Zach Braff’s Garden State is the embodiment of everything that was awful about American indie movies in the last decade.
Cute color schemes, fashionable twenty-something alienation, Natalie Portman’s mentally-ill male hipster fantasy construct causing everyone to decide they liked a terrible band like The Shins … it was so cloyingly precious, it nearly gave me diabetes.
Now Braff wants to make another terrible movie, and like a lot of filmmakers, he’s rattling change in his tin cup over at Kickstarter. What’s interesting is this became the pop culture outrage du jour on Twitter (as well as on a few snarky blogs), and it has nothing to do with this movie being an inevitable affront to art. Instead, people are in a huff because Braff is a rich actor who is soliciting donations for his movie, instead of just financing the film out of his pocket.
The prospect of there being a new Braff-directed film entering the zeitgeist is a chilling one, but the hate I’m hearing towards him for choosing to use Kickstarter smells like class-warfare bullshit.
If people out there just adore Braff and his taste in lousy music enough to throw away their money on his latest project in exchange for some promised perk (as opposed to a share of the profits like a real investor), then so be it. It’s their money.
If you’re like me, and you think his movies are wet garbage in a microwave, you won’t give him a dime. At the end of the day, no one is forcing you to do anything. That’s how this works.