As a child, I wondered why no one in the movies ever had to go to the bathroom. When suiting up to fight crime, Batman never tells Robin, "Now, kid, go now, because we're not going to have time later—and you know how hard it is to unzip these codpieces." Ecto-1 was never delayed because one of the Ghostbusters—probably Venkman—misplaced the keys. There are no scenes in Wayne's World of Wayne wandering around his kitchen, murmuring that he was hungry but unsure of what to eat.
There are certain things, I realized later, that are too boring to film. Everyone besides Peter Jackson knows this. Well, everybody besides Peter Jackson and, apparently, Bret Easton Ellis.
There are a lot of things amazing about this preview clip from The Canyons, the Ellis-written, Paul Schrader-directed "star vehicle" that will be the next car to plow into the infinite-car pileup that is Lindsey Lohan's career. The Observer's Drew Grant chooses to focus on Lohan's apparent inability to act with props. Fair point—the way she knocks over that water bottle is truly puzzling. Other items to note:
- James Deen is a more natural actor than Lindsey Lohan.
- The dialogue in this film was either lazily improvised or lazily written.
- Lindsey Lohan does not look good.
I could come up with some nasty metaphors about the degree to which she does not look good, but that would be cruel, and I'm not here to pick on Lindsey. I'm here to make fun of this script.
This is a two and a half minute sequence about somebody trying to find her cellphone. This happens to all of us. Your phone has been mislain. You ask someone to call it for you, or, if you own a landline, you dial the number yourself. You look around for it. You listen to the receiver to see if it's ringing. You wonder how long the delay will be between when you hear it ringing in the receiver, and when you hear it in real life. You wonder if you left it on vibrate. You find your phone. Or you don't.
Every moment of this is dramatized, thanks to the dramatic powers of Schrader & Ellis. Not just dramatized, but lingered over, the way a good film might linger over something interesting. But this is not interesting, and boy oh boy, this is not good.
At the end there's a bit of yelling, a bit of violence, that suggests that while Lindsey was searching for her phone, there was supposed to be some tension. In context, maybe there would be. But to release this as a preview clip, to suggest that this is the most tantalizing moment of the film, well...I suppose I did just write a couple hundred words about it.
You know what? I'm onboard. Consider me tantalized. But if this movie is just meant to troll—if it's supposed to be tedious—then it has already lost. Nothing in The Canyons could possibly match the wonderful stupidity of Lindsey Lohan's masterwork: the scene in I Know Who Killed Me when her bionic leg dies because she forgot to charge its battery. That's what I called filmmaking. That's what I call Lohantacular.