Zach Braff Destroys Promising Directing Career With ‘Swingles’

Posted by Rob Hunter (rob@filmschoolrejects.com) on May 21, 2009

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Garden State is an inexplicably divisive movie.  Zach Braff’s directorial debut is funny, introspective, odd, beautiful at times, set to a fantastic soundtrack, and stars the always fascinating Peter Sarsgaard and the always delicious Natalie Portman alongside Braff himself.  It’s far from perfect but still a great, little movie.  And yet there are haters who dump on it for being too “cute, quirky, and cool.”  Idiots.  Garden State is a solid debut that showed great promise from Braff as a writer/director… promise he may be about to squander.

Variety reports that Braff is in negotiations to direct and star in the new comedy Swingles.  He would also rewrite the script about a man who gets dumped by his wing-man and is forced to team up with a woman he hates in order to meet new ladies.  Besides making no goddamn sense it seems fairly obvious at even this early stage that the two main characters will end up together.  To make matters worse the wing-woman will be played by Cameron Diaz.  Ugh.

I wish Braff would revisit his plans to bring Fletch back to the big screen.


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  • wow, we're really jumping on the hate train early here. maybe give him a shot at the rewrite first?

    and i loved Garden State, and really liked The Last Kiss.
  • You may be right, but nothing about this project looks good. I agree with you on Garden State as well as The Last Kiss, but neither of them made any real money. Traditional (as in stupid) romantic comedies usually do... just look at Diaz's last one "What Happened In Vegas"... $80 million domestic. I'll get off the hate train (which is really more of a disappointed realist train anyway) if and when I hear Braff's rewrite addresses both the obvious nature of the story and the removal of Diaz.
  • Your wrong in that one thing about this looks good; Zach Braff. I trust that with writing duties he has enough control to put his distinctive (hilarious) stamp on it, with or without Diaz.
  • Garden State may have been better than most debuts, but it's his personal movie, and it's usually the case that most directors just don't have anything beyond their personal movie. After they get that story out of their system, they might not have anything left.

    Or maybe he needs to get within the studio system and play the game. Make a generic comedy, then make a passion project, rinse, repeat.
  • Mack41
    Fletch starring Braff will be awesome. It will happen.
  • funkyjebus
    Ah, the sound of the story doesn't bother me, we all knew Zack & Miri would get together, but the jouney was rewarded with big laughs, whats to say that this won't be the same. I have hope (interest) for this with Braff at the helm. However I won't give it a moments thought if Diaz is actually in it. She's the worlds least funny woman (including my mother!). She's is in all these romantic comedies because she was in one good one, and she was the worst thing in TSAM. Someone should have put her joker face down along time ago.
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