Echo Park

..is written in this film. between the plot of struggling with the American dream, where at the end friendship wins the day and the 80th flair, including soundtrack and a cheap dim TV-footage, a midget art piece can be found. German synchronous version is the icing on the cake! enjoy!

Echo Park is a bizarre and meandering film that continually defies expectations. It is entertaining in its flaunting of conventionality yet ultimately unsatisfying in its dramatic and its comedic aspects. The love triangle never builds any poignancy or any real interest, even, while the laughs come only sporadically. What are we to make of the opening and closing sequences involving the bodybuilder's father? Does the alpine frolic at the end suggest that the Ahnult wannabe has successfully rewritten his past? Has his friendship with Tom Hulce and Susan Dey allowed him to re-conceptualize his origins, transforming the nightmare of blood and sausages into a "Sound of Music" dreamscape?

One of the most ridiculously written and directed movies you will ever see. Possibly entertaining to some because of it's absurdity, particularly the ludicrous ending sequence. The character's have all the depth of * characters, making you wonder if the writer/director have ever even met the sort of people they make caricatures of. May possibly have been written by someone like Bob Dole. Particularly entertaining is the wardrobe. The bodybuilder who wears cowboy boots outside of his jeans. The slick agent who wears sunglasses over his acne indoors. You know what you're dealing with immediately in the scene where Tom Hulce brings in that 4" pizza, pulls a cutter out of his pocket, and starts slicing it up in the kitchen. Good Lord.

I liked this movie a lot. Kind of ad and depressing. A single mother working hard in LA just to make i work. I watched it when I was about 15, I don't remember if she used drugs in the movie or not maybe. Well it show different side the glamors Hollywood and Beverley hills anyway. At that time there were not a lot of movies on Swedish television. around 1988. I hope it will appear an a swedixh channel again some tine. Susan Dey who to me is Grace Van Owen in LA Law and nobody else make a good performance in this movie. I recommend it.

The title takes its name from that run-down, Bohemian quarter of Los Angeles, where (among other inhabitants) a pizza delivery boy dreams of publishing poetry, a single mother works nightly as a strip-o-gram dancer while awaiting her big career break as an actress, and a naive bodybuilder lands a role in a cheap deodorant commercial, setting his alarm for 3:00 a.m. to see his (small) screen debut. It's a neighborhood of considerable charm and eccentricity, but too bad the same can't always be said of the film, which has its moments but (in retrospect) all too often resembles an offbeat, low-rent plagiarism of Neil Simon. Michael Ventura's script is curiously transparent from a writer (in the LA Weekly, at the time) of opaque film criticism; the only way his scenario could be more obvious would have been to make the Tom Hulce character an aspiring screenwriter instead of just a closet poet.

A cute film. Echo Park is apparently a fairly seedy district of Los Angeles. Susan Dey plays a bartender who wants to be an actress (unheard of in L.A., huh?) and gets a job doing Strip-o-grams. The pathetic thing is, she considers this her big break. She takes in a roommate, Tom Hulce, who delivers pizzas for a living. He immediately falls for her, but she is enamored of a neighbor, an Austrian who spends all his time pumping iron. He is convinced that he will be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger, and is completely oblivious to how miraculous it is that there is one Arnold, and hardly a big market for another. Anyway, Hulce's character spends much of the film suffering that terrible pain of loving someone, but seeing her throw herself at someone inferior. I had never heard of this film, but I liked it fairly well. Cassandra Peterson and Cheech Marin have small roles, also. Grade: B

This movie was recommended to me by a person who I believe has great taste in movies. But I have to admit that I totally missed the mark on this one. I lived in LA for 12 years and I enjoyed seeing some of it again, but that is about the only redeeming value I got out of the movie. The opening and closing sequences seemed totally bizarre and out of place. I thought the acting was sub par and where the story was going was totally predictable until the jump cut to the scene at the end where everyone was suddenly running through the Alps like the opening sequence to the Sound of Music. This was billed as a comedy. I don't think I laughed out loud once though it had some mildly humorous moments. I could have skipped this one easily.