My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a splendid excellent wonderful example of a movie where the writer, director, and star are all the same person and the movie is hilarious and it rocks. And Garden State was not like that at all. It may have succeeded as a work of art and some of the visual irony was really excellent. But it just didn’t click together and soar at any point, at least not on the first watching and it was just too painful to watch it a second time.

Natalie Portman was the glue that failed to hold this movie together in the manner of glue holding on space shuttle tiles failing and the whole business just blowing spectacularly up. She was unconvincing as a happy-go-lucky ditz and completely failed to portray the vivacious, effervescent character with occasionally glimpsed depths that was obviously needed as a foil for Zack Branff (is that how you spell it?)’s creepy staring-lithium-freak-with-occasionally-glimpsed-depths lead.

Part of her problem is those eyebrows. They are too high-class and they make her look too serious. And way too rich for this role. Between her eyebrows and Zack’s giant scary capped teeth, I didn’t even know where to look on the screen most of the time.

Hohan would have been a much better choice and then we could have also had some song and dance numbers which are welcome in any movie.