie film - giving Garden State its ethereal look.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004, the film was so well received that Fox Searchlight and Miramax put up $5 million to acquire worldwide distribution. Released in July, the reviews were favorable; while Keith Phipps wrote at The Onion A.V. Club, “Garden State coasts on this considerable charm until it hits a brick wall in its final segments,” Roger Ebert added, “This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it’s smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail.” Generating enthusiastic word of mouth among many who discovered it, Garden State went on to gross $26 million in only a limited release in the U.S.

Opinion
Too early to tell whether Garden State will affect the generational impact of The Graduate, Harold and Maude or The Breakfast Club, this is the first comedy/drama in years that warrants a comparison with the classics of disaffected youth. The reason is Braff’s righteously offbeat screenplay which - maybe out of ignorance for how most movies are written - ignores commandments carved into stone by Robert McKee and finds its own voice. In addition to introducing characters with no relevancy whatsoever to the plot, the story develops in loosely connected episodes. The couple likes each other as soon as they meet. Somehow, it all works.

While the chemically imbalanced Large and Sam don’t really seem like they would last 72 hours together, much less happily ever after, Braff evokes the right moods to patch over gaps in logic. Garden State feels truthful. Just as good, it’s hilarious, due to an inspired cast featuring Jean Smart as Mark’s stoner mom, Michael Weston as a miniature cop and Geoffrey Arend as a retail employee who harangues Large with his get rich scheme. And after being lost in so many big movies, the plucky Natalie Portman seems tailored for this type of treehouse production. The much praised autumnal soundtrack - cueing Coldplay, Frou Frou and Nick Drake - avoids sounding trendy and holds up well.

Matt Cale at Ruthless Reviews rants, “Garden State literally made my skin crawl. I hated it as much as I’ve hated anything all year, and only an unexpected Adam Sandler film festival will keep it off my Worst of the Year list … rather than tell a story or develop interesting characters, the filmmaker throws together dozens of scenes that make no sense within the context of the film, largely because they were conceived by a young prick who collected random thoughts in a dog-eared notebook over several years in the hope that one day his bloated smattering of paper would find a buyer.”

“Garden State is far from perfect, but the things that do work exceed any excesses in Braff’s tendency to overreach in trying to inject heavy-handed pathos into his silly comedy. A little less angst would go a long way, but for viewers who tend to attribute meaning though mood over substance, you will probably come away thinking this to be a deeper experience than is warranted. Still, it is original and perversely clever at times, and in the world of romantic comedies, if you can call this one, that alone puts it head and shoulders above almost all of them,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Mike Long at Jackass Critics writes, “The real standout in the film is Sarsgaard, who seems to get better with every role. He plays a character who is both likable and despicable at the same time, and thus, the audience hangs on his every move as we attempt to decide how we feel about him. Garden State is the best Kevin Smith movie that I’ve seen since Chasing Amy. However, Smith had nothing at all to do with this film and Garden State only proves the difficulty in making a quirky film which is both moving and funny.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) and Banky Edwards (Jason Lee) - two guys from Highlands, New Jersey who made good self-publishing their own comic book - bust up the convention they’re signing copies of their work Bluntman and Chronic at when they seem to outrage Black militant cartoonist Hooper X (Dwight Ewell) arguing that Lando Calrissian was a positive Black role model. Hooper’s “militancy” is revealed privately to be a facade to sell more comic books, as well as hide the fact that he’s gay. He invites the boys to stay in New York to have a drink with him and perky cartoonist Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams).

The hopeful Holden gets to know Alyssa - a cynic when it comes to love - over darts. He’s attracted to her, and gladly skips out of work early the next day to bump into her at a club Hooper tells him she’ll be at. It dawns on Holden and Banky too late that they’re the only straight guys in the crowd, and that Alyssa is a lesbian. While Holden is stunned, Banky is fascinated by Alyssa’s sex life (”How can a girl fuck another girl? Are you talking strap-ons or something?”) and trades stories with her. Alyssa likes Holden enough to seek him out and extend to him her friendship.

