The Canyons

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.

This film suffers heavily from a distinct lack of sexiness and way too much boring dialogue. And that is just the beginning of the problems. You really know a film is bad when Lindsay Lohan is the only bright light in it!

The Acting: Lindsay Lohan does quite a good job in a couple of scenes involving emotion, though she is much less effective in the (too abundant) dialogue heavy scenes. James Deen shows a few flashes of talent but mainly seems as if he is trying to emulate a method actor with no real understanding of how to actually pull it off. The other "performances" are uniformly bad to less-bad.

The Writing: One word... Awful. Boring dialogue and unbelievable story. Poor ending. I think Bret Easton Ellis is a one-trick pony. He has never managed to equal what he achieved with American Psycho.

The Directing: Same word as above... Awful. Paul Schraeder really should sink back into obscurity. This project is definitely not going to help his career. Poor choice of camera angles and poor framing abounds. He shows no sign of his earlier talents. I think he is lost in his own imagined "genius" as he tries for a gritty realism and gets ugly pretentiousness.

Camera, Lighting, etc.: Poor lighting in almost every indoor scene. It looks like it was shot on a smart phone. The music is irritating. Wardrobe... What wardrobe? It looks like the actors supplied the clothes they wanted to wear. There is no costume design or set design in evidence here.

Sexiness: Basically there is none. Lindsay Lohan looks pretty sad with her prominent beer belly, sagging breasts and 1960s style lingerie. Control-top granny panties are not lust-inducing! The sex scenes are boring and much less spicy than the hype suggested. The "orgy" was so badly filmed it and lit that it was impossible to find it sexy or even interesting. Women or those with a gay interest may find it more sexually appealing but I don't find dangling limp penises to be anything but silly looking. The entertainment media painted this as shockingly graphic but it is pretty tame compared to cable shows like True Blood if you discount the number of penises on view.

In Conclusion: Not really worth a look even if you just want to see Lindsay Lohan in the buff. There was more of her on view in Playboy and her body looked at least a bit better in the magazine. If you are looking for titillating sex scenes you would be better off with Skinemax. If you want to see a dramatic expose of Hollywood's dark underbelly look elsewhere. In fact just look elsewhere. Period.

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.

While "The Canyons" is not a total loss, it still doesn't work. As mentioned, it's about this spoiled and mentally unbalanced trust fund baby named Christian (James Deen) who's accustomed to getting his way, and his gold-digging yet not entirely unsympathetic girlfriend, former actress Tara (Lindsay Lohan). They live in a stylish mansion and have sex with each other and sometimes have guests join them. Partly on his father's insistence that he work, Christian produces the occasional film and one of those films stars Ryan (Gerard Funk Nolan), a hunky actor whom Tara was once lovers with and whom she still secretly loves. This unexpectedly makes Christian violently jealous (even he's surprised by his reaction) and sets in motion eventual tragedy. None of the people here are all that likable, not even the seemingly idealistic Ryan, and the low budget shows. The gratuitous sex and violence is reeks of exploitation. Yet the film is watchable at times. The entertainment industry is somewhat captured and some of the dialog is perceptive. The acting is somewhat better than one would expect. James Deen is a porn star, yet he shows he can carry a lead role without sinking a legitimate film. More importantly, Lindsay Lohan gives her best performance in years. She's a greedy user not because she likes to be, but because she believes she has no choice, yet she's still capable of love isn't really out to hurt anyone. I don't recommend this film, but it's not as terrible as it could have been. For all its faults, "The Canyons" has its moments.

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.