Review Roundup: End of Summer Edition

Welcome to a late summer Review Roundup, in which I briefly take you through some of the small or independent films that have been released the last several weeks. These movies are Blue Jasmine, The Canyons, Lovelace and Prince Avalanche. Enjoy.

Blue Jasmine

Dir: Woody Allen

While Woody Allen’s recent output has had its pleasures, most would agree that it’s been a while since his films have had any real edge to them. Even Midnight in Paris, which was widely acclaimed and nominated for several Academy Awards, doesn’t aim to be any more than a purely pleasurable experience. This is not the case with his new film Blue Jasmine, which is a surprisingly biting comedy about characters who all too readily see the faults in each other but almost never in themselves. At the center of it is a mind-bogglingly good performance by Cate Blanchett, who plays a character that’s visibly lost at sea right from the beginning all the way to the end. After several years spent wandering around Europe, it’s heartening to see that Allen is still willing to get his hands a little dirty. Instead of highlighting any of the beauty or glamour that finds its way on screen, he is quick to undercut it. Blue Jasmine is bleak right down to its final shot, but in that bleakness Allen was able to make one of his funniest and best films in recent memory.

Grade: A-

The Canyons

Dir: Paul Schrader

There’s been a great deal of buzz around The Canyons, the latest film directed by Paul Schrader and written by Bret Easton Ellis. Unfortunately, just about all that buzz has been exceedingly negative. It was made for only $250,000, it stars Lindsay Lohan, and the most publicity it got was via a New York Times story that chronicled the troublesome production. Several festivals rejected it, and a distributor didn’t pick it up until IFC stepped in with a deal that would put it out on Video On Demand. Once the movie is seen, it becomes clear why so many festivals and distributors said “no.” It’s not even that it’s bad in a campy way, or else some would have probably jumped all over it. Instead, The Canyons is simply a boring and lifeless experience, made all the more disappointing because it has a great deal of potential. It’s in the same area code as a good movie, but it wound up getting stuck in a really bad neighborhood.

The weirdest part of the whole thing is that Lohan is probably the aspect of The Canyons that works the best. She’s hit-and-miss throughout the film, but she has a scene near the very end that is impressive enough to show that she still has considerable talent. Her co-star, adult film actor James Deen, also has an impressively menacing aura. The sociopath type suits him well. However, just about everything else here is a lost cause. Schrader just doesn’t seem all that invested in his film, and rarely does it feel like the work of someone who’s been in the business since the ’70s. It’s a joyless film with only a moderate interest in its own existence, and that feeling of apathy is just about guaranteed to rib off on any who seek it out.

GRADE: C-

Lovelace

Dir: Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman

There is precisely one interesting aspect of the biopic Lovelace, and that is the structure. Without going into details, the film’s first half is devoted to the ascension of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace to the top of the adult film world after just one movie. Then, the film jumps back in time and reveals the not-so-surprising truth about Linda via a somewhat captivating montage. This reveal could have and should have had a deep emotional impact. Instead, the execution of the rest of the material hijacks it, and the result is an utterly normal biopic that provides no real insights into its protagonist’s life. It skips along the surface like a summary of Lovelace’s Wikipedia page, and it’s too focused on trying (and failing) to recapture the energy of movies like Boogie Nights. The last thing a bad movie needs to do is remind the audience of other, better movies they could be watching.

Grade: D+

Prince Avalanche

Dir: David Gordon Green

After a few years of directing such low-class fare as Your Highness and The Sitter, David Gordon Green has at long last left the land of the juvenile with Prince Avalanche, a super low-budget film about two men working on various roads in the aftermath of a vicious Texas wildfire. There’s no real plot to speak of, and much of Green’s time is spent observing either the scorched trees or his two protagonists (Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch) talking about their lives. It’s as small as movies get, and ultimately it’s not that substantial, but Prince Avalanche is an absolute pleasure as far as it goes. It’s about two characters who intentionally spend several days cut off from the world, wandering around an environment where all signs of life have been incinerated. That’s more or less the extent of it, but it’s a gorgeous little doodle that proves Green hasn’t left all his ambition behind.

Grade: B+