For those who have yet to watch it, I HIGHLY recommend Garden State. Soundtrack: ridiculously good. Plot: standard themes of finding love, reconciling with family, and finding one's self. Mood: intensely introspective, thoughtfull, curious, and hopeful (but in a half-empty kind of way). But the way the story is told... really hits a frequency with me.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/garden_state/high.html
The scenes are really well done, and the directing, while it uses what I would guess are standard tools from the "my-first-director" starter kit (angled fly-aways, off-center staging, slow-mo scenes, dimmed lighting to avoid detail, that variety of thing), Zach does such a damn good job with the whole thing that I cannot help but say that it is the best film I have seen this year. Hopefully you'll have a similiar reaction, but I can see this film having a polarizing effect on viewers. I'm sure it has faults, and I am just glossing over them, because the soundtrack is tighter than a frog's ass.
c-
