Having missed last Tuesday’s screening of Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons at the Walter Reade, I finally caught it yesterday afternoon on my Macbook Pro while waiting at Newark Airport for my Virgin America flight to LA. Obviously it’s not that great but it’s not that bad either. Or at least it didn’t seem that bad after reading all those shitty reviews. The characters couldn’t be chillier or more spiritually vacant, but that’s the idea, right? It’s present-day Los Angeles as a kind of Dante’s Inferno. Everyone lies, nobody trusts anyone, a rancid scene every which way. The film has issues (including technical ones) but I got through it. I wasn’t greatly offended.

If you plan on seeing it, do what I did and read all the reviews and then hit play — you’ll be expecting a total piece-of-shit and it’s not. Here and there The Canyons actually shifts into gear and does something. Goes somewhere, I mean. Like that scene when Nolan Gerard Funk turns the tables on that bald-headed producer who’s reluctantly playing a manipulation game at the ordering of James Deen and says, “Okay, but let’s do it right now…go ahead, suck me off.” And I liked Tenille Houston‘s nude scene with Deen. Okay, so I’m an animal. I’m also saying she’s one of those actresses you can’t help staring at or feeling drawn to, and I don’t mean that in a rutting beast sort of way.

Incidental observation: Lindsay Lohan is going to be late-career Shelley Winters within five years unless she stops doing whatever she’s doing.