Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

The Canyons Blu-ray Movie Review

A ravine-like career low for everyone involved.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 21, 2013

With a script from washed up American Psycho writer Bret Easton Ellis, directed by American Gigolo's Paul Schrader—who sadly hasn't done anything good since 2002's Auto Focus—and starring America's sweetheart-turned-trainwreck, Lindsay Lohan, the The Canyons is an attempt at a three-way comeback. I say attempt because the "erotic thriller" is a top-to-bottom failure and would be more likely to end the careers of those involved than jumpstart them. For the record, I don't think the end is actually nigh. Ellis will continue his Twitter flame wars, Schrader may have one more late-in-the-game cult hit left in him, and Lohan—with a little luck and maturity—could still turn her life around.

But The Canyons won't do any of them any good. Tellingly, Schrader and Ellis have been doing a lot of finger-pointing in the media since the film's release, the former blaming his troubled star for not promoting the movie, and the latter straight-up dissing the director: "The film is so languorous. It's an hour 30, and it seems like it's three hours long," Ellis has been repeatedly quoted as saying. "I saw this as a pranky noirish thriller, but Schrader turned it into, well, a Schrader film." (What, exactly, did he expect?) The two initially teamed up to make a Jaws-esque shark thriller called Bait—no, really—but when their funding pulled out, they decided to produce a cheaper project entirely independently, putting up some of their own money to fund The Canyons and netting the rest of the tiny $250,000 budget with a well-received Kickstarter campaign. Rewards included a script critique from Schrader—and come on, this guy did write Taxi Driver—and a week spent working out with Ellis and his "celebrity personal trainer."

The production was rocky, with Schrader threatening to fire the perpetually tardy, diva-ish Lohan at least twice—by all accounts, including "Here Is What Happens When You Cast Linsday Lohan In Your Movie," a painfully intimate exposé in The New York Times—and when the film was finally finished and submitted to festivals, it was refused by Sundance and South By Southwest on the grounds of "quality issues." In other words, it's awful. The Hollywood Reporter quoted one SXSW insider as saying, "It's got an ugliness and a deadness to it," an unbeatable description for everything that's wrong with the film.

Just another evening in.

Of course, ugliness and deadness are not foreign to the work of Ellis and Schrader, who both made their names telling stories about disturbed loners in a world bereft of morality. The difference here is that while American Psycho has its gleefully nihilistic satire and Taxi Driver its street- cleaning avenging angel in the form of Travis Bickle, there's nothing at all to like about The Canyons, a film as vapid and plastic as its characters.

In the interminable opening scene, at the bar adjoining Sunset Boulevard's legendary Chateau Marmont, we meet failed model/actress Tara (Lohan) and her boyfriend Christian (adult film star James Deen), a twenty-something "movie producer." And by "movie producer," I mean a vacuous trust-fund baby who has decided to pay for a low-budget horror movie in response to his father's persistent requests that he do something with his life. They're dining with Christian's sometime assistant Gina (Amanda Brooks) and her boyfriend Ryan (Nolan Funk), a broke, wannabe actor who's landed the lead in Christian's film sheerly out of nepotism. Christian doesn't care one way or another, and he's bored with the conversation; he's more interested in the Adult Friend Finder-type app on his phone that's sending him photos of the "assignation" he's invited over to his sleek designer house in Malibu later that evening to screw Tara while he watches.

Christian and Tara are swingers, and the film's conflict arises when they both begin to suspect that the other is stepping out for some action beyond their agreed-upon group play. They're both right. He's been frequenting the house of a different failed actress, Cynthia (Tenille Houston), for "yoga lessons," while she's been secretly reconnecting with Ryan, whom she once shacked up with for a year when the two of them were fresh-faced Hollywood hopefuls looking for their big breaks. (Neither Christian nor Gina knows about the shared history of their apparently not-so-significant others.) When Christian begins putting the pieces together, it brings out his jealous inner psychopath. Cue the emotional manipulations and spying, the Facebook and bank account hacking, the poorly-written arguments and the thrill-less sex scenes of a film that takes itself way too seriously.

