He's cute, alright...

But he's not your friend. He's not your shrink. And he's never going to take the place of a nice Zoloft with a Xanax chaser. He may have played a sensitive, grieving, self-aware, psychotropic-drug-numbed television star in Garden State, but in real life, he is more than likely JUST a television star, minus all the adorable (?) adjectives.

He's not going to like you just because your comment on his blog was clever and insightful and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you two have the exact same taste in music. Nor will he be swayed by the fact that your comment formed a perfect Haiku. It is highly unlikely that he will ever even READ your comment, given that there are now more than THREE THOUSAND comments on his last blog entry alone, which dates all the way back to July 11. Of the year 2005, okay, fine. But still....

Yes, I am talking about Zach Braff, fellow native New Jersey-ite...former not-so-secret celebrity crush of Yoga Chickie (he's CUTE, Goddamnit, and Jewish, so can you really blame me?)...you know, the one who plays a hapless, puppy-like doctor on TV and who wrote, directed and starred in a mind-numbingly boring indie flick that got by pretty much exclusively on the merits of its techno-chill-world-beat soundtrack and the fact that it became the marching theme for a nation of seratonin-reuptake-challenged twentysomethings?

Let it hereby be known that I am pissed off at Mr. Zach Braff because he created a monster and subsequently abandoned it. (And anyone who ever read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein will know that is NEVER a good idea.) I am referring to Zach's blog (which I WILL NOT link to, because trust me, if you were to try to retrieve it, your computer would crash just like mine did. That's what happens when you try to load a blog that has several thousand comments on the most recent post), the blog which his fans believed was a place where Zach could "be real", a notion that Zach nurtured...that is, if it even was Zach posting on it at all (as opposed to some publicity flack being paid by the word).

For some reason, the many thousands of fans out there who anxiously awaited each post from Mr. Braff were under the impression that the blog was something other than a publicity machine for Garden State. It's hard for me to understand how such a misunderstanding might have arisen, given that Braff mentioned early on that his producers set up the blog in the first place so that he could hype the movie. Also, the blog happens to be called "Zach Braff's Garden State Blog". Perhaps that might have provided a clue.

But apparently not. But shouldn't something be done for the thousands of fans who have now resorted to fighting amongst themselves in the hopes of getting Zach's attention? Shouldn't someone tell them that Zach has moved onto other projects and isn't coming back? Seriously, I think it is quite irresponsible of Zach and his handlers to sit back and ignore several THOUSAND comments, many of which are frightening confessions of mood disorders and other high-decibal cries for help.

Here's how I see it: you make a movie that validates and even glorifies mental illness (see, e.g., Natalie Portman's manic character), you seek out the attention of fans who identify with mentally ill movie characters, and you lead those fans to believe that you "get" them. Don't you think that you have some sort of responsibility to let them down easy when it's time to let them down?

YC