Is anyone else tired of the whole multiple-characters-doing-unrelated-things-and-then-intersecting-somewhere-towards-the-end-of-the-movie genre? Seriously. What seemed ever so slightly innovative the first two or three times (reference the grossly overrated Crash and Babel) now just looks like a lazy way for scriptwriters to avoid the bother of creating a dynamic, functional story, instead just throwing a bunch of types on the screen and letting them yak at each other for 90 minutes.

In Garden Party, those people are photogenic young artsy types who hope to achieve some sort of success in Los Angeles. Sally St. Clair (Vinessa Shaw) encounters artist Todd (Richard Gunn), who likes porn, and he recognizes her from some naughty photos on the Internet -- which he promises to retrieve for her in exchange for a little nookie. Elsewhere, the movie jumps between 15-year-old runaway April (Willa Holland), who falls into a hackneyed movie-of-the-week world of posing for such photos; Sammy (Erik Smith), a musician who lives off the kindness of other people; and Nathan (Alexander Cendese), Sally's assistant who wants to be a dancer. Oh, and he may be gay. Or not.

To make up for a glaring lack of character development or plot, writer/director Jason Freeland (who based the script on his own short stories) has his young'uns smoke too much pot and go through the motions of fulfilling the obligations of their simplistic character descriptions. His thesis seems to be that L.A. is a cesspool where everyone's pretty, stoned, and expected to trade sex for success at every turn (Sally explains that she decided to become a realtor because "I was desperate for a job where I didn't have to take my clothes off"), which is not only pretty stupid, it's also surprisingly boring.

The obligatory catalog of alt-rock songs is designed to spread a layer of cool over the film, but the result ends up a little like listening to the Scrubs soundtrack while partying with Lindsay Lohan. These are unlikeable, unpleasant young idiots with nothing to recommend them, and Garden Party is a grinding, dumb examination of people that no one with half a brain would care anything about.

The DVD from Lionsgate looks good, with a bright, clean 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer and solid 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. As befits a film this flimsy, there are no bonus features other than the theatrical trailer.

Dawn Taylor grew up in L.A., and knows that not everyone there is pretty.

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