The Canyons is breathtakingly vapid

by Adrian Mack on August 7th, 2013 at 11:16 AM

1 of 2 2 of 2

Starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen. 19+ only. Opens Friday, August 9, at the Rio Theatre

Back before he was forced into making crowdfunded soft-core porn starring a tabloid wreck, Paul Schrader had a career in the movies. A pretty interesting one, too! If he wasn’t the most consistent filmmaker, directorial efforts like Auto Focus or his script for Taxi Driver brought some depth to the ultratormented male behaviour Schrader was often trying to depict.

The Canyons is breathtakingly vapid in comparison. There’s nothing—and I mean nothing—that is real, true, or insightful in this movie. If Schrader had any feel for camp, then perhaps his tale of kink-seeking Hollywood trash could have been turned into something like Valley of the Dolls by way of Caligula. Instead, with its pathetically earnest and astoundingly lousy dialogue—courtesy of rapidly deteriorating novelist Bret Easton Ellis—we get The Room with none of the laughs.

As it is, the only appeal here is the morbid spectacle of a scarily over-Botoxed Lindsay Lohan in a psychosexual showdown with porn star James Deen. He’s a decadent, sex-addicted, sociopathic rich kid, and she’s the abused partner. Much nudity and a notorious, climactic four-way ensue. The film’s other characters aren’t worth describing.

None of the performances work, but it’s hard to imagine how they could. Lohan evinces a single convincing moment when Deen’s character hits her, but if you caught the widely read New York Times magazine article about this film, you’ll know that she talked about channelling her relationship with Daddy for that scene. So, yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Equally painful, in its own way, is a montage of abandoned cinemas that inexplicably plays behind the title and end credits. Bottoming out with digital-age, sensationalist junk like this, how could it be anything besides a sad expression of Schrader’s own torments?

Watch the trailer for The Canyons.

Comments

5 Comments

out at night

Aug 12, 2013 at 10:56am

Can the Straight start sending grown-ups to review movies from now on? The Canyons is not anything like soft core pornography. It has a great deal of sexual content but the actual sex scenes are neither all that abundant nor all that graphic. This review reminds me of all the ballyhoo I remember hearing about Henry Miller's "scandalous" book Tropic of Cancer. When I got around to reading it myself I was struck by the book's incredible scope. Sex is in there for sure, but right along with food, music, painting, walking through a city filled with light and mystery (Paris), life's struggles (to eat, find love, make a living, create), geography, culture, history, and Miller's distinct take on how consumerism and American cultural hegemony is ruining the world. But all anyone could talk about was the sex. Grow up you prudish, provincial, blind, stupid beings!

Paul Schrader didn't just make a couple movies! He has visited this territory before in movies like American Gigolo, The Comfort of Strangers, Mishima and Light Sleeper. His screenplays rank as some of the very best in the history of cinema, including Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, the Mosquito Coast and many more. A reviewer of one of his films should be looking for more than scandal and scurrilous details about the leading lady's motivation for a scene. Who cares about your gossip Mr. Mack? Not me. I want a review of a movie by a master of the art form, so please, Georgia Straight, don't send a kid to do an adult's job.

Adrian Mack

Aug 12, 2013 at 11:16am

Hi out at night, I can see from your anonymous message that brevity isn't one of your strengths. We have to convey a lot of information in only 300 words, so the luxury of making lengthy if questionable comparisons to Henry Miller is something we just don't have.

The Canyons is built entirely on scandal and scurrilous detail; something that a grown-up will recognize somewhere between the casting, marketing, and first virtually unwatchable 5 minutes of the movie. Hence the focus of the review.

If you see some depth in there, that's great. But speaking as someone who's actually seen pretty much every movie directed or written by Paul Schrader, thanks, I'm pretty confident that The Canyons is his nadir as a filmmaker. I hold Blue Collar, Affliction and Auto Focus all in very high regard, by the way. I even defended Cat People when it first came out.

You remind me of the one or two critics (hello New Yorker) who have bent over backwards to defend this turd because they can't seem to allow that their hero is fallible. Have you seen it?

out at night

Aug 12, 2013 at 12:53pm

Sorry, my lat post may have been sent unfinished...

Okay, your website allows for both anonymity and 'lack of brevity' so I'll take advantage. I choose expression and loquaciousness over the preferred "brevity" of this post-literate age. I do not do Twitter nor do I send emails so truncated and impersonal as to be indecipherable and/or socially unacceptable to anyone born before 1982.

Yes I've seen The Canyons and thought it was terrific. It belongs right up there with Schrader's other movies about degradation (Hardcore, American Gigolo, Auto Focus etc.).

Paul Schrader is above all else a moralist. He comes from a strict Calvinist background and he has never really deviated from a path that is unapologetic in its inherent judgment and concern with good and evil in the world. His few failure owe more to experimental ambitiousness than any loss of integrity (Cat People springs to mind).

So you are saying he suddenly lost his way and sold out. That "The Canyons is built entirely on scandal and scurrilous detail". Like Chris Penn unable to believe that Michael Madsen just out of the blue turned rat in Reservoir Dogs, your claim rings false to me. So if you reject the idea that this movie is true exploitation, then it is a morality tale and should be viewed as such. Just my say so.