There's not much chemistry in Garden State, but maybe there doesn't need to be. If so many love stories are the right person at the (comically) wrong time, GS deals with not necessarily the wrong but not necessarily the right, possibly any (or at least any not clearly wrong) person at the right time. Sam doesn't cause a change in Largeman's life (though maybe she inspires him to keep it); she merely appears at the time it takes place, and if this is meant to convey fate, it more convincingly states that their meet-up (hook-up) is more about time than person. This is probably not the intent of director Braff; Natalie Portman's Samantha ("Sam," meant to mean 'quirky' name) is stocked with enough 'charming'-style idiosyncrasies that she's probably meant to signify uniqueness. Let us forgive her, though. If these quirks seem a little run-of-the-mill, they still signify a certain level of vitality, and a certain level of vitality combined with the primary factor - timing - is evidently plenty.

The film states early on (as early as the funeral) the familiar small-town (or hometown) trap, and puts Largeman back in the un/appealing haze of drugs/booze/high school girls; while it doesn't condemn it outright, it seems to be setting us up for the contrast of the sunnier world Sam will bring along. The portrayal is generous, though; it's easy to make the hometown party scene (the party scene and film scene both) completely unredeemable, but Braff lets it have a little appeal - the doting and at least somewhat genuine friends, the pretty girls, the allowance by Largeman of himself to trade his usual medication for more illicit kinds - and even if his smile is at least partly influenced by drugs and a large part by confusion, it's at least a small part drugs, booze, girls and home. Though he may be enjoying some part or parts of the experience, Braff presents it visually so as to remind us that even if it's a more pleasurable fog, it's still a fog, and maybe also proof that though this may be as far as he can get from his usual stumbly routine - ingesting medications designed to intensity feeling rather than nullify it - a fog is a fog.

The answer left to him is to seek the clarity somewhere between the antithetical fogs of feeling and unfeeling at either end of the spectrum. For this he needs to stop taking drugs. He does not need to meet a girl. If he should happen to do so, great, but his decision to leave his drugs behind is made before he meets Sam; he meets her only because he has already begun to enact the course of actions designed to free his consciousness from its pharmaceutical accommodations.

Is she a bonus prize, then, or is she the fated meaning? The latter comprises a high-demand series of assertions: that Largeman was destined to pull his act together and leave the drugs behind in the precise nick of time to return home where he would come across the girl destined to change his life in the brief window of time before he lost faith in non-drugged reality due to what would likely have been a series of strange and unfulfilling experiences with his father, his old friends, his hometown, returned to his fairly empty life and his fairly full medicine cabinet. This girl would be the only girl quirky enough to point out to him how weird and good his life might be. If the chemistry were a little better, that would be the assumed intent.
But there's not much chemistry in Garden State.

The result is that Sam does not seem the...

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Come on, Christopher Doyle! Hero, a movie we've been waiting a handful of years to see on the big screen, is here at last in its Tarantino-sponsored American theatrical release, and it's been in the oven too long. The dramatic, moving story of some people who get in slow, really arbitrary fights for a murky, unexplained political justification, Hero has been acclaimed for, among other things, its caaaaaaarefully arranged visual presentation and Rashomon presentation. The two are tied together by roughly assigning a segment of story-retelling to a color palette depending on the character recounting it, its place on the truth-o-meter, and its theme. It doesn't work here, as it wouldn't have worked in Rashomon; in fact, it negates the point.

Crayola Presents: Hero is its own film and shouldn't be directly compared, but we can look at the telling-and-retelling motif the same way in both films. Would Rashomon have benefitted from a color wash on each segment? It's not an aesthetic argument, either - the idea is that without something literally or figuratively coloring the different stories, they take place in the same nebulous gray (neither black nor white, nor black-and-white) space of an unsubstantiated personal account, and if they all look the same to us, we don't know which version would have deserved to be impassioned red, nonjudgmental blue, fraudulent purple.

Now, Hero isn't trying to be eXistenZ. It's prepared to admit that some versions are true and some are false, but it's not entirely sure why. The concept of presenting a version of a story, illustrating the nuances of it, and then later retracting it isn't necessarily an unpleasant one. Presumably you might want to throw your audience off by giving them certain loyalties and interpretations, then causing them to reconsider their thoughts and choose to reverse their ideas later on. I'm not averse to trying to stimulate thought. Little of that is done here, though. Removing a scene that has been retold by a character is worthwhile, but Rashomon knows it teaches you about the character, not the scene. Watching a fight scene and then finding out it didn't occur - when the revelation means nothing to the development of the character beyond a very stock Surprise, It's a Twist! - means we have watched only a kata, a martial arts demonstration to show you what a fight might conceivably look like. If Hero starred Jackie Chan, okay, no problem, but a fight scene in a drama - especially an overblown, windy Zhang Yimou drama - must have some meaning and weight to it. This is to say nothing of sub-fight scenes, scenes (and there are several) that are tangential even to the fictional segments containing them. For a movie with pacing problems, this kind of padding is unforgivable; it seems Zhang Yimou was compelled to make a martial arts film where he really wanted a drama. This compelling force adds unnecessary fight after unnecessary fight, but no fight has any real energy or meaning.

If this wasn't bad enough, he slows them down. He slows them way down. He throws on color washes and computer graphics, but digitizing Jet Li into What Dreams May Come adds neither meaning nor all that much appeal. It's not without its moments, but enjoying a fight scene to find later that it didn't exist is not a way to get the crowd to like your characters, trust your storytelling, or warm...

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