My apologies if this is too “inside baseball,” but a movie earning $172,000 in its first weekend of release isn’t — SPOILER — good. If I haven’t already lost you with all that cinematic jargon, let’s talk about inAPPropriate Comedy, a quote-unquote “comedy film” directed by Vince Offer, a.k.a. the ShamWow Guy who got into an “altercation” with a Florida prostitute four years ago, that earned a whooping $625 per theater. By comparison’s sake, Movie 43 is f*cking Avatar. inAPPropriate stars the murderers’ row of talent that is Rob Schneider, Michelle Rodriguez, Adrien Brody (as “Flirty Harry”), and Lindsay Lohan.

Of course it does.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was going to do something a little uncharacteristic and pay Scary Movie 5 a compliment based on the new trailer. As I was watching it, I started to think, “Hey, at least it kind of seems like these guys are trying to get back to the definition of parody, unlike dipsh*ts like Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, whose idea of parody is a Paris Hilton clone saying, ‘That’s hot.’” Then five seconds into the trailer, the black guy started stealing stuff and I just said, “Oh f*ck this.”

Meanwhile, this latest installment in the franchise that hasn’t provoked an intelligent laugh in 12 years, appears to be content with just going through the motions of cheap pop culture references (“It’s Honey Boo-Boo!”) and smug celebrity self-awareness. Charlie Sheen looking into the camera and saying, “I’ve come back from worse” is like Nordberg telling Frank Drebin, “I’ll take a stab at it” and then winking at the camera. Fortunately, the Zucker Bros. relied on good comedy writing.

But look at me being all negative, when I promised y’all a trailer and a poster. Maybe you’ll enjoy it more than I did.

Read the rest of this entry »

Boy-next-door porn actor James Deen, born Bryan Matthew Sevilla, recently wrote a first-hand account of his experience working on The Canyons for DailyBeast. Considering the source material, his account is a truly impressive combination of compelling yet un-gossipy. Okay, so he does call James Franco a dick at one point, and of course I’m going to blockquote that:

After my first meeting with Paul, he mentioned he was going to a James Franco party for an art piece he commissioned called “Rebel Dabble Babble.” “I’m in that!” I told him. I ended up crashing the party with Bret, but that’s another story. My not receiving an invite to a party to celebrate a project I was part of is the point. One, Franco is a dick. Two, I would be fighting an uphill battle. Paul and his wife were not the only ones who thought of me as a party trick. Other than Braxton, Bret, and in time, the crew of The Canyons, everyone I met and worked with saw me as a joke.

To be fair, I’m not sure James Franco can even keep track of what art installation he’s doing with what male porn star on any given day. Anyway, this excerpt sort of sums up the theme of the piece: that no one in Hollywood respects actors, and that especially no one respects porn actors. They only enjoy them as a novelty.

Braxton and I spoke about cameras, my experiences on movie sets, and the personality types of most “actors.” No one likes actors. They are commonly referred to as “meat puppets.” Every person involved in movies thinks of actors as a joke. Braxton laughed as I ranted about the incompetence of every actor I’d ever met. He seemed refreshed and excited to get me involved.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Canyons famously stars sometime porn actor James Deen and Lindsay Lohan, and, after getting rejected by both Sundance and SXSW, was probably well on its way to obscurity, leaving behind little but a really good NY Times profile. But now it seems that it will hold onto its fame a few minutes longer, as Vivid has offered James Deen the unprecedented opportunity to direct and star in in the XXX parody of his own movie. Normally, I’d say something like this was a cheap publicity stunt – and it is a cheap publicity stunt – but the guy’s already a porn star. It’s not like there’s anything stopping him. In my experience, porn stars aren’t especially picky about their scripts.

Here’s the letter, from Vivid Entertainment’s Steve Hirsch. Forgive the grammar/spelling errors, he is a pornographer.

Hi James,
We’ve been following the news of your mainstream movie “The Canyons” with great anticipation, and we have a business offer that we think will intrigue you.
As you know Vivid is widely recognized as the leader in adult parodies and we would like to produce aVividTV parody of “The Canyons” directed by you, and starring you.
It would be a first in parodies…the actual star of a mainstream movie also starring in an X-Rated version of that same movie! How cool is that?

“Hi James?” Not even “Hi, James?” Man, somewhere, the Microsoft Paperclip is telling anyone at the bar who’ll listen, “See? I told you these motherf*ckers would be lost without me.”

Anyway, it’s ironic that Lindsay Lohan’s co-star, who she was convinced was stealing her thunder (rightly, I might add), is the one getting offers to play the porn parody version of himself. We always assumed it would be Lindsay who’d be the first to play the porn parody version of herself (I mean, career-wise, she’s already 70 percent there). I have to commend commenter Jacktion! for leaving the following prescient comment way back in May 2010:

Jacktion! says: I think Lindsay Lohan is playing Linda Lovelace in the porn remake of the Linda Lovelace biopic.

Almost, buddy. Almost.

[banner image via]

Poor Lindsay Lohan has been having a rough time lately. First, there was the 7,000-word profile in New York Times magazine about what a pain in the ass it was to work with her on The Canyons. Then The Canyons got rejected from Sundance. And now, it’s been rejected by South by Southwest, with a source saying the film has “an ugliness and a deadness to it.” And that’s just when they were looking into Lindsay’s eyes! You’re welcome, Jay Leno, now you don’t have to write that joke tonight.

Sources tell THR that SXSW has joined Sundance in rejecting the erotic thriller. A festival insider tells THR that the Bret Easton Ellis-penned, Paul Schrader-directed Canyons — which features tons of nudity, including au naturel shots of Lohan — suffers from significant “quality issues.”

Says a festival insider, “It’s got an ugliness and a deadness to it.” Canyons producer Braxton Pope says the filmmakers are still awaiting official word from the festival. [hollywoodreporter]

Moar like the CanYAWNS, am I right? If I saw this Lo-han-ging piece of Pope, I’d drive Easton until my car James Deened into a tree. /fakeGeneShalit

I haven’t seen the film, but I’ve seen some shithouse films at film festivals (*cough* Buried *cough, cough*), and to me this smacks of film festivals desperately needing to assert that they’re somehow “above” this kind of celebrity. See also: Robert Redford slamming Paris Hilton for showing up to Sundance. So yeah, it’s fun to make fun of Lindsay Lohan being a train wreck, but festival organizers don’t get a pass on being smug hypocrites either. They’ll say it’s about the quality of the film, but more likely she just doesn’t have the right kind of celebrity for them. They want stuff like Adrien Grenier doing a documentary about paparazzi, or Turtle’s lyrical, semi-autobiographical think-piece about the nature of celebrity (doesn’t exist yet, thankfully). The movie itself will be just as insufferable as The Canyons, but the star will show up and wear a nice scarf and pretend it’s all about the art while collecting the same gift bags, and everyone’s happy. Why, we can’t have Lindsay Lohan coming here turning our nice fart-sniffing festival into some playground for dilettantes! Think of the scandal!

By the way, how were the reviews for the last Bret Easton Ellis-scripted film presumably of sufficient quality to be admitted to Sundance, hmm?

Read the rest of this entry »