Feedback: The Braff-lash

[TMC]

http://thedissolve.com/news/2760-fee...he-braff-lash/

Keith Phipps’ one-and-a-half-star review of Zach Braff’s latest indie dramedy, Wish I Was Here, provoked a lot of comment from Dissolve readers, many of whom seemed to have been lying in wait for a chance to jump on Braff, an actor/writer/director/producer whose arrested-adolescent earnestness rubs a lot of folks the wrong way. But some commenters pushed back a bit against the anti-Braff tide, reminding people that there was a time when it was socially acceptable to find Braff’s work on the sitcom Scrubs and the movie Garden State to be charming and sweet.

I think the phenomenon Fritz is describing is just an unfortunate byproduct of how the cultural discourse has developed in the Internet age. Even though we live in an era of fragmentation, where people can more easily seek out and enjoy their own niche entertainments or opinions, the conversation online often seems to presume—or to push for—a monoculture. It’s almost as though we’re all anxious for some certainty: a point of view shared so widely that dissenters are singled out as freaks or morons. Often that means that movies most people don’t feel strongly enough about either to defend or dispute get defined by a passionate few, who want to make sure that the default position on a film like Garden State is that it’s an abomination.

I saw Garden State when it came out (when I was in my mid-30s, for the record), and thought the film was mostly just okay, with a few scenes and images strong enough to suggest that Braff had real talent. I’ve always liked Braff on Scrubs too, though there his combination of good-heartedness, naïveté, and silliness works because it’s parceled out in 20-minute chunks. Still, I’m mostly on Jeremy’s side, believing that the movie business can always use more “earnest fellows,” with distinctive points of view.

I say “mostly,” though, because I do think Braff has earned some of this backlash—not because of how he crowdfunded Wish I Was Here, or because he lacks talent, but because he represents a trend in independent filmmaking that I personally find fairly insidious. Every year at Sundance, I run across multiple plotless dramedies that either star or are directed by fairly big-name actors from TV and mainstream movies; and these films usually follow the same blueprints. They have an abstracted view of ordinary life that mocks authority and conformity while standing up for melancholy weirdos; and they deliver pat life lessons about “what’s really important.” They have a perspective that’s based not on what it actually takes to live in this world, but on what a celebrity sees.

I haven’t seen Wish I Was Here yet, but judging by Keith’s review, it follows that blueprint closely, delivering phony uplift while making some arrogant presumptions about how people should live. I still agree with Jeremy that a movie like Wish I Was Here is hardly the worst thing that a human being or even an artist can do with his time. The anti-Braff sentiment is probably stronger right now than it needs to be, and I’d love to read some thoughtful defenses of Wish I Was Here if there are any out there. But from what I’ve read so far, the opposition to this particular movie seems sincere, and properly motivated. Calling someone out on their bull**** is one of the best things the Internet does.

[Darmund]

Well Sundance isn't an indie film festival anymore, and hasn't been for nearly 2 decades. One needs to go to Slamdance or some of the other 'alt' film festivals that have sprung up around Sundance.

As for the backlash against Braff there are couple of parts to it. One stems from his using Kickstarter to fund WYWH despite his having a net worth of $22,000,000 or whatever. I'm curious as to why NONE of the people who bleat and fart and shriek how UNFAIRSSSZZZ!!! this is have said NOTHING about the fatc that despite having a net worth of well over $2,000,000,000 Steven Spielberg has NEVER used ANY of his own money to finance any of his movie always studio money.

Another part is that Braff had a reputation while Scrubs was still in production of being a dick and a douche towards women in the bars and clubs in LA and Hollywood.

[TMC]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...ThanDisco/FILM

Note: Simply having one or two underperforming movies does not make a director or franchise "Deader Than Disco." There needs to have been irreparable damage done to the director's career or franchise's popularity, be it through a tarnished reputation or an inability to adapt to changing cultural tastes.