The more time Holden and Alyssa spend together, the more threatened Banky becomes. He forecasts there’s no way his pal will ever sleep with Alyssa, but after she buys him a painting off a restaurant wall, Holden pours his heart out to her. The couple gives romance a shot, alienating Alyssa’s lesbian friends. Banky fills Holden’s head with so many wild rumors about Alyssa’s past, he grows insecure and pushes his girlfriend away. After an encounter with a pair of whimsical dope peddlers named Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith), Holden realizes his mistake, and hatches a novel solution to his problems with Alyssa and Banky.

Production history
Kevin Smith was at the Sundance Film Festival with his debut feature Clerks in January 1994 when he met director Rose Troche and her ex-girlfriend Guinevere Turner, who co-wrote and starred in a movie they were promoting at Park City, Go Fish. Due in part to the similarities between their two films, Smith - along with his producer Scott Mosier - struck up a friendship with the women. Turner recalled, “I would drag Rose over to their condo, and we’d have endless conversations. We really got along and learned probably too much about each other.”

Mosier later admitted to harboring a crush on Turner. By the time his sophomore effort Mallrats was in post-production in the summer of 1995, Smith had a title for his next script - Chasing Amy - and began with the idea of a straight guy falling in love with a lesbian. The filmmaker also wanted to comment on his state of the union with girlfriend Joey Lauren Adams, who Smith had cast in Mallrats and discovered how much more experienced she was in relationships after they started dating. Smith finished writing Chasing Amy within a couple of months and approached Miramax to finance the film’s intended $2 to $3 million budget.

The studio liked the script and asked which actors Smith was thinking of casting. The director wanted two unknown players from Mallrats - Ben Affleck and Jason Lee - cast opposite Joey Lauren Adams, who was even less of a box office draw. Miramax countered with Jon Stewart, David Schwimmer and Drew Barrymore. Smith dug in. “They said, ‘It’s not about making a movie with your friends.’ And I said yes it is, it’s absolutely about making a movie with your friends.” Smith slashed his budget to $250,000, shooting on Super 16mm film stock, but maintaining full creative control.

Released April 1997, not every critic fell in love with the picture; Eric Brace at the Washington Post quipped, “The words ‘written and directed by Kevin Smith’ are now an instruction to run very fast out of the theater.” But raves were given by the New York Times, the L.A. Times, Roger Ebert and Time Magazine, where Richard Schickel called Chasing Amy, “A true movie rarity: a brutally honest romance. If you loved Sleepless in Seattle, you’ll just hate it.” The no-budget film grossed $12 million in the U.S., establishing Smith as a voice of his generation.

Opinion
Other viewers have called Chasing Amy the worst movie - next to Armageddon - ever preserved on DVD by the Criterion Collection. They have a point. Student films look more professional, while Smith’s inadequacies as a director extend to the casting of Joey Lauren Adams, who on top of her limitations as an actor is also given a musical number. Chasing Amy not only survives its own scruffiness, but blossoms with it, painting a portrait of male/female relationships in the 1990s that’s raw, at times uneven, but exhilarating in the creativity of its dialogue and openness of its characters.

Chasing Amy achieves classic status for its audacious screenplay, which explores sexual and racial insecurities so plainly and without hypocrisy that it would be sent to sensitivity training if circulated today. The raunchy dialogue is balanced by characters confronting something deeper and less glib about their natures. Just as important, the film is laugh out loud funny, with Jason Lee ripping Smith’s material up. Ben Affleck gave a skillful leading man performance, while Smith should be commended for refusing to soft pedal relationships, ending the film on a bittersweet note, but one that’s perfect for this story.

Matthew Dessem at The Criterion Contraption writes, “Chasing Amy is second only to Armageddon when it comes to discussions of films that don’t really deserve to be part of the Criterion Collection. I see where people are coming from, but I think you can make a case for it now that you couldn’t when the DVD was released in 2000. In addition to being a time capsule from the mid-nineties in terms of what’s on screen, Chasing Amy also represents a pivotal moment in the film industry. The movie came out towards the end of the time that people thought of ‘independent film’ as a sensibility, rather than a financing model.”

