The Canyons

Whoo-boy, saw "The Canyons" and I guess to damn it with faint praise is that it isn't the worst movie I have seen this year (congrats still, "Grown Ups 2").

"The Canyons" does have its minor moments of art-directed, abject L.A. decadence and contains a modicum of car-crash curiosity. Lindsay Lohan is OK in it, as is porn star James Deen - although both are characters I'd pretty much cross the street to avoid in real life.

The movie is as nihilistic and dead-at-it's-core as it was designed to be, particularly expected when you have the guys who collectively created American Psycho and Taxi Driver piloting this thing. In fact, if you took Bret Easton Ellis' "Less Than Zero" and spliced it with Paul Schrader's "American Gigolo", you've pretty much got this movie's number.

Schrader's camera captures the vacuum of this glam couple well in the early going setting up Lohan and Deen's hedonistic, vacant relationship - its coolly pointed in its visual observation. Ellis manages to make a few catty points about the movie industry and those who work in it. It doesn't add up to much, though.

Perhaps coked-up "The Canyons" greatest misstep is that it settles to be forgettable mid-grade trash instead of a batsh*t-great guilty pleasure. The movie seems satisfied to recline in low-speed soap-opera theatrics, softcore antics and smug button-pushing instead of putting pedal to the metal and really going gonzo - which both writer and director are prone to do in their own individual projects.

In the end, the film's final act basically torpedoes whatever low-budget goodwill the picture had cobbled together. Both director Schrader and writer Ellis are expert provocateurs and have done - and will do - better than this shoestring experiment. Still, it coulda been worse.

I was eager to see 'The Canyons' because of Paul Schrader, Brett Easton Ellis directing and writing respectively, and Lindsay Lohan as the lead. I'm not a LiLo fanatic by any means, but I have always thought that given the right script and director she would be primed for a comeback. And if she can clean up her personal life then maybe she deserves one. The film for me was neither horrible nor far from perfect. The movie opens with scenes of boarded up movie theaters's, and I don't quite get the symbolism there since Hollywood seems alive and well. It is puzzling to me though that the Schrader/Ellis team had to go the Kickstarter route to raise a minute $250,000 for the budget. As you probably know, the film center's around two couples- a trust fund 'doucebag' named Christian who hasn't even read the script for the movie he is helping fund and Lohan as his girlfriend Tara, and unknown to Christian, Tara's ex Ryan, who is now dating Christian's assistant. Ryan has also been cast as the lead in the movie, and he and Tara are still hooking up. You would think Christian wouldn't be jealous of Tara's sex life since he constantly invites strange men and women into their bedroom, but of course he is. He suspects Tara is sleeping with Ryan, and things spiral out of control from there. Much has and will be said about the sex scene's in the film, but for me what really worked was Lohan's performance. You can sense that the actress knows her career is in trouble, and when she talks about needing to be taken care of, and not wanting to go back to being poor, you start to wonder where the acting stops and her real life begins. The movie isn't perfect, and the performances are flawed. I'm not at all happy with the ending, but I still think it's worth watching.

Release Date: 2nd August 2013 (US)

After starring briefly in two of the years worst films, Lindsay Lohan makes her full length return in Paul Schrader's "The Canyons". A film that documents just how crazy one individual can go, when he finds out about the secret love affair between his girlfriend and the lead on his film project.

With this being Lindsay Lohan's first full length appearance since the critically panned, "Labor Pains" released in 2009, there has been a lot of correspondence and speculation surrounding this indie flick.

Despite hearing some very mixed opinions, I have to say I wasn't particularly fazed by "The Canyons". The film is littered with problems, yet I never really had any trouble sitting through it. It is overdramatic and slightly ridiculous, but at times, that alone makes it a very compelling watch.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't enjoy the movie, but I didn't dislike it either. It's a very middle of the road experience. Well at least it was for me anyway.

The films production budget is very low. So don't go into it expecting some extravagant revenge-romance esque thriller, because that's not what it is. In a way, the films plot-line could be compared to that of a soap opera. It's not particularly exciting, but it is partially entertaining watching it unfold.

However, for such a low budget film ($250,000 to be precise), the film is actually rather attractive. It is very well lit and the various locations work with the direction that the film goes in. It's well cinematised, and in terms of shots, whilst it doesn't do anything original, there were times when I was watching the film amending some of the cinematography.

