Garden Party

The teenager April (Willa Holland) arrives in Los Angeles expecting to find a job and she stays at her lesbian cousin's home. Sammy (Erik Scott Smith) is a talented homeless singer, musician and composer that meets a guy that offers an opportunity to him to become a pop star. Nathan (Alex Cendese) is a young gay that has come to Los Angeles expecting to be a dancer but works as secretary of the real state agent Sally St. Claire (Vinessa Shaw). Todd (Richard Gunn) is an artist that neglects his girlfriend and spends most of his time in porn sites. Their lives are entwined when the pornographer Anthony (Patrick Fischler) meets Nathan and April in a bar and he offers two-thousand dollars to take nude pictures of them. Nathan befriends Sammy on the street. Sally hires April to work in her office with Nathan. And Sally dates Todd and finds that there are pictures of her in Internet.

"Garden Party" is a film with enjoyable but pointless stories in LA. The characters are likable but the neither the characters and nor the situations are well developed. The one-dimensional characters are shallow and the story goes nowhere. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

Yeah, one reason why I bought it: that squirrel-cute girl from THE O.C., Kaitlyn Cooper, I hadda see more of her. Oh, I mean that without any innuendo, I found out beforehand that despite the movie's controversial theme, there was no nudity involved for "my little heroine", and for those of you who saw her bare back, remember, that is all you saw, that was all done from a certain angle.

But, getting back to the movie itself, the general consensus here on IMDb is of an under-performer, a disappointment, a wasted effort, and I have to agree, but only in part. The movie is by no means bad, it just lacks proper direction, meandering like lost little rivulets finally converging, but by then, you're fed up already with the scene changing to some other characters just as you finally get into watching.

From my own viewpoint, I only wanted the April story-line, so you can imagine how much that little homeless half-Oriental dude's singing got into my way.

You also cannot take the characters seriously. A little thing it might be, but in this day and age, would a young professional like Sally St. Claire step into gum with her high heels (ooh eek! horrors! a piece of gum! ooh help!) and then stand there offering her leg to a motorcyclist so that he could remove her shoe, cradling her bare foot, and wipe off the offending wad? It is also never explained whether that guy was stalking his dream girl from ten years before. Oh, well, such coincidences might happen in Hollywood, of course.

And, hey, as for Sally, everybody here makes her sound like Evil Incarnate. Business lady who smooths her way with little pot samples. Expects 24/7 assistance, but supplies a place to live + a car. Not her fault her intern dances with another man and gets lured into a toilet.

An empty movie, true enough.

Okay, it's named after the song, but YOUNG AND CONFUSED would have been a better, more descriptive, name for this picture.

People looking for action and thrills should watch another movie. This is for people looking for character driven movies which bring smiles, rather than laughs. Although obviously low budget, everything in the film was quite professional. All the acting was good and the camera-work was equal to any good television series.

Standouts were Vinessa Shaw as real estate Sally St. Claire and Willa Holland as April. I haven't seen either before, but they both presented warm and delightful characters. Richard Gunn as Todd and Erik Smith as Sammy also showed themselves adept at light humor.

I hope that Jason Freeland, the writer-director, gets a chance to do more stuff. He handles this material very well. While there's only a touch of nudity in the film, there is a nice subtle erotic vibe to the film with most scenes centering on some aspect of sexuality.

Los Angeles is a city of transplants, every person arriving with a dream that is eventually shown to be an illusion in the harsh light of city's reality. GARDEN PARTY weaves this theme beautifully with an ensemble cast of up-and-comers.

The film introduces each character as a classic archetype - the runaway teen, the frustrated artist, the demanding successful boss, the aspiring musician, the dead-end job dreamer - but the film then spends its time delving deep into the personalities behind these stereotypes, revealing them all as individuals as it entangles them in various plots that flirt with destruction but offer redemption. Along the way there is porn, pot, homelessness, backstabbing, tools from the entertainment industry, superficiality, revenge ... and love!

As a native Angeleno, what struck me most was how this film captures the mundane, day-to- day existence of Los Angeles with every hint of glamor and Utopian paradise removed from the stark cityscape. What GARDEN PARTY delivers is an accurate and memorable vision of the city of Angels being a landscape of personalities, each with a dream, some with a dark side and most with a sympathetic humanity underneath it all.

Here are some stories and you just observe them from start to finish without anything interesting happening. Surprisingly there are a lot of enjoyable bits somewhere between, but ultimately it's really not worth watching.