“Kevin Smith is a fairly easy director to pigeonhole; a fantastic dialogue writer, a poor visual artist and a man who is truly obsessed with Star Wars and comic books. His films tend to include shockingly raunchy jokes, although little actual sex or nudity, but they also contain many surprisingly moving or affecting moments. Chasing Amy is perhaps his best film to date, an award-winning examination of male dysfunction that still manages to be frequently gut-bustingly funny,” writes Alexander Larman at DVD Times.

Bradley Null at filmcritic.com writes, “Going well beyond other Gen X movies such as Swingers and Reality Bites, Chasing Amy embraces the new generation with an unparalleled frankness. Although this boy-meets-lesbian love story is more mature than Smith’s earlier work, its never before seen subject matter is indicative of Smith’s predilection for ignoring the taboos of film. Frank discussions of sex and perversion are common in Smith’s world of wordy, quick-paced diatribes long on profanity … Although the intermittent stupidity and vulgarity of Smith’s characters is sometimes painful to watch, the film’s refreshing realism is an invaluable experience.”

© Joe Valdez

Joan Allen was born August 20, 1956 in Rochelle, Illinois. Her father was a gas station owner, her mother a homemaker. Attending Rochelle Township High School, Allen described herself as “shy but desperate to meet boys.” Her sister suggested Allen try out for the cheerleading team. She was not accepted. Allen auditioned for a play instead and won a part. “I think the cheerleading thing was a way of performing. There was the boy element, but more important was the performance element. Once I got to high school and auditioned for a play and got in, I thought this was really what I was looking for.” The left-handed Allen was also an honor roll student and “played the cello badly.”

Following her sister to Eastern Illinois University, Allen met a drama student named John Malkovich. After he graduated, Malkovich launched the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, performing plays in a church basement on the northside of Chicago. When Allen transferred to Northern Illinois University her junior year, Malkovich asked her to join the group. She accepted, and found less inclination to finish school, dropping out a few credits short of a degree. Allen found work as a secretary while performing with Steppenwolf. When their production of And A Nightingale Sang opened on Broadway in 1983, Allen landed an agent, who sent her on auditions for TV and film.

Allen credited her career to John Malkovich. “I can’t think what I would have done if I hadn’t met him. I wasn’t one of those kids who was like, ‘Get me to New York. Get me to a big city.’ I was always much more shy. All I knew was that I loved to act. But I don’t know about the other part of it. I’m not sure I had the chutzpah to go and prove yourself.” In 1985, Michael Mann cast her in the pivotal supporting role of a blind woman who unknowingly becomes drawn to a serial killer in Manhunter. Roles in Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Searching For Bobby Fischer followed, but Allen’s greatest success remained on stage, winning a Tony Award for the 1987 production Burn This.

In 1995 - once her peers in Hollywood got a look at her performance as Pat Nixon in Nixon - Allen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She shot to the top of casting lists, playing the wife of John Travolta in Face/Off, Kevin Kline in The Ice Storm and William H. Macy in Pleasantville. Film critic Rod Lurie, who wanted to be a filmmaker, also took notice. With Allen in mind, Lurie wrote a script about a female vice presidential candidate whose sex life becomes public debate. Released in 2000, The Contender resulted in Allen’s third Oscar nomination in a five year span, this time for Best Actress.

Currently a single parent raising a daughter born in 1994, Allen has focused on film and TV work for the last fifteen years. Her eclectic taste has led to roles as a lovably bitter alcoholic in The Upside of Anger (2005), Rachel McAdams’ interfering mother in The Notebook (2004), a benevolent spymaster in The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), a sorceress in TNT’s mini-series The Mists of Avalon (2001), and martyred Irish journalist Veronica Guerin in When the Sky Falls (2000). She hosted Saturday Night Live in November 1998, performing sketches with Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer, and has been a presenter at the Tony Awards.

Allen has spent years trying to set up a comedy called Pushers Needed, about working class women in Dublin who push wheelchairs for the cripples going to Lords. Despite interest from Claire Daines, Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith, Allen has been unable to secure financing. When asked in a 2005 interview about her status as a star, Allen responded: “I’m hard to pin down. I tend to look different in films. But I just live my life. I get on the bus, I get on the subway, it’s not a problem. I think of myself more as a character actor than that ingénue leading lady, who started out something like Michelle Pfeiffer, or Jessica Lange. I’m a bit quirkier than that.”

