Garden Party

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.

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.

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.

I liked Crash. I thought the interweaving story lines was subtle enough to not make me second guess any of the writing. The issues dealing with race and class differences was very compelling and brought me to a different level when I left the movie theater.

I do not like Garden Party. Here we have yet another film about people living or moving to LA to try and follow their dreams. The problem with stories like this is the subject matter itself. The film has a smart premise, but I simply did not care for any of the characters.

That being said, Garden Party is not a total failure. While the story lines that do join together are forced and many times just don't feel genuine in the least bit. But we do have small scenes of character interactions that are quirky, funny, and charming.

The movie portrays LA a little differently than people see it as on the outside. Unfortunately for LA, the more real perception of the city isn't very pretty. And when a movie comes along trying to push that specific point, it better do it with some characters we want to care about.

In the end, Garden Party is the story of how we struggle to live our lives, and how not everything is golden and happy on the outside. You might connect with some of the terribly stereotyped characters, but in truth the writing doesn't lend itself to a strong character development, the acting as a whole is sub par, and the story simply not believable. I didn't buy into it, but you might.

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.