Echo Park

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.