Guilty Pleasure No. 72: The Canyons (dir by Paul Schrader)

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It took me a while to appreciate The Canyons.

In fact, it took me so long to appreciate this film that I’m writing a second review it. I initially reviewed The Canyons way back in 2013, the same year that it was released. I praised Lindsay Lohan’s performance as Tara, an actress who is living with a sociopathic producer named Christian (adult film actor James Deen, who was a bit of a celebrity when this film came out but whose star has dimmed considerably since). I complained that the film was too slow and that director Paul Schrader seemed to be trying too hard to find some sort of existential meaning within Bret Easton Ellis’s pulpy script. Though I didn’t really mention it in my initial review, I also felt that rest of the cast was rather dull. Lohan was great, playing a character to whom she could probably relate. Deen was stiff but oozed enough charm to be believable as the manipulative Christian. The rest of the largely unknown cast came across as being dull and somewhat lost.

Though I was nowhere near as critical of The Canyons as some critics, I still was not initially impressed. I thought of it as being a showcase for Lohan’s attempted comeback and little else. But I have to admit that The Canyons has stuck with me. It’s a film that I’ve rewatched more than a few times. While all of the flaws are still there, I have come to better appreciate the film’s languid decadence. I’ve come to see that there was a bit more wit to both Ellis’s script and Schrader’s direction than I initially realized. James Deen’s performance as Christian has grown on me. I like that he’s a neurotic sociopath. He’s evil but he’s needy and, though he’ll never admit it, he knows that he’ll be nothing if Tara ever leaves him. He’s desperate to be loved but he has no idea how to give that love back.

When I first saw the movie, I thought Nolan Funk, who played Tara’s ex-lover, was a bit dull in the role. Upon subsequent rewatches, I’ve come to see that his dullness is actually very important to the film. Ryan is written to be boring. That’s why Tara is drawn to him. His dullness provides some relief from Christian’s mood swings. But, because Ryan is so boring, he can also never truly take Christian’s place. In the end, Ryan still sells out his integrity, first to get a part and then to obsessively check in on Tara. Ryan and Christian are ultimately revealed to be two sides of the same coin. Ryan may be “the good guy,” but — in a typical Ellis and Schrader twist — there’s nothing likable or even that good about him. One gets the feeling that, if had Christian’s money, he would be just as bad.

You really do find yourself feeling sorry for Tara, who is basically trapped between two men who both want to control her. Lohan’s performance continues to be the strongest things about The Canyons. There’s a lot of courage to Lohan’s performance, courage that goes beyond taking part in the film’s sex scenes. Lohan reveals the vulnerability that’s at the heart of Tara. She’s someone who knows that she needs to escape but she also knows that she’s a creation of Hollywood. Hollywood is her home and her world and it’s hard to imagine her surviving anywhere else. Tara is interesting not because she’s trapped but because, in many ways, she would prefer to be trapped to being free.

The film’s flaws are still there, don’t get me wrong. The Canyons still has a lot of moments that don’t quite work. The opening scene, where Christian, Ryan, Tara, and Gina (Amanda Brooks, whose performance also improves on repeat viewing) have an awkward dinner, is almost laughably bad. (In that opening scene, James Deen delivers his dialogue like Dirk Diggler in Angels Live In my Town.) That said, this is a trashy and colorful movie that does stick with you. You might not want it to stick with you but it does! It’s portrayal of sexual decadence and neurotic Hollywood players is far more entertaining than it has any right to be. It may not be a great film but it is one that’s a bit more interesting than many originally thought.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

October True Crime: Smiley Face Killers (dir by Tim Hunter)

Posted on October 16, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Okay, you need to go back on your meds….”

“Kaeen, I am on my meds.”

