Garden State (that guy from "Scrubs," 2004): C-

(Spoilers, but you don’t want to see this film anyway. Except I think Lisa already has. And I think liked it. Sorry Lisa.) "If a gun is on the mantle in the first act," the great playwright Anton Chekhov once supposedly said, "it must go off by the third." What this film is is 125 guns onstage with none ever being fired. Every 30-to-60 seconds Zach Braff introduces some quirky or unusual fact about one of his characters (invented "silent velcro," collects Desert Storm Trading cards, had a pendant with a try-to-get-the-ball-in-the-hole game as the "jewel," made a quadriplegic because a faulty dishwasher, drives a WWII motorbike with a sidecar, wears a suit of armor to work -- and I'm only scratching the surface here, people). Nearly all of these could have been interesting if looked at in some detail and thus had some impact on The Story At Large, but nearly all of which are dropped 30-to-60 seconds later, never to return, and replaced by Next Idiosyncratic Fact. I mean really. Braff’s early emotionless lethargy (as an actor) is explained, but it’s still daft; I can’t stand dramatic acting that requires being completely emotionless in the face of, well, everything (see also everything Clive Owen’s ever done, except maybe Closer, which I haven’t seen). Peter Sarsgaard wasted (he’s better in just the previews for Kinsey [which I don’t intend to see] than he is here). Jean Smart good in a stupid one-scene role. Natalie Portman makes the main woman protag more three-dimensional than she has any right to be by accentuating both her quirky attractiveness and the fact that she is totally, completely messed up, which leads to a big problem when the okay bittersweet ending is superseded by a completely happier-than-happy ending which, given the states of the two leads, c’mon. I did not like this movie.