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.
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.