© Joe Valdez

Photo courtesy of Wisdom Digital Media at Broadway World.com.

Mad props to Aaron Valdez for designing the United Federation of Character Actors shield.

Synopsis
“What came first, the music or the misery?” Rob Gordon (John Cusack) asks the audience as his girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle) moves out. When his record collection fails to soothe his heartache, Rob recounts his “Desert Island, All Time, Top Five Most Memorable Breakups, in chronological order.” He tells himself that Laura doesn’t crack the list. Rob owns the Chicago record store Championship Vinyl. “I get by because people make a special effort to shop here,” he continues, “Mostly young men who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original - not re-released, underlined - Frank Zappa albums.”

Bookended at the store by the shy and awkward Dick (Todd Louiso) and the manic Barry (Jack Black), Rob broods over Laura and makes a half-hearted attempt to win her back. A shared friend Liz (Joan Cusack) reveals that his ex has moved in with “this Ian guy.” Rob deduces that Ian (Tim Robbins) is their flaky former upstairs neighbor and torments himself imagining Laura having sex with him. He finally admits that Laura is indeed in his top five breakups of all time. His wounded, sensitive side appeals to singer Marie DeSalle (Lisa Bonet) who poured her breakup woes into her music and has a compassionate one-night stand with Rob.

With the encouragement of Bruce Springsteen, Rob tracks down the rest of his Top Five breakup list, including the introspective Sarah (Lili Taylor) and the obnoxious Charlie (Catherine Zeta-Jones). None of the women boost Rob’s ego to the extent he needs to get over Laura, but when her father dies, she invites him to the funeral. In her grief, Laura decides to give Rob another chance, helping him promote a record release party for two skateboarding punks whose album Rob has produced. This brings him to the attention of Caroline Fortis (Natasha Gregson Wagner), a music columnist who has Rob second guessing his relationship status all over again.

Production history
Published in 1995, High Fidelity was the first novel by English essayist Nick Hornby. It told the story of Rob Fleming, a self-absorbed record shop owner in London who soothes a breakup with his girlfriend Laura by generating trivial “top five lists” with Dick and Barry, the audiophiles who work in his store. According to Hornby, “People would come up and say, ‘This book is about me - literally, this book is about me.’ I’ve been told, I don’t know how many times, ‘I know the record shop you wrote about,’ and the shop’s in some part of the country I’ve never been to. It’s a fairly depressing indictment of the state of things, I think.”

Mike Newell optioned the novel and set it up at Disney, where Scott Rosenberg wrote a draft. Looking for a better take, the studio ultimately sent the book to John Cusack, who’d rewritten Grosse Pointe Blank with two high school buddies from Chicago named D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink. The locations and characters Hornby described reminded Cusack of his hometown, and the actor also felt “that many young men can identify with Rob’s inner monologue, which is spoken through great, incisive writing. It’s a very funny book, but he also captured this particular type of character with brutal honesty. And it’s actually kind of strangely romantic in a way, so I felt the combination of all those things was really remarkable.”

After receiving Hornby’s blessing to relocate his narrative from London to Chicago, the scribes went to work. Cusack recalls, “We’d go through the book and structure it out and then Steve and D.V. would go off and write and then I’d read what they do, and then sometimes I’d go off and I’d write for a while and they’d read it. Finally when we were getting it all together, we’d sit with two or three different computers and say ‘All right, well here’s a checklist of things we need to get done … So, each person would then check something off the list and take a pass at it and then three of us would edit it together.”

Cusack had signed with William Morris Agency to represent him as a screenwriter. Stephen Frears - who directed Cusack in The Grifters - was also a William Morris client, and when he heard the news, asked what the actor was working on. Though skeptical of High Fidelity being taken out of England, when Frears read the script, he changed his mind. “I liked the idea of it being in America. It had a sort of, this sort of more optimistic way in which Americans live, seemed to me to add something to it, rather than taking it away. So it lost some of its stoicism and became slightly more romantic.”