When it was first released in 2004, Garden State was hyped as the future of independent film and Zach Braff was thought to be a breakout star in the making. Cut to the present day, where its constant imitations, mockery of what was perceived as the film's hipster tendencies (most notably the infamous "The Shins will change your life" scene), and the decline of Braff's career have basically turned the film into a joke. In fact, one could say that, in the long run, this film and its copycats did more harm than good for independent film, causing the term "indie" to be associated with insufferable hipster stereotypes for years.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by Darmund

Well Sundance isn't an indie film festival anymore, and hasn't been for nearly 2 decades. One needs to go to Slamdance or some of the other 'alt' film festivals that have sprung up around Sundance.

As for the backlash against Braff there are couple of parts to it. One stems from his using Kickstarter to fund WYWH despite his having a net worth of $22,000,000 or whatever. I'm curious as to why NONE of the people who bleat and fart and shriek how UNFAIRSSSZZZ!!! this is have said NOTHING about the fatc that despite having a net worth of well over $2,000,000,000 Steven Spielberg has NEVER used ANY of his own money to finance any of his movie always studio money.

Another part is that Braff had a reputation while Scrubs was still in production of being a dick and a douche towards women in the bars and clubs in LA and Hollywood.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmo...ish-i-was-here

With his second directorial effort, Wish I Was Here, arriving in theaters, the former Scrubs star is as divisive as ever.

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/article/down-d...res-bei-211570

One year ago at the Sundance film festival, Zach Braff’s indie dramedy Wish I Was Here debuted, accompanied by a fair amount of pre-screening hubbub. The film was already controversial, because of writer-producer-director-star Braff’s decision to finance a good chunk of it via Kickstarter. But Braff was also one of Sundance’s great success stories, having scored a hit with his movie Garden State after premiering it at the fest in 2004. Garden State had practically become the model for a certain kind of Sundance film: the quirky, earnest, personal project from an actor stepping behind the camera for the first time. So the first Wish I Was Here screening at Sundance was as much a belated pat on the back for Braff’s first film as it was a celebration of his latest.

Wish I Was Here didn’t receive the kind of warm reception that Garden State got. While it had some supporters, it met with far more loud howls of derision on social media after that premiere, and then weathered an early round of scathing reviews. It’s as though critics were lying in wait—not just for Braff, but for this whole sub-genre of American independent film.

Honestly, I can’t blame my colleagues, because Wish I Was Here crystallizes a lot of what’s irksome about these kinds of aggressively adorable indies. Braff plays Aidan Bloom, a 35-year-old actor who home-schools his sixth-grade daughter Grace and her younger brother Tucker when the family can no longer afford private school tuition. On the first day of “class,” Aidan asks his kids what they’ve been studying in school, and when Grace says, “Geometry,” Aidan draws a triangle on a sheet of paper and asks her and Tucker to identify the shape. Grace heaves an exasperated sigh, and informs her dad that she’s in Honors Math, and has been learning things like supplementary and complementary angles, and how to calculate circumferences.

The point of this scene is to show that Aidan is in over his head, and that he’s half-assing being a teacher just like he’s half-assed so many other things in his life. Yet what sticks out to me isn’t Aidan’s slackness, but Braff’s. Leaving aside that Grace’s curriculum sounds a little basic for sixth grade Honors Math—it’s as though Braff just Googled “geometry terms” and went with the first few that sounded age-appropriate—the whole premise of the scene is stupid. Even given that Aidan is supposed to be somewhat of a dope, what kind of dad makes a big plan to teach his own kids and then doesn’t prepare anything? Why wasn’t Aidan’s wife Sarah (Kate Hudson) on his case more? And in the 2010s—an age when schools send out texts and set up websites to keep parents apprised of what their kids are up to—why doesn’t Aidan have any idea what his children are doing?

