The Canyons

After watching this movie six times I have decided to write a review. Words can't explain how much emotion is put into this movie. It had me laughing at some parts, but mainly crying. I can't describe how well the actors and actresses did portraying their characters. Lindsay, did a wonderful job, and I believe this could have been her comeback into the acting world. I think after most critics watched her outstanding performance they learned: don't judge a book by it cover. Nolan Funk was probably my most liked character though. Finally, instead of playing the bad guy like in glee or popfan Funk played someone good. He did an amazing job and should be in more movies like this one and play more roles like his character. I wish in the end Ryan and Tera ended up together but, not every movie has a happy ending. This not so happy ending can make viewers imagine that when Ryan was on the phone he was trying to make sure Tara was safe. Which, leads viewers to believe he is still deeply in love with her, and wants only the best for her. Sincerely, The wolf watcher 🐾

Idk why people are complaining what was u guys expecting ? It's a typical low budget movie, the actors all did good, it's nothing special but it entertain me.

horrible. wanted my gut to be wrong. it wasn't. not even a little bit. save your money and more importantly your time. skip this movie.

Lindsay Lohan's raw, passionate, fearless performance is the best thing about THE CANYONS. She is BACK!

Found a ton of bad reviews and was intrigued... how bad is bad? The film is saved by some of the acting, some of the scenes & location yet overall seemed like a college freshman attempt at "noir." That was shocking given the production pedigree. With any wit, eroticism, style, or just one character for the audience to care about this could have been sharp and black-humored. Heck, there wasn't even a memorable theme song a la Blondie's "Call Me." Still, James Deen proved watchable in a fresh & skillful non-acting performance (you weren't aware of him "acting"), and Lindsay doing her studied impression of Liz was there, too. Bad wasn't so bad, after all.

Can we get this for purchase

Bad

This movie wanted to be good... I was rooting for it to be good... but it didn't happen. I will credit Lindsey Lohan as a top-notch actress, as she really made the best of a bad situation. The rest of the characters were kinda sad, and the story drifted "near" some interesting plot lines... but never made it come together.

Big boobs and tiny talents. Lousy lines, lousy timing, lousy plot. Lindsey's a two-note harp: bored and hysterical. Disgusting movie.

“When was the last time you went to see a movie in a theater? A movie that really meant something to you?” It’s a loaded question, asked by one of the characters in crowd-funded, Bret Easton Ellis-scripted, Paul Schrader-directed film about the part of Los Angeles that exists on the periphery of the movie business, and which opens, ends and is intercut with arty photographs of boarded-up movie theaters. Ellis and Schrader want to ask us the same question, because they want us, the audience, to ask ourselves the same question – when did we last see a good movie? – and, ideally, agree with their pronouncement that the movies are dead. There are two reasons why they want this: one is that, in the cynical world of the hipster, nothing is cooler than to be the first to pronounce something dead. The other reason it suits Ellis and Schrader to declare cinema dead is that it is, effectively, dead for them. Ellis, who wrote the novels Less than Zero and American Psycho in his twenties, both of which spawned well-received films, hasn’t been able to get a movie made for years; the last two films adapted from his work (The Rules of Attraction and The Informers) were critically derided, commercial failures. Schrader, who in his heyday scripted Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, has fared even worse, getting fired from the last film he was hired to direct, Exorcist: The Beginning, and replaced… by Renny Harlin. Obviously, movies aren’t dead – no more than baseball or football is dead just because most people watch them at home on their big flatscreens, rather than actually go to games. Leaving aside the obvious irony of making a movie which declares, more than decries, the death of movies, what Ellis and Schrader seem to be saying, subtextually for the most part, is that the movie business has changed beyond recognition – and the peripheral players in it are panicking. How fitting, then, that the two principle characters are played by individuals who epitomise the darker side of Hollywood: James Deen, the well-endowed star of some 4,000 porn films, whose very name evokes Old Hollywood in the same awful way that porn films often ape the titles of mainstream films; and Lindsay Lohan, the former child star and preternaturally talented actress (so great in The Parent Trap and Mean Girls) whose personal life and nose-diving career have become punchlines for the mean-spirited, give-me-reality-or-give-me-death TMZ generation she partly helped to create. When their casting was announced, shortly after the film reached its $150,000 funding goal on Kickstarter, it seemed like a sick joke at the expense of no one in particular, except perhaps for the few thousand crowd-funding backers. But here’s the real surprise: it works. Deen, whose typical films commonly require him to perform rather than act, has a weirdly blank expression entirely suited to the role of Christian, a feckless trust fund film producer who only makes films to show his father he’s actually doing something. Lohan, meanwhile, follows her underrated portrayal of Elizabeth Taylor (for the TV movie Liz and Dick) by bringing exactly the right amount of ingénue-gone-to-seed insouciance to the role of Tara, who once dreamed of being an actress, but having tired of the endless drudge of waiting tables, auditions and rejections, has taken the easier option of becoming Christian’s live-in girlfriend and plaything. As we meet the unhappy couple, in an excruciating restaurant scene that mercifully gets the film’s low point out of the way early on, Christian is regaling his assistant’s boyfriend, Ryan (who is secretly having an affair with Tara), with tales of his and Tara’s sexual adventures, largely involving threesomes and foursomes found via the (fictitious) Amore app, which locates casual sex hook-ups without the bother of having to advertise on Craigslist. Tara is too jaded to be seriously offended by Christian’s airing of their dirty laundry; she has made her bed (with Christian), and she would sooner lie in it than ever go back to Ryan’s life of “waiting tables for eight bucks an hour” – even if the part of her that still loves, loves Ryan. Christian is the classic obsessive/possessive/abusive type: he stalks Tara, checks her phone messages, and grills her about her movements and encounters… and yet he is turned on by watching her have sex with other people. While this seems paradoxical behaviour, it isn’t: polyamorous relationships tend to involve sanctioned, contextualised adultery, often within pre-determined boundaires; thus, in a ménage a trois, rather than cheating on Christian, Tara is acting out his (or her) sexual fantasies in the confines of a situation which Christian controls; any liaison (such as her affair with Ryan) that might take place outside of Christian’s control would constitute an unforgivable betrayal. The true paradox is really that, despite all the stalking, hacking and demonstrative jealousy, Christian doesn’t love Tara – and neither does she love him. They are, however, monstrously co-dependent, like younger, but equally jaded simulacra of Martha and George from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, who, like Christian, invites another couple, less worldly and bitter than they are, to the epicentre of their miserable existence. The Canyons is not, in the end, about the death of motion pictures – although it’s an added irony that you’d have to drive a lot further than the actual Canyons to find a theatre showing it – but about the death of privacy and intimacy. It's uneven, and its last-minute genre switch is unconvincing, but for all its flaws, it’s a thoughtful and thoroughly modern look at the way in which we wilfully sacrifice our privacy, by sharing every thought, image and memory with whoever will listen, and confuse true intimacy with a kind of reality-show pseudo-reality in which we know everything about everyone – without ever really knowing them.