Garden Party (2008) Reviews

• Enjoyable but Pointless Stories in LA

  claudio_carvalho2012-03-20

  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

• Deja Vu

  MBunge2011-07-12

  It's not that Garden Party is badly made, just that it seems like this exact same movie has been made 3 or 4 times a year by 3 or 4 different indy filmmakers for the last 15 years. Is there some book out there that teaches people to write this same script as some sort of screen writing exercise? Is there something in the bottled water shipped into Los Angeles that makes people forget they've done this film over and over and over again? Is there some cursed videotape floating amongst the aspiring fringes of the movie industry where if you watch it, you see a girl climb out of a well and the only way to save your life is to write this same script and get it produced? Garden Party is about a bunch of fairly aimless people in LA whose lives are tangentially connected. Yes, one of them is a kid from the streets trying to break into show business. Yes, another is a gay kid from the Midwest. And yes, there's young girl running away from a broken home. No, there's really not much of a plot or a particular reason to give a crap about anything or anyone involved here. There is a moment about 2/3rds of the way through when things almost get a little interesting. Unfortunately, writer-director Jason Freeland is apparently allergic to drama, undermining and deflating the tension before the moment is halfway over. Our cast of characters includes April (Willa Holland), a young girl running away from a leering stepdad who has to turn to nude modeling for fast money; Sammy (Erik Scott Smith), a talented young musician who rises from homeless to budding pop star so fast and relatively painlessly it might make any real struggling singer/songwriter who watches this movie want to kill themselves; Todd (Richard Gunn), a wealthy artist with nothing better to do than masturbate to internet porn; Nathan (Alex Cendese), a blonde slab of beef whose Hollywood dreams have fizzled; Sally (Vinessa Shaw), a real estate agent who slips her clients marijuana as a sales technique; and Anthony (Patrick Fischler), a low-level pornographer who still quaintly uses an actual camera with film in 2008. The actors all do perfectly fine work. Vinessa Shaw gives the standout performance as a very benign version of a film noir temptress. She's sexy and smart but way too nice to people. The almost interesting part of the story is when Sally lures Todd into a scheme to get naked pictures of her removed from the internet, as if such a thing were possible. If this movie weren't so determined to avoid any sort of excitement, that might have been worth watching. As it is, the film sets up some drama and then completely undercuts any sense of danger or even conflict. Then it does it again, just in case you didn't get the point the first time. Garden Party is well directed and looks okay. The dialog isn't memorable but neither will it make you cringe or facepalm. It's really not a bad movie. The problem is that there've been so many low-budget films about "tangentially connected people in city X" that it's basically become a sub-genre, like torture porn or zombie movies. If you're going to add something to a sub-genre, you need to do something a little different with it. Garden Party never does. There's no reason to avoid this movie, but also no reason to watch this instead of one of the umpteen other versions of the same thing.

• A nice little time waster flick.

  testacorsa2009-01-09

  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.

• I have bad taste and I enjoyed it

  jay_hovah7032009-02-27

  I have a habit of liking movies with low production value due to their craptasticness. There is nothing about this movie that is good except for the fact that it tries so hard with its worn out stereotypes and shoestring budget. The movie doesn't portray reality or LA at all. Yet, in all its cheesiness, I found myself smiling. The scenes with Ross Patterson as Joey Zane are really funny. He's trying so hard and it shows. The movie itself goes nowhere and ends where it starts: without any crescendo or plot succession. I guess these people are older and perhaps wiser, but I doubt it. I give this movie a 7 for its bad dialogue, tired portrayals of artists, and quotes like, "I don't go to school. I'm a musician." If you like cheese and have a couple minutes to waste, this may be the movie for you.

• Perfectly Captures the "Move to L.A." Experience

  wryter642008-07-08

  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.