Echo Park

..is written in this film. between the plot of struggling with the American dream, where at the end friendship wins the day and the 80th flair, including soundtrack and a cheap dim TV-footage, a midget art piece can be found. German synchronous version is the icing on the cake! enjoy!

The title takes its name from that run-down, Bohemian quarter of Los Angeles, where (among other inhabitants) a pizza delivery boy dreams of publishing poetry, a single mother works nightly as a strip-o-gram dancer while awaiting her big career break as an actress, and a naive bodybuilder lands a role in a cheap deodorant commercial, setting his alarm for 3:00 a.m. to see his (small) screen debut. It's a neighborhood of considerable charm and eccentricity, but too bad the same can't always be said of the film, which has its moments but (in retrospect) all too often resembles an offbeat, low-rent plagiarism of Neil Simon. Michael Ventura's script is curiously transparent from a writer (in the LA Weekly, at the time) of opaque film criticism; the only way his scenario could be more obvious would have been to make the Tom Hulce character an aspiring screenwriter instead of just a closet poet.

Excellent film, great cast and didn't anyone notice the pictures that were put in there on purpose (yet done in a subtle way) Like the photos of "Elvira" on the wall in the apartment (when the actress who played Elvira was also in the film sans the black wig.... Or when Tom Hulce and the boy went to deliver the pizza and Hulce stopped briefly to pause to look at the photo of Wolfgang Amadeus on the wall of the house? (Hulce was nominated for an academy award for his depiction of Amadeus two years earlier before this film)

I really thought the writing was superb too and ...God it even made me miss Los Angeles!

I give this film a 9 out of 10. I hadn't seen it since my teens when it came out and was so glad to get to see it again on cable.

I highly recommend it...an intelligent well directed pic for all.

One of the most ridiculously written and directed movies you will ever see. Possibly entertaining to some because of it's absurdity, particularly the ludicrous ending sequence. The character's have all the depth of porn characters, making you wonder if the writer/director have ever even met the sort of people they make caricatures of. May possibly have been written by someone like Bob Dole. Particularly entertaining is the wardrobe. The bodybuilder who wears cowboy boots outside of his jeans. The slick agent who wears sunglasses over his acne indoors. You know what you're dealing with immediately in the scene where Tom Hulce brings in that 4" pizza, pulls a cutter out of his pocket, and starts slicing it up in the kitchen. Good Lord.

Low-budget item about three would-be stars living together in a section of Los Angeles: Susan Dey is the single mother and acting-hopeful who ends up delivering Strip-o-Grams, Thomas Hulce writes songs and delivers pizzas and Michael Bowman hopes to be a celebrity bodybuilder. The set-up sounds overly precious--though it certainly doesn't play that way, thanks to sharp, acute writing and savvy directing. Of the ensemble, it's Susan Dey who surprises with a fully-dimensional performance; cynical, wise, exhausted, and yet still clinging to hope, Dey's first assignment (stripping at a small party) is excruciating to watch (for all the right reasons), making her eventual accomplishment at this profession almost joyous to behold. This is one of the few films I've ever seen to visually equate self-confidence with success, and the tangled relationships between the roommates is well-realized, wistful, funny and touching. *** from ****