Director:Â 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