The Canyons would be so much better if Schrader had turned up the wackiness dial and made the film into a Showgirls-y, Paul Verhoeven-ish high camp satire. Instead, as Ellis put it, it's "a Schrader film." And not one of the good ones. (Where did the director of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters go?) He seems to have lost whatever touch he once had when it comes to assaying and commenting on art and culture. In the opening credit sequence, and then behind intertitles that announce each new day in the roughly week-long story, Schrader shows stills of derelict, closed-for-good movie theaters, trying to draw some correlation between the idiot industry-types we're watching onscreen—who care more about money and power and celebrity than "the movies"—and the death of cinema itself. He's aiming here for the easiest targets, and he doesn't even hit them, never bothering to further develop the theme.

Beyond the lack of substance, there's also the stone cold fact that The Canyons is all-around ineptly made, even for a microbudget feature. The cinematography, for example, is inconsistent in noticeable, off-putting ways; sometimes the camera is locked down on a tripod, sometimes handheld, sometimes swaying awkwardly, and elsewhere following the characters via Steadicam. There's no cohesion to the feeling of the camerawork or the editing, which features a strange surplus of unnecessarily jarring cuts and transitions. What kills the film outright, though, is the acting, not just from one or two, but from the collective cast. Every other line reading sounds like an excerpt from an audition tape for an actor who should never get the part. Deen is artificial and overplayed, bringing with him all the performance baggage from his porno career. Nolan Funk is a non-presence on screen. And Lohan is dead-eyed, tired, non-committal. If the writer of that scathing New York Times article is to be believed, Lohan used all her energy partying with Lady Gaga and racking up a $46,000 bill at the Marmont. And if The Canyons will be remembered for anything, it'll only be as another of the many twists in her downward spiral.

The Canyons Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Canyons was made quickly and cheaply, and it looks it, with flat, dully-lit cinematography shot digitally with the ubiquitous Arri Alexa HD camera. Besides some light compression, though—which occasionally amplifies and distorts the camera's inherent source noise—IFC's Blu-ray appears true to intent. Clarity is strong during daylight scenes but gets somewhat murkier the darker it gets, and the color grading stays mostly in the realistic range while occasionally veering into stylized territory for effect. Shadows do get crushed in certain sequences—see the four-way sex scene in Tara's laser- lit bedroom—but this was probably unavoidable while shooting on the fly in the dark. Otherwise, contrast is decent. No glaring issues here, but it's still hard to believe this ugly, plastic-y-looking movie was made by the same guy who directed the gorgeous Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

The Canyons Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As usual, IFC has provided two audio options, the default lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix and an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 stereo track. Both are listenable and well-balanced, though neither offers anything particularly noteworthy sound design-wise. The multichannel track is front- loaded, with clear dialogue taking precedence in the mix, surrounded by some occasional quiet ambience in the rear speakers—room noise, light wind and crickets, a lonely helicopter panning behind your head, off in the distance over the Hollywood hills. The music—from composer Brendan Canning and a group credited as "Me and John"—has suitable clarity and presence. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, which appear in bright yellow lettering.

The Canyons Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Creating The Canyons (HD, 6:09): A series of quick, un-narrated B-roll montages themed after the cast, crew, locations, look, and style of the film.
• Creating The Canyons Featurette (HD, 8:48): A short making-of piece covering how the film came together, featuring interviews with Schrader, a self-congratulatory Bret Easton Ellis, and James Deen, who all seem to act like they're the first people to ever make an independent film.
• Trailer (HD, 1:12)

The Canyons Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you're placing bets on what film might sweep the Razzie Awards next year, my money's on The Canyons, a soulless and empty-headed "thriller" that marks the new career lows for writer Bret Easton Ellis, director Paul Schrader, and star Lindsay Lohan. (Co-star James Deen, the most popular man in porn, will surely bounce back, but I doubt we'll see him again in more mainstream fare.) It's just not worth your time, even if you're some kind of Lohan apologist or connoisseur of guilty pleasure cinematic punishment. You'd really have to be a masochist to enjoy this one.