GARDEN STATE
This tragi-comic US indie hit marks the debut of actor Zach Braff, star of the sitcom Scrubs. He plays a disaffected TV actor who returns home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral and falls for a big-hearted, lying epileptic (Natalie Portman). “I felt no one had made a film about what it’s like to be a twentysomething that wasn’t broad, silly or scatological,” says Braff. The soundtrack includes his favourite bands, including Coldplay and the Shins. They also feature on a mood CD Braff sent with his script to the studios. Some executives who passed on the screenplay apparently still play it in their cars.
THE INCREDIBLES
The latest cartoon feature from Pixar, the computer- animation company behind Toy Story, Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo, finds a family of superheroes forced to become suburban nobodies after a series of lawsuits filed by the people they’ve saved. “The movie is often about how the mundane can affect the fantastic,” says writer-director Bard Bird, a former consultant on The Simpsons, who made the acclaimed The Iron Giant (1998). A new recruit to Pixar, Bird threw all sorts of animating challenges at his team, including making rippling muscles and swaying hair move convincingly in the air and underwater. “That’s what I love about Pixar,” says Bird. “They never want to rest on their laurels.”
Advertisement
MARIA FULL OF GRACE
Watch out for the breakthrough performance by Catalina Sandino Moreno as a stoic drug mule trying to enter the United States. The film has enabled Moreno, a 23-year-old from Colombia, to pursue an acting career in New York. She landed the role on her first film audition; an anonymous reporter had passed her name on to the movie’s casting agent while she was taking classes at a Bogotá theatre. “If I ever find out who it was, I want to give them a hug,” she says.