Now a lot of media outlets have compared to the film to porn. I don't necessarily agree with that statement. Sure there are specific body parts that are revealed on numerous occasions, but whilst there is an emphasis on sex, it's not as explicit as a lot of people have made it out to be.

The performances are average. Nobody really impressed me and whilst nobody is bad, some of the dialogue is very cheesy and repetitive, but of course that can only be blamed on the writers. Lindsay Lohan offers a solid turn as does real life porn star, James Deen, but nobody does anything that you're going to love or remember the next day. Everyone's very mediocre, and due to how ridiculous the film eventually becomes, the characters all end up becoming rather comical.

Whilst the film does lack in its key areas, along with the cinematography, one of the aspects I liked was the score. I will be the first to admit that it does sound very amateurish, but the electronic nature of it occasionally works, with what the movie is trying to present. That presentation being that shouldn't have affairs, especially if you're dating a complete an utter psychopath.

I have to admit The Canyons was lot of better than I expected it to be. I didn't necessarily enjoy it, but there were aspects to it that I liked. Perhaps I'm being too nice, but for a low budget production I didn't find it too bad. If you have a partial interest in seeing it, see it. But if you don't, then I wouldn't bother.

5/10

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This is a failure from the normal standpoint where films are the perfected sum of their construction. There is no beauty to speak of, no clever writing. They could have found better actors. But is this the only way we have to evaluate films? Sure, we celebrate Kubrick for his meticulous beauty, Nolan for his mechanics of story; there's none of that here. But we also celebrate makers like Herzog or Cassavetes for their intuitive pull to unmask a real life trying to balance, the stories all about this effort.

This strangely works for me because Schrader reached out to where the cracks and damage have settled on real lives by the turn of things.

For an enhanced effect, you might wanna see this in a row after Mean Girls and a bunch of James Deen porn—I didn't but I could feel a faint tension humming at the edges, already interwoven with the fiction. And if you read about the shoot, there's I think a Variety article that covers the gonzo wreck it was, Schrader jeopardized the whole thing several times over by casting Lindsay. I'm sure she was the most recognizable name he could get on his budget, but it's also obvious he had to have someone like her and not any other girl.

It is soap as others say: games of power over the viewer with nervous exposing of souls as the trophy of cruelty. But having Lindsay and Deen in there asks of us to recognize the bare selves we know before anything could be touched over, it's to see her withered beauty, cloudiness around the eyes and sense of being lost as truly heartbreaking because we know it's not all acting. Deen is much less interesting, a simple lust for control. But it registers as a callousness that was already there before any character trying to act; no one who slaps women in hundreds of videos is merely 'acting'. So when we see Lindsay trying to avoid another character prying into her life, when later she's on a bed making out with a girl for a movie like this (and being filmed in it) or when Deen erupts on her in a frenzy; that's real dust flying through the air.

This is the kind of stuff Herzog tried for when he got Bruno to America for Stroszek, looking for entries into someone experiencing this as not simply artifice. We're in lesser hands here but having this as our anchor rubs off on everything else, suddenly we have a whole mess of things that are no longer just flaws but the thing showing itself. I like that it's not all dressed up and somewhat raw, that the acting is inexperienced, that Deen's mansion is that mansion from porn videos, that the camera discovers an ordinary Los Angeles. It wouldn't be the same without LA around these people. We reinvest all the cinematic dreams we've had from Sunset Blvd to Mulholland.

Oh, all the stuff about the abusive richboy being a filmmaker, acting as life and feeling objectified in images are as obvious now as that whole filmmaker subplot in films like Last Tango and Blackout. The film does reflect Ferrara who was caught in the 90s between obvious constructions and evocative air. So it's not some great film by design. But Schrader was smart (or cynical enough) to know he could create a situation that would pull everything else, bending it to where he'd like to go, skiing on the pull.

Watch like you were unsure yourself where real life picks up again.

Predictable, usual nihilistic Bret Easton Ellis script, all they do is show bored and cynical people, usually texting o having sex or taking advantage of someone else, "Hollywood style", of course. Broke bartenders/actors ready to do everything for a role, gay people ready to "help" them, pretty girls faking relationships because they don't wanna be broke anymore, the usual, you know. Pouty-lip James Deen is OK as a proper actor I guess, that role didn't require much effort after all. Lindsay is basically playing herself or possibly the tabloid version of herself, I'm afraid. Don't waste your time, unless you're an Easton Ellis die-hard fan.