I get that Wish I Was Here is a comedy, not a documentary. But Braff’s also trying to say something meaningful about how a family crisis can force even a committed goofball like Aidan to start taking life more seriously. In an effort to make that message more palatable and funny, Braff reveals either an outright ignorance or a general lack of interest in how the real world works. And that’s a problem, because Wish I Was Here means to reveal essential truths about that world. It’s hard to trust a pontificator who can’t be bothered with the particulars.

I don’t mean to pick on Braff here, because he gets slammed enough, and often unfairly. I think he’s a well-intentioned guy, with a unique screen presence and real talent as a visual stylist. I like Scrubs. I even have fond memories of Garden State (though I haven’t seen it since it came out). But I see too many independent films every year that are like Wish I Was Here: phony and faux-profound, and filled with recognizable actors who make the project seem even more like a fiction, divorced from real-world relevance. Not all are bad. Some indie filmmakers, like Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers, have built substantial careers out of telling stories about regular folks muddling through their lives while hamstrung by hazy feelings of dissatisfaction. After a while, though, the sheer preponderance of these cutesy Amerindie movies about arrested adolescents—and other people with non-problems—starts to become numbing.

Aside from Garden State, a possible Patient Zero for the mushy indie dramedy trend is another Sundance hit, Little Miss Sunshine—an Oscar-winner that represents American independent cinema in default mode, pumping out mildly absurd slices of life populated by eccentrics and childish adults, mostly played by stars calculatedly working against their usual type. Little Miss Sunshine’s plot—which sees a family of misfits hitting the road to take their youngest member to a children’s beauty pageant—features fake characters in a scenario that’s baldly contrived, leading to a climactic pageant sequence that has no foundation in what pageants are actually like. But the movie is sweet, and ultimately uplifting, so it wins over audiences, who don’t care so much about phoniness if it feels true.

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/article/what-b...as-here-228937

Over the last decade, Zach Braff’s reputation has experienced a dramatic downturn. Ten years ago, Braff was the well-liked and charming star of the perennially imperiled television comedy Scrubs, a guest star on Arrested Development, and the writer, director, and star of the well-received film Garden State. Although Braff’s directorial debut attracted its share of detractors at the time of its release, it was also passionately embraced by those that saw it as a generational touchstone of sorts, a Gen-X New Jersey version of The Graduate.

Today, Scrubs is half-remembered as a show that started off strong before quickly devolving into glib, gimmicky self-parody. Garden State is generally regarded as a tremblingly earnest embarrassment from a walking punchline synonymous with a dour, sadly deathless strain of straight white male pretension. Googling Zach Braff leads to articles with titles like “Why I Hate Zach Braff,” “Why People Hate Zach Braff,” “If You Mock Garden State, You Will Hurt Zach Braff’s Fragile Heart,” “Zach Braff’s Irritating Sense Of Entitlement,” “Why I Walked Out Halfway Through The New Zach Braff Movie,” and more puzzlingly, “Zach Braff Face Cream Cheap Best Skin Care Products.”

I have not read any of these articles because I wouldn’t want them to prejudice my opinion of Braff’s follow-up, but I think they capture the general tenor of online discourse about Braff at the moment. I was never a fan of Garden State, but I admit that my opinion of Braff has been colored by Amelie Gillette’s adroit and clever mockery of him in these here pages, particularly her description of him as possessing a “face made out of feelings.” Ever since, I have been unable to gaze upon Braff’s hangdog visage and not have those words pop into my mind.

There is a self-perpetuating nature to the nastiness of these articles. “If You Mock Garden State, You Will Hurt Zach Braff’s Fragile Heart,” for example, refers to Braff’s recent ill-advised tweets (that have since been deleted) attacking a Vice article entitled “It’s The Ten-Year Anniversary Of Realizing ‘Garden State’ Sucked.” Honestly, criticizing Vice for being unnecessarily mean is about as useful as attacking the sun for rising each morning with groaning predictability and just as likely to yield results.

