Watched
The Canyons, scripted by Bret Easton Ellis, of who's work I'm generally a
fan.
It's
directed by Paul Schrader (screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging
Bull), so you would expect a certain level of quality. Unfortunately,
it was terrible. Tara (Lindsay Lohan) doesn't realise that her agent
or whoever (porn star James Deen) is a psycho, despite him being
generally weird and vacant from the outset. Low point- no discernible
plot. High point- Lohan's tits.
(NSFW, obviously.) Her performance was actually better than I
expected, (although she was playing a bit of a fuck-up- i.e. herself)
but the rest of the cast were playing characters that were façades to
begin with, and bringing that kind of vacancy to life requires a
level of subtlety that none of the actors possessed. Watchable, but
forgettable.
I
later redressed the balance by re-watching The Rules of Attraction, a
film based on Ellis' novel of the same name.
An arts
college in New England, some time in the 90s (shifted on a decade
from the book): an unrequited love triangle emerges to the backdrop
of parties, drugs, sex, and dissociation. It received a fair wad of
criticism on its release in 2003, and it must have been about a decade since I last watched this film. But it still holds strong as a
rollercoaster of a movie and is still by far the best adaptation of
Ellis' work, as he himself agrees.
The
screen adaptations of American Psycho and Less Than Zero were
let-downs, and The Informers got bad press (I'll check for myself
soon). Will somebody in Hollywood now please adapt Glamorama? And please don't fuck it up!
BTW, did I ever mention I met the guy?
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