Jul
12
A few years ago, I wrote a pilot script about listless young people living in Los Angeles. The one and only literary agent who was willing to read it said that audiences aren’t interested in watching anything about the entertainment industry. To be honest, I don’t think she was paying that close attention. The whole script — hell, the whole series — was about people who can’t break in to the entertainment industry. It was the antithesis of all those cacamamie Cinderella stories about overnight successes.
Oh, and then the show “Entourage” came out a couple years later. I understand that it’s a show about the entertainment industry. It’s nothing at all like my idea, but I’m just sayin’. The gatekeepers in Hollywood don’t know anything.
Anyway, this afternoon I went to see “Garden Party,” an indie about listless young people living in Los Angeles. It’s not like my idea all that much, either. One character’s trying to break into the music business (in my pilot, the main character wanted to make movies) but apart from that, the listless young people are mostly in real estate or selling dirty pictures of themselves to creeps.
The stories are all interlocking, making Hollywood seem like the smallest town on the map. I’ll concede that you do sometimes run into people in Los Angeles that you never expected — or wanted — to see again. But apparently in this film, everyone goes to the same coffee shop, the same bar, and the same pornographer. If they didn’t, I guess there wouldn’t be a movie. So I’ll bite.
I like these kinds of movies. Coming out the same weekend as “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (read my review here), “Garden Party” is a nice little bit of counter-programming — a peek into the lives of people with very little going on day-to-day. I’m not sure if that’s the film’s strength or weakness. Tapestry movies like this usually have an emotional peak to each character’s story. The folks in this film just sort of coast in and out of each other’s stories. Their lives change in one way or another by film’s end, but they’re all sort of unimpressed by what’s different about themselves. I guess life’s sort of like that. Movies have spent so much time trying to condition us to think that there has to be some grandiose, life-altering climax. “Garden Party” doesn’t have that.
What the film does have is the gorgeous Vinessa Shaw as real estate agent and marijuana maven Sally St. Clair. I’ve seen Ms. Shaw in other unremarkable movies — “3:10 to Yuma” and “The Hills Have Eyes” — but I’ve never really paid all that much attention to how stunning she actually is. I wanted to see more of her character, and by “more” I mean “bikini photos.”
At any rate, writer-director Jason Freeland’s “Garden Party” taps into that listlessness that I was going for in my own attempt at writing something “real.” I enjoyed the film. It’s lived-in and authentic. The movie feels almost like a pilot for an HBO series. That said, it’s something I would definitely watch every week. I’d like to see what else happens to these characters, and not just Vinessa Shaw.
-Brad Lohan
“Hi, I’m Vinessa Shaw. See ‘Garden Party,’ now in theaters.”
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Vinessa Shaw makes a fairly risque appearance in “Eyes Wide Shut” if you’re into that kind of thing.
Yeah, but then I’d have to sit through “Eyes Wide Shut” again.