That exchange, between college student Jake (Ronen Rubinstein) and his girlfriend, Keren (Mia Serafino), pretty much sums up 2020’s Smiley Face Killers. It’s a study of modern paranoia, in which Jake thinks — with good reason — that he’s being stalked and all of his friends think that he just needs to take more of his meds. The fact that a lot of very weird things are happening to Jake doesn’t really matter to his friends. They’ve decided that any and all problems are linked somehow to taking meds. “Take your meds” is the only solution that they can offer up. It’s empty advice but it’s also advice that makes them feel absolved about going to parties and obsessing on their own petty dramas while Jake essentially loses his mind.

Jake suspects that he’s being stalked and that his phone is being hacked and that someone wants to kill him. He’s absolutely right about that. The majority of the film follows Jake as he tries to get someone — anyone — to accept that he’s right to be paranoid. The film may have been sold as Eli Roth-style torture porn or as a postmodern slasher movie but, instead, it’s a study in isolation. Jake is being stalked by the Smiley Face Killers for reasons that are never made particularly clear. That said, one gets the feeling that, if the Smiley Face Killers didn’t get Jake, some other group of homicidal lunatics would have. It’s a dangerous world out there and Jake has obviously pissed off the forces of fate.

Who are the Smiley Face Killers? The film’s opening credits refer to them as being an urban legend, though I think that gives the whole Smiley Face Killer thing too much credit. Over the years, there have been several incidents of college students drowning. All of the students were male. All of them were athletic. The majority of them were members of fraternities. Two retired homicide cops noted that smiley face graffiti was present at many of the “crime scenes” and they came up with a theory that these students were being purposefully drowned by a cult who used the smiley face as their calling card. It’s a ludicrous theory but one that was embraced by some grieving parents who were still trying to understand how their child could have possibly died when he had his entire future ahead of him.

Of course, it’s far more probable that there is no cult. The fact of the matter is that the smiley face is a universal symbol and it’s one that you can find drawn or painted just about anywhere. As well, the majority of the victims were described as being drunk when last seen alive. College students — especially frat boys — have a tendency to drink more than they can handle. When a college happens to be near a river or even a creek, it’s a sad of fact of life that there’s a chance of someone stumbling into the water during the night. That’s especially true if that person is drunk. No parents wants to admit that their child died because he didn’t know when to say when, leaving them susceptible to conspiracy theories about cults. Dr. Phil did an entire show on the Smiley Face Killer theory. Oprah’s network aired an entire docuseries about the theory and pretty much presented it as a fact. Both of them exploited the grief of the parents for ratings. Shame on both of them.

As for the movie, it’s actually weirdly effective. Screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis and director Tim Hunter (who also did the similarly dark River’s Edge) do a good job of capturing the paranoia of everyday life. Jake is pretty much doomed from the minute we see him but the film holds our interest by showing how everyone but Jake has essentially closed their eyes to what’s happening in front of them. In the end, Jake has no control over his fate, whether he’s taking his meds or not.

Book Review: Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Posted on July 3, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After having watched the film version a few hundred times, I figured that it was time for me to sit down and actually read Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero.

First published in 1985 (and written when Ellis was only 19 years old and still a college student), Less Than Zero tells the story Clay. Clay is a rich college student who returns home to Los Angeles for winter break. It’s his first time to be back home since starting college and he quickly discovers that all of his old friends are, for the most part, hooked on drugs and self-destruction. Clay’s friend Rip deals drugs and buys underage sex slaves. Clay’s former best friend, Julian, is now a heroin addict who has sex for money. Clay’s other best friend, Trent, is a model who watches snuff films. Meanwhile, Clay’s girlfriend, Blair, isn’t even sure that she likes Clay. Clay goes to therapy and the therapist tries to sell his screenplay. Clay struggles to tell apart his two sisters and he rarely speaks to his mother or his father. He’s haunted by memories of his grandmother slowly dying of cancer. As winter break progresses, Clay finds himself growing more and more alienated from everyone and everything around him. He feels less and less.

