The credits show a series of derelict cinemas, now just ruins, before cutting to a kind of business lunch in which beautiful, vacuous movie people talk about movies and sex. The scene would appear to be 'badly' written and acted but brilliantly directed; if this is what constitutes the movies today it's little wonder so many theatres have closed down. You might call Paul Schrader's "The Canyons" a satire on the movie business but it's much too sour to be truly satirical. For decades Schrader has always been Hollywood's Number One Avenging Angel, condemning sex and violence in his puritanical fashion while showing it in extremis.Now he has turned his jaundiced eye on the business that has been providing him with a livliehood from the seventies onwards. It takes time to get your head around the inane dialogue and the stilted acting that in lesser hands might have condemned this to a straight-to-video release but this is an expensive production, brilliantly photographed in widescreen by John DiFazio, its money shots coming, not from below the belt, but from inside Schrader's head, or should we say from inside Schrader's head and that of writer Bret Easton Ellis who has also been biting the hand that feeds him for quite awhile now.The problem lies in the casting. It's one thing having good actors play 'badly' but it doesn't really work in reverse. The lead here is played by porn star James Deen who is supposed to be someone who, if not exactly intelligent, is at least successful and in this role Deen never convinces for a second. Lindsay Lohan, on the other hand, is somewhat better. Lohan is someone who might have had something of a career had her personal life not got in the way. Everyone else is cast for their bodies and not for their brains which, I suppose, is just as it should be in a film about an industry that seems to have been founded on sex. No doubt the 'Me2' movement will find much here to back up their argument that Hollywood has long been operating on exploitaiton. At least Schrader has fun telling us that all this is bad while wallowing in it. Of course, most people haven't caught Schrader's little jest as intended and the film flopped. It may be far from his best work but I think it fits perfectly into his canon.

I will not regurgitate the story line of this horrendous clunker of a film, The Canyons; there are many reviews outlining this stark, confusing and confounded movie, so I won't bore anyone with a redundant rehashing of this freakishly odd, depraved and lackluster bomb. All I can offer are a few, hopefully non-cruel notes on the sad fate of it's pathetic, washed up lead actress, Lindsy Lohan. Oops, so much for not being cruel. This film (more like student made video) is a true life commentary on the pitfalls and repercussions of allowing oneself to drug and drink her way into oblivion as Miss Lohan has apparently and unfortunately done. This once beautiful and talented young actress was teetering at the precipice of super stardom; now, she is a terribly aged has-been addict who has run her career and life down the proverbial tube. We have watched in horror, and perhaps morbid curiosity, as this young woman has circled the drain and finally sunk into a virtual abyss of failure, and in the end, written herself into the annals of infamy. It's a very depressing sight to behold. In this instance, art really does imitate life. Well, at least REALLY bad art. Lindsy accepted a role befitting a faded and torn painting of her own life. Maybe she took a major turn at Method Acting. Maybe she could truly see herself mirrored in her character. Maybe this putrid film is another note in her real life swan song. Maybe The Canyons is so hard to watch because I actually see a glimpse of the real Lindsy Lohan in a more heartbreaking light. Then again, maybe I am just trying to justify the very existence of this crud-fest in my own philosophical way.

I am surprised Paul Schrader, known for Taxi Driver and Patty Hearst, would direct a film with so many time wasting random movements that students in film school were told to cut out. The characters spend a lot of time getting out of cars, walking up to a door to enter and find someone in a room. And the worst people for the leads were picked, probably because they were so well known as celebrities but not quite as much in the acting department. James Deen has 200 porn films, Lindsey Lohan 200 appearances on SNL and probably as many substance abuse incidents. The scripter, Bret Easton Ellis, should go to an unplug camp for internet junkies and stay a year where he can write five minutes of film without the actor talking on a cellphone or picking up a laptop. No doubt Deen and Lohan just needed a career SOS on their resumes, with him getting old and her running out of acting work. They do well in spite of the dull pacing. Christian is a tyrant director jealous his girlfriend (Lohan) is seeing another guy, the lead in his film, so he knocks off a girl who knows a scandal in his past. He seems to have gotten away with murder and you'll think so did those who churned out this tripe. Agents need to stay out of producing films.

There's not even any reason to give a synopsis to this dog of a film, its a comeback movie for Lindsay Lohan, and to prove she's serious, she gets naked and does lots of things you would have never expected her to do in Mean Girls....The fact of the matter is, she didn't need a comeback, she hadn't done anything of really any relevance since the aforementioned film, and then that film didn't sell because of her, it sold because of the fabulous writing and the nasty streak it had.This is just nasty, and has some streaks, but hey are just from the fake tan.But wow, this is from the guy who wrote the excellent American Psycho, and Less Than Zero. Even The Informers was a half decent look into the excesses of the rich.And it's directed by the guy who wrote Taxi Driver. Another wow.....So again, this is all about the excess of the rich, and how they can influence the lesser people with their money, lifestyle, and bedroom disco lights.But to be fair, any film that has some called Funk in the film, and James Deen, has to be going somewhere.That's right straight in the bargain bin.Worthless filth.