GARDEN STATE

Director: Zach Braff (no major film work)
Starring: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard

This is a young person movie - in good ways and in bad. It's a pretty darn funny account of a numb young man finally returning home after running away to Los Angeles. Our early-twenties hero finally begins to confront his confused childhood and take the first real steps into maturity. He finds love. Unfortunately, he also spends a lot of the movie partying with his old high school friends. Yes, this film is frankly adolescent in its theme and plot. I'm quite sure that this adolescent view point was why the Hollywood powers-that-be deemed the film worthy of a national release. And, as expected, these areas of the movie were also the weakest. The film was at it's best, though, when it lost its desire to be cool - and it did do this at times. It's unfortunate that there weren't enough of the moments to rate it really highly. There were enough, and enough youthful exuberance, to rate it well, however. Not much to love in this film, but a fair amount to enjoy.

Standouts: Interesting, quirky storyline.
Blowouts: It's a kid's flick. Tried far too hard to be hip.

Grade: B+

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS

Director: Alan Rudolph (long list of films with Hollywood talent, none of which did particularly well ...)
Starring: Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Dennis Leary

The Secret Lives of Dentists is a pretty darn good film about the day to day struggles of your average American everyman. He happens to be a dentist. I mean, what could be more mundane than a dentist? This particular dentist is solid, structured basically good guy who's boring as hell. He's struggling with a flighty, self-involved wife who I imagine thinks of herself as passionate rather than flighty. Eventually his solid, stable little life begins to crash down around him. Helping him along through all of this is a voice in his head (Dennis Leary), sort of a 21st century Walter Mitty fantasy.

There's a lot that I liked in this movie. I liked that they pointed a camera at a simple man's struggles. I liked the Dennis Leary character. I liked that even though this film is about maintaining passion in life, and the dentist was the most boring human on earth, it wasn't dumb enough to treat the cuckholding wife as the victim. The problem is that I didn't love much of anything in this film. I liked a lot, but I'll probably soon forget much of it. I think that this is a story that could have been wonderful, but didn't quite pan out.

Standouts: Not much really stood out. Most everything was solid, but little exceptional.
Blowouts: See Standouts.

Grade: B