Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Paul Schrader's "The Canyons"
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The following review was originally published in 2013 for the now defunct Grolsch Film Works. The unlikely team-up of Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader behind The Canyons, the troubled starlet’s artful “comeback” film, unsurprisingly yields strange results. Lohan is Tara, who with her boyfriend Christian (James Deen), is helping produce a horror film with Gina (Amanda Brooks) whose boyfriend, Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk) has the lead part. These are the principal characters of what is a melodrama virtually isolated to the interiors of sickly modern Canyon residences and restaurants. A web of secrets, lies, and dirty deeds entangles Tara, Christian, and Ryan, as they jockey for position: texting, drinking, and fucking (strangers, occasionally)—seemingly, their only three past times. Schrader’s Hollywood Hills figure as some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, barren of everything aside from its populous wealthy, whose vapid lives signify an artless landscape of cinema, where any aspirations involving the seventh art are beyond the frame, an unwelcome ghost merely haunting its attic.
Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Paul Schrader's "The Canyons"
Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Paul Schrader's…
Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Paul Schrader's "The Canyons"
The following review was originally published in 2013 for the now defunct Grolsch Film Works. The unlikely team-up of Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader behind The Canyons, the troubled starlet’s artful “comeback” film, unsurprisingly yields strange results. Lohan is Tara, who with her boyfriend Christian (James Deen), is helping produce a horror film with Gina (Amanda Brooks) whose boyfriend, Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk) has the lead part. These are the principal characters of what is a melodrama virtually isolated to the interiors of sickly modern Canyon residences and restaurants. A web of secrets, lies, and dirty deeds entangles Tara, Christian, and Ryan, as they jockey for position: texting, drinking, and fucking (strangers, occasionally)—seemingly, their only three past times. Schrader’s Hollywood Hills figure as some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, barren of everything aside from its populous wealthy, whose vapid lives signify an artless landscape of cinema, where any aspirations involving the seventh art are beyond the frame, an unwelcome ghost merely haunting its attic.