I ordered Garden State off Netflix (I love you Netflix) because everybody RAVED about this movie. It came in the mail yesterday, so instead of doing the one meeelion things I should have been doing – housecleaning, grocery shopping for this weekend’s love-in (no kids!)… hmm, what else, paying my bills and getting car insurance quotes (my rates went up after five years of premiums with no claims after a few months ago my brakes locked on a slick corner and I had a minor impact with a cement barrier. Bastards).

The first thing that bothered me about the movie was that it wasn’t much of a reach for Zach Braff. Ok- he wrote, directed and played the lead, so I should have expected this. And of all the guys who could play a character who doesn’t feel emotion, Zach Braff is one of them. He has the intensity of vanilla pudding. Every time I read the F-word on his blog, I’m like, “Whoa! He knows this word?!?”

I’ll grant two things though – first, I’m crazy-naïve about any other roles he’s played. I’ve seen only snippets of Scrubs, and haven’t seen any of his other films (I double-checked his filmography at IMDb) and I don’t see him much in the celebrity press. For all I know, he could be crazy wacky insane. But somehow I don’t think so. I think he’s destined to be the poster child for the unassuming, amiable, mildly goofy character role. Second – I don’t pick up on subtle very well. I’ve been known to need the proverbial whack-in-the-shins-with-a-metal-baton. The “genius” of his character portrayal might have flown directly over my head. I also might have noticed while watching the film that my house was on fire. Might.

Natalie Portman carried that movie. She said on “The Making of...” (on the DVD special features menu) that the reason she liked Sam was because she wasn’t the prevailing cookie-cutter notion of what a male writer thinks a female character should be and do. I liked the character of Sam because Natalie Portman is insanely adorable in every possible way. But I appreciate her point, and she played this character dead-on.

What this movie did remind me of is that each member of humanity could list something about them that, culturally-speaking, is NOT NORMAL. Not to mention the hundreds of idiosyncrasies that make up our personality and ultimately defining us, even to ourselves.

And I wonder if there’s a part of love that balances these idiosyncrasies, that weighs them against each other, which determines if we’re attracted to that person or repulsed by that person. For instance, does that cute sniffy thing that I do on the back of my fiancée’s neck because I like the way he smells counteract against the annoyance from having to stand at the lunch counter while I rattle off the five substitutions that need to be made to my food? Will that balance ever tip the other way?