Garden Party

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.

Well, it's my first comment here on IMDb, but since this movie only had two comments before mine, one of them rating it perfect and the other one below average, I thought mine would make sense.

First of, I really liked the semi slow-flowing pace this film had. It kept me entertained the whole way through, and I was excited to see what happened next.

Eash characters little story holds dilemmas, and situations we can understand and relate to. While the storyline isn't heading anywhere in particular, it takes you through a short period of time in the character's life. I like this style, and when this is done well, I find I don't long for a big climaxes, or an ending where everything comes together.

Sadly there is a lack of depth in the characters. The stereotype characters work very well, but we aren't allowed to look much further below the surface. The perspective is always from the outside as a spectator, which makes the few reactions and emotions seem pretty superficial and hollow.

This movie could have been much more! A bit more manuscript development, and it would have been up there.

So all in all: This is not a masterpiece, and not a movie I will remember, but a good hour and a half's entertainment well worth watching.

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.

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

Usually when I'm watching a movie, I wanna care about the main characters and most likely root for their storyline. First off, this movie had way too many characters including one "main" character who really didn't fit in to the main storyline at all. In all honesty, I only watched this movie because Jennifer Lawrence was listed in the cast. She was in one scene that probably lasted 45 seconds in the first 10 minutes of the movie. Somehow her character was given a name even though her name is not mentioned in the scene. Regardless, this movie meandered all over the place. The "garden party" itself was a basically a 5 minute scene focused around the character who barely has any connection at all to the other main characters. I mean honestly, his story is completely unnecessary and he's also not very likable. The only character I actually liked was the real estate agent. She's the only one who actually had a decent story. The rest were super shallow and I just didn't care at all about them. Anyway, if you're like me and saw J-Law was in this, you can stop watching after her scene. This movie goes nowhere. Not sure why the reviews are so positive when this has a fairly low rating.