vonChristian Ihle 05.08.2014

Monarchie & Alltag

Neue Bands und wichtige Filme: „As long as the music’s loud enough, we won’t hear the world falling apart“.

“Frequently billed as Garden State’s “spiritual sequel” and sharing little with its predecessor beyond a strongly unlikable protagonist and the ever-present spectre of death, Wish I Was Here is a sometimes-bland, sometimes-intolerable mix of tired platitudes, overbearing religious themes, casual racism, and sappy sentimentality that, quality-wise, makes Garden State look like The Graduate by comparison.

Braff’s most vaunted position in pop culture circa 2014 isn’t as the actor who played the annoying guy on the TV show your college roommates watched all the time (…) Arguably, he’s not even most known as the guy who directed Garden State—he’s the guy who put together the Garden State soundtrack, and so the question surrounding Wish I Was Here is a strange one that most films aren’t subject to: What does it sound like?

Braff himself is undoubtedly aware of this expectation, going as far as to promise an early stream of the soundtrack to those who backed the film’s funding on Kickstarter.
(…) The film’s corresponding title track carries writing credits from Coldplay and features Cat Power’s Chan Marshall singing lead, and “Wish I Was Here”’s melodic structure certainly sounds like Coldplay, a subdued, unfussy version of the weirdest mega-band in the world’s skyscraping tendencies. But Marshall’s flat, unaffecting vocal take, along with the dull arrangement, makes for a boring ballad that outpaces anything on Coldplay’s recent misfire Ghost Stories in terms of tedium. In a sense, “Wish I Was Here” a perfect representation of the film and, by extension, Braff’s overall preferred aesthetic—moderately palatable, harmless, uninteresting, and ultimately less forgettable than you’d want it to be.”