This onslaught of online snark prompted Braff to tweet at Vice repeatedly with the following bursts of Eeyore-like self-pity, condescension, and weird passive-aggression, such as, “I really enjoy your reporting. You are better than this very cruel article about my film.” He then tweeted separately to the author of the article, Dan Ozzi, “That was a tremendously mean article you wrote about my film. I wish you all the best with all of your future endeavors.” as well as “I’ll bet you are a nice guy. Why write something so cruel?! You’re a writer!!!! It was my first film!!! For what?! Click?!?!”

This weird tantrum of a response, where Braff can’t stop simultaneously complimenting people (I bet you’re a nice guy! We’re both writers! You guys do great journalism! I wish you the best in all of your future endeavors!) and begging them to stop being such meanies, in turn prompted a mocking article in Jezebel, feeding the public perception of Braff as a thin-skinned artiste who cannot take criticism, and providing fuel for future “Zach Braff is the worst, as an artist and person” think-pieces.

There’s nevertheless something poignant about Braff’s response to the Vice article, misguided and counter-productive as it might have been. Braff is calling for a more polite and kind online world, one where people think long and hard about the feelings of the artists they’re writing about, and treat movies with sensitivity and empathy rather than snark and derision. But Zach Braff asking the online world to stop being mean toward Garden State now is like Bill Clinton calling a press conference next week to call for a moratorium on Monica Lewinsky jokes: It’s a little too late for that, and it’s touching that Braff somehow imagines that it isn’t. It’s hard to imagine what a positive response to Braff’s tweets might be. Did he expect Vice to formally apologize for saying Garden State sucks and run a multi-page retraction explaining that writer who wrote the piece was suffering from a terrible case of the hates, and was just jealous of Braff’s talent and now realizes that it’s an achingly bittersweet coming-of-age masterpiece?

All those tweets were going to do was further feed an online Zach Braff hate machine that’s doing just fine on its own. It’s not as if Braff went from being a well-liked young actor and filmmaker to a widely mocked joke of a man by virtue of making lots of bad movies. On the contrary, Braff has been aggressively non-prolific since Scrubs went off the air in 2010. He appeared in a couple of obscure, low-budget films (The High Cost Of Living, Tar) and voiced a winged monkey in Oz The Great And Powerful. Otherwise all of his energy seemed focused on finally making that long-awaited, long-dreaded follow-up to Garden State. Just in case there weren’t enough reasons to want to punch Braff right in that face made out of feelings, the title of the follow-up was Wish I Was Here.

Braff did not trust the parasitic, sausage-fingered money men of Hollywood with his beautiful brainchild. So he appealed to his devoted fan base, and asked them to help fund the movie through popular crowd-sourcing powerhouse Kickstarter. Depending on your perspective, this was either a heroic attempt to maintain complete creative control over a deeply personal vision, or an insufferable act by a whiny little baby-man who would rather beg for money from the general public than have to compromise his precious art.

People are innately skeptical of celebrity Kickstarter campaigns because there is a widespread belief, not unfounded, that if rich, famous people want to get a project made they should use their wealth and fame to get that project realized and not ask for assistance from people who are likely nowhere near as famous or wealthy. Braff’s Kickstarter campaign raised over a million dollars more than its $2 million goal, but the campaign also made Braff a target of even more ridicule, resulting as it did in another movie like Garden State.

Though technically not a sequel, Wish I Was Here, which was released to mixed to negative reviews and failed to make back even its modest budget, once again casts Braff as an actor in the midst of an existential crisis that forces him to confront the ghosts of his past, a scary present, and an uncertain future. In Wish I Was Here, Braff’s Aidan Bloom is staring down a pair of agonizing deaths, one literal, the other symbolic. Bloom, husband to a supportive but frustrated wife played by Kate Hudson and father of two children (a gratingly precocious boy and a teenaged girl who has rebelled against her secular parents by embracing the values of her Orthodox Jewish private school), is facing the death of his gloomy and disapproving father Gabe (Mandy Patinkin), who financially supports Aidan’s family while making no secret of how little respect he has for his son’s acting dreams.