Once Frears came on board, one of his first questions to Cusack and his co-writers was who they thought should play Barry. Without hesitating, they answered “Jack Black.” Black had worked steadily in TV and film, but was unknown to the general public. Todd Louiso walked in to audition and quickly fell into the role of Dick. Settling on the woman Rob spends the film trying to win back did not go as smoothly. Frears was at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999, where a Danish actress named Iben Hjejle was starring in Mifune. Her mother was an English teacher and Hjejle spoke fluent “American.” Frears phoned Cusack to tell him that he’d found Laura in Germany.

High Fidelity commenced filming in Chicago in April 1999. To assemble a soundtrack, Frears gave Cusack and his co-writers free reign. Cusack recalls, “The film has 70 song cues, and we probably listened to 2,000 songs to get those 70 cues. We used our Rob and Dick and Barry dispositions a lot.” One scene in the script called for Rob to converse with Bruce Springsteen in his head. Cusack was sure The Boss would turn them down. To the actor’s surprise, “he kind of just laughed at the idea and said, ‘Send me a script.’ So when we finished shooting, we wrapped around 2 a.m., flew to New York, and taped him in his studio for an hour the next morning.”

Opening in the U.S. in March 2000, High Fidelity became one of the best reviewed films of the year. Raves flew in from the New York Times (”Even more sharply than the book, the movie evokes the turmoil of urban single life with a quirky mixture of confessional poignancy and dry, self-deflating humor,”) the Austin Chronicle (”A smart, funny, and youth-savvy relationship film,”) and from Nick Hornby himself, who commented, “I never expected it to be so faithful. At times it appears to be a film in which John Cusack reads my book.” It grossed a modest $27 million in the States, quietly recouping its costs.

Opinion
One of the more sublime things about the film version of Nick Hornby’s hysterical novel is how Rob is altered from an Englishman obsessed with American R&B to an American obsessed with British New Wave and punk: Belle and Sebastian, Stiff Little Fingers, Elvis Costello and Sheila Nicholls all make appearances on the superlative soundtrack. The best news is that High Fidelity lives up to and then surpasses the emotional honesty, edginess and freewheeling creativity of the platters Cusack and company spin over the course of the film. If there’s such thing as a perfect movie, this is it.

Rob’s immaturity might remind women of their least favorite ex, and those too young to have experienced a painful breakup will likely be bored as well, but single urban dwellers with misplaced fetishes will find repeated enjoyment in the film. Stephen Frears deserves much credit for enabling Jack Black, Todd Louiso, Joan Cusack and Tim Robbins to go to another comic level here, while every concept in the script - addressing the audience, employing flashbacks, dramatizing Rob’s insecure psyche - shouldn’t work, but does. The movie contains not one tired plot element, but somehow manages an upbeat, hopeful ending all the same.

Christopher Null at Filmcritic.com writes, “Literally, the scenes in Rob’s store are so funny they make you forget about the rest of the film. A hilarious supporting role by a pony-tailed Tim Robbins notwithstanding, that ‘rest of the film’ is pretty much a drag. It’s uniformly shallow and vapid, and the reliance on Hjejle (imagine Mia Farrow with a bad haircut and a language barrier) to carry a lead role was a fatal error for High Fidelity’s producers. All the talk of avant-garde bands may make you envious of the boundless musical knowledge these guys possess. Or, like me, you may just want to skip to the tracks you like.”

“The more I thought about it afterwards, the more I realized just how much convention the film defied. It’s a comedy, so of course things will turn out okay, one way or the other, in the end. But High Fidelity refuses to tell you WHY things will turn out alright … Even as I wondered why a smart girl like Laura would be interested in a slacker like Rob, I knew that guys throughout the audience were nodding and smiling, quite familiar with such unanswerable questions. And the women were smiling too, keeping to themselves the reasons that they are sometimes drawn to thick-headed, oafish, and insecure men.,” writes Jeffrey Overstreet at The Phantom Tollbooth.

Gary Militzer at DVD Verdict writes, “High Fidelity pays particularly astute attention to the typical life of the aging male GenX-er in this millennial time, nailing even the most predictable details of life, like those cruel, nagging phone conversations between mom and son, with droll, sagacious charm. From its observant takes on late twenty-something romance, to its perfect recreation of the hardcore record store set and music scene, High Fidelity does just about everything right.”

© Joe Valdez