The AV Club have a funny article entitled “24 Romantic-Comedy Characters Who Don’t Deserve Love”. Among those who receive a beat down – Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones’s Diary, Meg Ryan in Sleepless In Seattle and Woody Allen in…everything.

Garden State’s Sam is one of the 24, despite currently leading our Valentines poll.

15-16. Zach Braff and Natalie Portman, Garden State (2004)
The myth of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was pushed to its most egregious extreme in Garden State, where beautiful Natalie Portman “redeems” a self-pitying, thoroughly unlikeable wimp (Zach Braff) by inexplicably falling in love with him, in spite of his rancid self-absorption and unseemly level of pussitude. In fact, she enables his bullshit, taking out a bottle to preserve his single, precious tear when he finally works up the nerve to cry over paralyzing his mother back when he was a kid.

What makes the central relationship in Garden State even more unbearable (though, to the film’s credit, oddly realistic) is that Portman—a childish hipster doofus who mistakes goofy noises and arm-flailing for iconoclastic acts of individuality—is equally unworthy of love. So perhaps it’s best that they end up together rather than poisoning other, more decent people.