Director:  Paul Schrader
Writer: Bret Easton Ellis
Cast: James Deen, Lindsay Lohan and Gus Van Sant
Studio: IFC Films

Everything about this movie is hard to watch. The acting, the directing, the storyline, and the movie’s overall message to the audience. The “magical movies” which Lohan’s character talks about is lost among the audience. I believe the Canyons does represent how Hollywood has been to many people. After all, the Canyons is located in the city of Lost Angels. A canyon after all is a giant hole, an abyss. The Canyons comes across as a “cry for help” of a movie that talks about how people have been victimized by the movie industry and by the people in that industry.

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. But, I don’t expect much out of anything that Ellis has done in the last decade.

This is not a movie to admire for its plot. But what is unique are the performances and the dialogues the actors have with one another. Bret Easton Ellis has managed to depict another side of the human mind. Here people are portrayed as ambitious individuals who will go to any extent to achieve their dreams and ambitions. I found Christian’s character to be quiet hard to believe. He seemed to have double standards having open relationships with other women, but was hostile when he discovers Tara seeing someone. This makes it difficult to a certain extent to accept him. In relation to the climax he neither takes the typical form of revenge, but instead his alternate action is understandable.

RELEASE DATE: 08/02/2013

Director:  Roland Emmerich
Writer: James Vanderbilt
Cast: Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, James Woods and Richard Jenkins
Studio: Columbia

“White House Down” seems to suffer from an identify crisis, serious political thriller vs comedic quips. And it appears to be nothing more than a vehicle for Channing to perform impossible heroic stunts. I’m surprised Channing would include himself as a producer on this boring piece, very little different from Olympus Has Fallen of a couple months back. And it is an obvious promotion for the Obama administration– you know Obama good and everyone opposed to him is bad.

None of the characters stand out. I’m not asking a Joker show here but at least the antagonist needs to have his motive clear. Twists appear completely out of the blue, I mean it should be a good thing but there should always be a good justification so that all the bits and pieces join together to make the twist believable. Simply saying how would you react if Alfred from the Batman trilogy turned out to be the villain in the last scene. Movies in which action does most of the talking, need to have deep rooted and believable characters, and this starts from the writing stage till the final casting but unfortunately this is one of the weakest aspects of the movie. I mean a simple way to gauge that would be to ask yourself, how badly you want the villain killed or the love story to end on a positive note or the leading man bash up the antagonist in the final act. In this movie, I felt none of those.

Other than the decent chemistry between Tatum and Foxx, there is no enjoyment to be found anywhere in “White House Down.” Bad guys are duly dispatched, the world is once again free from nuclear meltdown and a corn pone ending is wrapped around a safe PG-13 rating that makes everything all right and somehow feasible.

RELEASE DATE: 06/28/2013