As you may have heard from our own Bill Morris, The Canyons, the new movie starring James Deen and Lindsey Lohan, is a bad film that somehow manages to be worth watching anyway. At the LARB, Naomi Fry agrees with this assessment, arguing that the film is important because it “identifies how desperately many of us still want to believe that the larger-than-life, commodified good life is still available to us.”
Bad Yet Vital
Best Screams
Peruse the complete ballots for Leroy Stevens’ “Favorite Recorded Scream” project. “Won’t Get Fooled Again?” Oh, yes, it’s in there.
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On Writing and “Built-in” Editing
Sergio De La Pava, the once and future king of our list of top ten books, gets the interview treatment at The Believer’s Logger page. Now might be a good time to scroll back to our profile of the author, whose first book, A Naked Singularity, came out in bookstores in June.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Remembers the Beauty of the World Through Poetry
Melissa Lozada-Oliva discusses her new novel in verse, Dreaming of You, and the role poetry plays in keeping us attuned to the beauty around us.
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“Hauntedness is a feeling.”
Wyvern is publishing a “Haunted” theme issue just in time for Halloween this year, and you have until mid-September to submit your work. “Haunting is in your bones,” Wyvern’s editors write. “You know it when you feel it, and you know it when you write it. That is what we’re looking for.”
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In Memoriam: Gordon Willis
Gordon Willis, the celebrated cinematographer who worked on The Godfather films and Annie Hall, passed away Sunday at the age of 82. The Paris Review has posted a short “In Memoriam,” which serves as both a wonderful introduction to the work of this artist and a knowing celebration of his work, complete with a video of Manhattan‘s bridge scene and an interview with Willis himself.
Novels for the Ebolapocalypse
“If you want to be grateful for something today, be grateful for that: Ebola doesn’t fly,” according to a 2012 NYT op-ed. (Ok, so that’s not true, but you’re still probably safe.) If you (like me) have been obsessively re-watching that infected American patient walk into his hospital in Atlanta, I’d like to suggest you (I) first relax, and then indulge your (my) Ebolapocalypse fears elsewhere, e.g., a roundup of the 14 best pandemic novels according to Slate, 11 from io9, 22 from Bookshop, or all 1,000+ at Goodreads.
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Anything the critics are getting out of this movie is something they had already brought with them, and the move is giving them a chance to present their ideas as if it’s an organic part of the experience of watching the movie. The Canyons isa pitch-perfect example of incompetence and devoid of any significant meaning beyond what it gives you, which is nothing. The movie is literally empty. The acting is horrible, the script is sub-telenovela, the camera work is film schoolish, and Schrader seems to have forgetten how to edit. Some of these quasi-positive reviews are acting as if this movie, despite itself, is the skeleton key to understanding the current zeitgeist. I’m more interested in way some critics are so intent on giving trash like this a pass, why they want it to be something it so clearly is not.