I had often heard that the film version was dramatically different from the book but nothing could prepare me for just how different. In the film, Clay is an anti-drug crusader who reacts to everything that he sees in Los Angeles with self-righteous revulsion. In the book, Clay simply doesn’t care. Clay’s narration is written in a flat, minimalist style, one that makes Clay into a dispassionate observer. Over the course of the narrative, there are times that Clay obviously know that he should probably feel something but he just can’t bring himself to do it. Even when he objects to Rip buying a 12 year-old sex slave, Clay doesn’t do anything to stop Rip or to help his victim. Clay is the epitome of someone who has everything but feels nothing. Most of the memorable things that happen in the movie — Julian begging his father for forgiveness and money, Clay and Blair being chased by Rip’s goons, Julian dying in the desert — do not happen in the book. They couldn’t happen in the book because all of those scenes require the characters to have identifiably human reactions to the things that they’re seeing around them.

It’s not necessarily a happy book but, fortunately, it’s also a frequently (if darkly) funny book. Bret Easton Ellis has a good ear for the absurdities of everyday conversation and some of the book’s best moments are the ones that contrast Clay’s lack of a reaction to the frequently weird things being discussed around him. Even more importantly, it’s a short book. Just when you think you can’t take another page of Clay failing to care that everyone around him will probably be dead before they hit 30, the story ends. Ellis writes just enough to let the reader understand Clay’s world and then, mercifully, the reader is allowed to escape.

Just as the movie is definitely a product of its time, the same can be said of the original novel. Reading Less than Zero is a bit like stepping into a time machine. It’s a way to experience the coke-fueled 80s without actually traveling to them.

Lisa Marie’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2019

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

White by Bret Easton Ellis
Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Raferty
Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kruger and Melanie Anderson
Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meary
Make My Day by J. Hoberman
Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art by Michael Snayerson
The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson
Justice on Trial by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino
Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. by Lili Anolik

Here’s The Trailer For The Curse of Downers Grove!

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A lot of good trailer were released today. Check out this one for The Curse of Downers Grove, a horror film written by Bret Easton Ellis! This one will be released on August 21st.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHupWbq9imY

Scenes I Love: American Psycho

Posted on November 10, 2014 by Arleigh

Last week I put up as one of the entries for the 27 Days of Old School the classic song by Huey Lewis and the News. That song is “Hip to be Square” and I wrote how that song has become famous as not just being part of a great album of the 80’s, but due to the fact that it became the soundtrack to one of the best scenes from Marry Harron’s American Psycho.

Patrick Bateman’s personal take on “Hip to be Square” resonates not just as a description of the song but of the 1980’s as well.

“Do you like Huey Lewis & The News? Their early work was a little too ‘new-wave’ for my taste, but when Sports came out in ’83, I think they really came into their own – both commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humour. In ’87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is ‘Hip To Be Square’, a song so catchy most people probably don’t listen to the lyrics – but they should! Because it’s not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it’s also a personal statement about the band itself! Hey Paul!”

Film Review: The Canyons (dir by Paul Schrader)

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Do you remember that YouTube video of Chris Crocker screaming, “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” while tears and eye liner ran down his face?

That’s often the way that I feel about Lindsay Lohan, a talented actress and a fellow redhead whose career has been destroyed not so much by her own mistakes but by the fact that the tabloids refuse to allow her to move on from those mistakes. It seems that, regardless of what Lindsay Lohan does, not a single story will be written about her that doesn’t mention that she’s spent time in rehab and jail or that doesn’t offer up some sort of tawdry speculation about her private life.

And that’s unfortunate because, regardless of what the tabloids may say, Lindsay Lohan remains an excellent actress who is capable of doing a lot more than parodying her own image in Scary Movie 5.

Consider, for instance, her performance in The Canyons.

In The Canyons, Lohan plays Tara, the world-weary girlfriend of a wealthy sociopath named Christian (James Deen, who may not be a great actor but still projects a proper mix of charm and menace). Christian is a film producer whose need to control and dominate is demonstrated in both the way he manipulates actor Ryan (Nolan Funk) and the way he arranges for Tara to have sex with strangers while he films the action.

