There was a time when Lindsay Lohan looked like she was going to be huge. It was 1998, and The Parent Trap had just hit cinemas. She was playing two roles at once – a complicated feat for any actor, never mind one not yet in her teens – and she was the belle of the critic’s reviews.
Fast forward just 14 years and Lindsay Lohan’s latest movie, The Canyons, is supposedly so bad that they’ve had to cut the trailer for it in such a way that it looks like a corny film noir movie. How the mighty have fallen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SxShyePUF_I#!
If you thought that was bad enough, consider her co-star, loveable porn star (but, you know, still a porn star) James Deen. Deen’s actually been praised – and for good reason – he manages to look at least compos mentis in the trailer, but let’s be honest: this thing is wooden, stilted and just doesn’t look great.
It’s also written by Bret Easton Ellis, who lost any sort of cultural reverence about 15 years ago and has been trading off the name of American Psycho ever since. All in all, it doesn’t look good for her.
It’s such a shame because she could act – and then drugs and drink caught up with poor Lindsay. Post-Winehouse, she’s the star the general public worry most about. She’s not a happy sloppy drunk like Rihanna: she looks wild, out-of-control and a little ill all the time.
She doesn’t turn up to movie shoots (which has cost her a job at least once before); she has the ruddy, chubby look of someone whose face is filled with booze. And she’s left starring in a film where either the action is so thin or the acting so un-salvageable that they’ve had to disguise it in the trailer with gimmickry.
The film…well, here’s where I’d love to tell you what the film is about. But I don’t know. It’s been kept a secret. Studios think that when they keep a plotline a secret, and don’t release screeners to reviewers, it gives off the aura of it being something so fucking good that they don’t want to spoil it for the first people to queue up on opening day. They don’t realise that people see through the thinly-veiled attempt to hide schlock of the highest order.
The Parent Trap, Mean Girls – hell, even Herbie: Fully Loaded! – were examples of good or great films in which Lindsay Lohan added something worthwhile. The Canyons probably won’t be joining them.