To the Orthodox Jewish community, Aidan is less a dreamer pursuing a noble dream against long odds than a silly little clown indulging a child-like fantasy that forces his wife to be the breadwinner of the family in violent defiance of God’s wishes (and God’s inveterate misogyny). This leads to the second death Aidan is facing: the death of his dreams of supporting his family by being a full-time actor. It’s hard not to see the meta-commentary in Braff’s character continuously being told that he should abandon his dreams and accept the compromises of adulthood and get a real job, the same way that Braff as a filmmaker working in the studio system would be forced to accept the compromises that are both an inveterate part of being a grown-up and also the creative process. So it feels like Braff took to Kickstarter to make a film that lovingly preserved all of his mistakes and wrong choices, that retained every woefully unnecessary big speech, every subplot screaming for the cutting-room floor, and every actor’s huge moment that feeds their ego but adds nothing to the film.

Wish I Was Here is a pure reflection of Braff’s desire to give actors meaty, substantive roles, scenes, and dialogue. Yet with the exception of Braff, literally every major character and subplot could be completely removed without harming the film. That dying patriarch thread that gives the film its ostensible gravity? The whole section of the film involving Noah, Aidan’s brother, an eccentric science-fiction-obsessed genius played by Josh Gad? Wish I Was Here could just as easily have been a comedy-drama about a single father, instead of one where Hudson has groaningly unnecessary subplots of her own, including being sexually harassed by a sleazy cartoon of a leering cad straight out of a 1970s sitcom. Yet all of these characters and subplots remain in the film and demand to be serviced constantly by a screenplay that begins as the cinematic equivalent of an earnest first novel. It’s filled with heavy-handed symbolism and contemplation of life’s big issues and an open-mic night stand-up comedy set, complete with glib, dated jokes about the similarities between the names Al Roker and Al Qaeda, Sting’s lute-playing, and Jane Fonda.

The dramatic shifts in tone should be more jarring than they actually are. Early in the movie, Aidan’s dad confides that he’s dying and will no longer be able to pay for Aidan’s children’s private-school tuition, and also that Aidan must take care of his misbehaving dog. The scene could have ended with a reaction shot of the dog sassily covering its eyes with its paws in mock-protest, or Aidan staring soulfully into the distance as he contemplates mortality. Neither would feel out of place. When the film shifts from Noah having sex with a hot furry to Noah soberly contemplating his father’s mortality and his own shortcomings as an uncle, son, and brother in a matter of seconds, the whiplash nature of the change in tone should be unintentionally hilarious. The fact that it isn’t speaks to the film’s strange in-between quality.

Braff has staked everything on a personal dream project that is merely okay. It groans under the weight of its pretensions, but isn’t anywhere near the self-aggrandizing train wreck it has the potential to be. There are some lovely shots, nice cinematography, and valuable moments, but the whole thing feels achingly unnecessary and devoid of substance. Wish I Was Here sometimes recalls A Serious Man in its very Jewish exploration of a middle-aged man searching for answers and not finding them in Orthodox Judaism. But the Braff brothers (Zach wrote this with his brother Adam) are not the Coen brothers, so this feels more like A Not So Serious Man.

One of the turning points in Braff’s descent from well-liked young artist in a hurry to silly caricature of a self-important artist was the instantly iconic, then widely mocked scene in Garden State where Natalie Portman’s character sticks a pair of headphones on Braff’s sad sack and tells him, “You gotta hear this one song—it’ll change your life, I swear,” before playing The Shins’ “New Slang.” Such outsize passion and urgency about something like a pop song is easy to mock, but that brazen sincerity helped make Garden State as loved as it is hated. I respect Braff’s desire to tell the story of Wish I Was Here his way, but the movie is defined by a furious lack of urgency and significance, no matter how desperately it strains for meaning. To paraphrase Portman’s words, you don’t gotta see Wish I Was Here. It’ll have absolutely no impact on your life, I swear.