Tara and Christian live a life that epitomizes empty luxury, an existence defined of ennui where casual cruelty is the norm. However, when he discovers that Tara is secretly having an affair with Ryan, Christian’s carefully constructed facade of control starts to fade away. Perhaps not surprisingly, Christian’s obsessiveness and manipulative mind games eventually lead to a brutal act of violence…

When it was released earlier this year, The Canyons got terrible reviews and the film is definitely uneven. Bret Easton Ellis’s script is predictable and, while director Paul Schrader captures some haunting images of Los Angeles at its most languid, the film also is a bit too slow for its own good. Schrader takes Ellis’s pulpy script and attempts to use it to craft an existential portrait of American culture and he doesn’t quite succeed.

However, to a large extent, The Canyons is redeemed by Lohan’s excellent performance. In Lohan’s hands, Tara becomes a survivor who has sacrificed her innocence but still has yet to develop the hardness that one needs to survive in Ellis and Schrader’s Los Angeles. As cynical and decadent a character as Tara may be, Lohan plays her with just enough hints of optimism that it’s impossible not to regret the loss of who she was before she met Christian.

It’s a performance that manages to redeem a film that, without Lohan, would have been one of the worst films of 2013.

For that reason alone, perhaps it’s time to leave Lindsay alone and she what she’s capable of doing when she’s simply allowed to act.

What Lisa Watched Last Night: Less Than Zero (dir. by Marek Kanievska)

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I ended up watching the 1987 anti-drug propaganda piece, Less than Zero.

Why Was I Watching It?

Last night, I was hanging out with Jeff, our friend Evelyn, and Evelyn’s friend Steven and we were flipping stations, trying to find something that we could use for background noise. When we came across an announcement on FMC that Less Than Zero was about to start, I made the mistake of admitting that despite having read Bret Easton Ellis’s novel and heard a good deal about this film, I had never actually sat down and watched Less Than Zero.

Well, after everyone got finished making fun of me (boo hoo), it was agreed that we simply had to watch Less Than Zero.

“But,” I started, “isn’t Gone With Wind starting over on TCM…”

“Fuck Gone With The Wind,” someone (I think it was Evelyn because she’s a meanie) said, “you’ve never seen Less than Zero before.”

What’s It About?

It’s about rich kids in Los Angeles doing drugs. Clay (played by Andrew McCarthy, who my cousin Jessica met once and who she says was a really nice guy) is a college student who comes home to L.A. and discovers that his ex-girlfriend Blair (Jami Gertz) and best friend Julian (Robert Downey, Jr.) are addicted to cocaine and that Julian owes a lot of money to a drug dealer named Rip (James Spader).

(Personally, I would never buy drugs from someone named Rip — with the possible exception of Rip Torn.)

Anyway, Clay takes it upon himself to try to save the soul of everyone in California.

What Worked?

Downey and Spader are both great in this film. From what I’ve read, the general assumption seems to be that Downey was just playing himself here but whether or not he was, he still gives an excellent performance. Spader, meanwhile, turns Rip into a great villain by making evil sexy.

The film, full of garish neon and defiantly tacky pastels, looks great in its decadent, shallow way. The same thing can be said of the music.

What Didn’t Work?

Everything else. Less Than Zero really doesn’t work as an anti-drug film because the character of Clay seems so boring when compared to Julian and Rip.

If I had to choose between the three of them, I’d probably hang out with Rip because 1) he always seems to be having a good time, 2) he’s apparently not a drug addict himself, and 3) he’s got the most money of all of them. That therefore makes him preferable to both Julian, who is having a good time but is also a drug addict, and Clay who isn’t a drug addict yet appears to be miserable throughout the entire film.

“Oh my God! Just like me!” Moments

One night, years ago, I found myself making out with an ex-boyfriend in a convertible while one jagged bolt of lightning split the night sky above us and hundreds of scary guys on motorcycles drove past us. As is often the case, the memory was better than the ex.

Lessons Learned:

Drug dealers make the best dates.