ORIGINAL TITLE The Canyons

YEAR 2013 Apple Trailer

RUNNING TIME 99 min. 

COUNTRY 

DIRECTOR Paul Schrader

SCREENWRITER Bret Easton Ellis

COMPOSER Brendan Canning

CINEMATOGRAPHER John DeFazio

CAST Lindsay Lohan, James Deen, Amanda Brooks, Nolan Gerard Funk, Gus Van Sant, Tenille Houston, Michelle LaRue, Lauren Schacher, Victor of Aquitaine, Jarod Einsohn, Philip Pavel, Alex Ashbaugh, Matthew Hoffman, Andres De La Fuente, Chris Schellenger, Jim Boeven, Thomas Trussell

STUDIO/PRODUCER Canyons / Prettybird / Sodium Fox

OFFICIAL WEB https://www.facebook.com/TheCanyonsFilm

GENRE Thriller | Independent Film (USA)

SYNOPSIS/PLOT Director Paul Schrader and writer Bret Easton Ellis join producer Braxton Pope to finance THE CANYONS, an original Ellis script about youth, glamour, sex and Los Angeles, circa 2012. "We came to the same point at the same time," Schrader said. "We all experienced the frustrations of financing and institutional censorship. But now, with advances in digital photography and distribution, we can tell a story in the manner we choose. Movies are changing and we're changing with it."

PRO REVIEWS ----------------------------------------

"Lohan (...) gives one of those performances, like Marlon Brando’s in 'Last Tango in Paris' (...) with her puffy skin, gaudy hoop earrings and thick eye makeup, there’s a little-girl-lost quality to the onetime Disney teen princess that’s very affecting" (Scott Foundas: Variety)

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"Far from the renegade, boundary-pushing, sexually explicit sensation that its makers have been suggesting, 'The Canyons' is a lame, one-dimensional and ultimately dreary look at peripheral Hollywood types not worth anyone's time either onscreen or in real life" (Todd McCarthy: The Hollywood Reporter)

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"With 'The Canyons', [Mr. Schrader] tries to get at something real under all the hard, glossy surfaces, but ends up caught in the divide between the movie that he seems to have wanted to make and the one he did" (Manohla Dargis: The New York Times)

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"Stephen Rodrick's New York Times article about the making of 'The Canyons' had humor, suspense and propulsion. They should have made that movie. What we have here is dead on arrival (...) Rating: * (out of four)" (Peter Travers: Rolling Stone)

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"'The Canyons' is not porn, but it has the demoralized second-rateness and the lowlife inanity of the porn world" (David Denby: The New Yorker)

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"Paul Schrader's miscast, poorly executed and utterly soulless drama is an example of the failing art form it seeks to indict. Though it has real ideas, Schrader and his team never manage to put them into action" (Eric Kohn: Indiewire)

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"She (Lohan) isn’t the best thing about this awful (...) drama (...) but in her defense, Lohan has been atrociously directed, allowed to get away with the worst aspects of her vocal-fry laziness, and trotted out like a symbolic objet d’art (...) Rating: * (out of five)" (Joshua Rothkopf: Time Out)

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"'The Canyons' is not the worst movie of 2013 — it's marginally better than 'InAPPpropriate Comedy' and 'Scary Movie 5', two even worse bombs that Lindsay Lohan also lent her rapidly diminishing talents to — but it is surely the most boring I’ve seen (...) Rating: 0 (out of four)" (Lou Lumenick: New York Post)

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