Falling for Christmas

 Falling for Christmas (2022)

Starring Lindsay Lohan, Chord Overstreet, George Young, and Jack Wagner

Directed by Janeen Damian

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - The Canyons

The Canyons (2013)

Starring Lindsay Lohan, James Deen, Nolan Funk, Amanda Brooks, Tenille Houston, and Gus Van Sant

Directed by Paul Schrader

I will readily admit that the only reason I watched The Canyons is because I expected both the film and its troubled star Lindsay Lohan to land on my Worst of 2013 list.  Color me surprised that Lohan's performance is a intriguingly vulnerable one, tapping in to what I can only assume are her own insecurities as she attempts to get back on her feet after a rough go this past decade.  The film itself...well, I've see worse this year...

The problem with The Canyons is that all of its characters are self-involved, obnoxious a-holes.  They're certainly not enjoyable to watch.  Considering that this is from the pen of Bret Easton Ellis, I'm not particularly surprised as my limited knowledge of Ellis is that these types of characters are his bread and butter.  There's a slightly noir-ish tone to The Canyons with story centering around spoiled rich kid movie producer Christian (porn star James Deen) and his inability to trust his live-in girlfriend Tara (Lohan).  The two have an odd, open relationship welcoming men and women back to their palatial L.A. home to partake in a variety of sexual relations.  However, when Christian suspects Tara may be having a "real" relationship with someone other than his controlling self, he's not a happy camper.

While Lohan embodies the worn-down, world-weary, tough-around-the-edges Tara quite well, the same can't be said for James Deen.  While he certainly tries, he can't quite get Ellis's words to come out sounding believable.  Then again, to Deen's credit, I'm not quite sure anyone could succeed as the character of Christian does get saddled with much of film's attempt at creating "substance" and "meaning" by talking about what his character perceives as problems with society.  This is where Ellis falters in that I have no desire to hear what these vapid characters have to say about anything.  While I think it's supposed to be skewering the elite Hollywood mindset it depicts, it doesn't succeed.

The rest of the relatively unknown cast actually does a decent job, but the surprise of the film is Lohan.  She definitely looks weathered here and a little worse for the wear, but this was a vehicle aptly made for her and her recent troubles.  She channels a bit of the noir dames of the past and was honestly compelling to watch.  Good luck to her in the future and here's hoping she can turn her life around.

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Machete

Machete (2010)

Starring Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Don Johnson, Lindsay Lohan, Daryl Sabara, and Robert DeNiro

Directed by Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez

Having never seen the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez flick Grindhouse which apparently contained a fake trailer that spawned Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez' Machete, there weren't really any expectations going into this movie.  In the end, the story probably just should have been content with the kooky fake trailer and left it at that because this homage to the B-movies of the 1970s overstays its welcome by about 45 minutes of its hour-and-forty-five-minute runtime.  

The broad story is ridiculously simple.  The titular character, an illegal Mexican immigrant (played by Danny Trejo), is hired by a shady guy (Lost's Jeff Fahey) to assassinate a Texas senator (Robert DeNiro) who happens to pride himself on his creatively unjust methods on keeping illegal immigrants out of the country.  Little does Machete know that he's simply being set up in order to make the senator (who is experiencing a sharp downtown in the polls) become more sympathetic to the voting public.  Somewhere along the line, Machete discovers this double-crossing and eventually meets up with a sexy US immigration officer (Jessica Alba) with whom he teams up with to defeat his enemies.

What works here is the violence...and there's certainly plenty of it.  Excessive to the extreme, it's in these moments of massive bloodletting where the humor and fun lie.  Taking no prisoners, Machete is a man who'll chop off peoples' heads without pausing for a second, and there's something grotesquely fun about watching ludicrous decapitations and profusely spewing blood.  It's when the film decides to bog itself down with dialog and attempts to present a "pro-illegal immigrant" stance where the film falls apart.  Yes, yes, I'm a republican, but I didn't hate this film for taking the other side of the issue.  I disliked the movie for taking that stance in a silly, unsubstantial way.  I'm certainly not turning to a film like Machete for political advice, but even the final showdown between the Mexicans and the Americans just felt disappointing and unsatisfying after such a lengthy, talky build-up.  (There was actually substantial talk about this issue when the film was released and I think most of the Republican bloggers were giving more weight to the issue than it was worth.  In the end, the movie presents the whole thing in a tongue in cheek way...although it certainly does paint a caricaturish image of Republican senators.)

The film initially starts out visually grainy, looking like a film that's been run through the projector one too many times.  It's rather unfortunate that Machete abandons that look after the first scene because it would have been a little more optically appealing.  That older look screamed "B-movie" and it would've made the horrible acting by the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Alba seem more like it was horrible for a reason as opposed to the fact that the two women just can't act.

The RyMickey Rating:  C-