Dog112 This movie has given me a new understanding and appreciation of a word I first learned in high school chemistry class: sublimation. That was when I learned that a solid could transform directly to a gas withoout becoming a liquid. But this movie introduced another meaning, and served it on a platter in the last scene.

lamegabyte Well, a lot of you consider her as a non looker. However, for me, she is like a plug : i really feel electrified by her charisma and for that, she is as good as a lot of those sexy babes that i put on my list! Usually, this tension is on when there is a halo effect but here i can't remember a look alike girl that i would know. Sure, she is a bit like Madonna (#50) and Janine Lindemulder (#26) and maybe a Swedish girl i know but i'm sure that there's something more i can't explain yet.. What's sure is that when « Mississipi » aired again in July 2014, she literally illuminated my evening and thus i started to follow her movies. I would never expected to review one of her movies here but this one is really worthy of it ! This « Laurel canyon » is totally terrific and exciting as for one time, Frances gets very loose : i understand that she wanted to try nudity and pushes her usual envelope and honestly she wins! flashing her tits, unzipping her man, swimming nude and having a sort of threesome with a girl… The fact that her partner is Beckinsale just adds some more spice and truly things really get hot in that canyon!

justin-kindy I'm sure those reading this review have read the plot, so there is no need to go into it again. Frances McDormand transforms herself into yet another different character, Jane, than what she has played before, that of a Rock n' Roll producer who liked the 60's and 70's and decided to never leave the lifestyle, and she does it effortlessly and beautifully. That said, her character is a cliché, at best, which probably helped her step into that role. That is one of the problems with this movie. Most of the characters are clichéd caricatures of what we expect to see. In fact, the plot is so clichéd that you know what is going to happen about 10 minutes into the movie. Another problem with this movie is that if the character is not a cliché, it is an unbelievable character. There are two very noticeable and unbelievable deviations from the cliché. One is in Sam (Christian Bale). Sam is Jane's adult son and is the opposite of his mother, having disliked the lifestyle she immersed him in as a boy. He is pretty conservative and has recently graduated from Harvard Medical School. I've yet to see the son of anyone in that lifestyle decide they want to work long hours at a respectable job. Not very believable. But, Bale puts in a fine performance and is very likable and appealing to the audience. In Bale's case, it is not his fault that he is playing an unbelievable character, because he is very believable as a conservative Psych Doc. The problem lies in the writing of what created this character, his history. The second deviation is in Alex (Kate Beckinsale). Alex is Sam's girlfriend who has not only graduated from Harvard Medical, but is currently working on her dissertation. We're supposed to believe that Alex is so naive and has been so protected that once exposed to the lifestyle of Jane and the rock band she is producing, that she loses her inhibitions and ambition that has gotten her this far. Her slouch towards hedonism is brought about, not by Jane, but by her rock band's lead singer, Ian (Alessandro Nivola), who is also Jane's lover. The only problem is that there is no chemistry between Ian and Alex. There are a few witty comments and you can clearly see the actors looking on at each other to show there is an attraction. They don't even try to hide their supposed attraction when Sam is around (also unbelievable). Ian is yet another clichéd character in this mishmash of cliché and unbelievability. See this movie because both Frances McDormand and Christian Bale are masters of their craft and can pull you into any character they possess. But, expect to see them do this in a pathetic story line.

MBunge This might have been a good film if someone had been able to say "enough" while they were making it. I'm not sure who's at fault here. It could be a self-indulgent writer/director, feckless producers, meddling studio executives or demanding actors. Whoever is to blame, there are simply too many characters going in too many directions that are too disconnected from each other. Those machinations leave too little room to explore inter- and intrapersonal conflicts that are sparked by plot devices and smothered by too much back story.Sam and Alex (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale) are a young unmarried couple. He's a psychiatrist and she's his smarter half, going for her PHD in genetics. They move to the West Coast for Sam's new job and have to move in with his complicated mother Jane (Frances McDormand). She's a record producer trying to finish up a new CD with the band of her young boyfriend Ian (Alessandro Nivola). As Alex tries to finish her dissertation, she gets caught up in the rock-n-roll atmosphere at Jane's house and quickly morphs into a hanger on who's attracted to both Ian and Jane. Meanwhile, Sam gets caught up in a mutual attraction with an inexplicably Israeli doctor (Natascha McElhone) at his new hospital. On top of all that, add in a running battle between Jane and a record company executive (Melissa De Sousa) and Sam's attempts to help a troubled young man with a mother who's like the anti-matter universe version of Jane.Laurel Canyon isn't poorly directed or poorly performed and none of its individual scenes are poorly written. The film as a whole, though is overstuffed and undercooked. The characters have to room to breathe, the relationships have no time to grow and the overall story is never able to get anywhere. Sam and Alex's relationship is barely established on screen before they start drifting apart and since there's no way to be really invested in them being together, there's no drama in seeing that union strained. Sam and Jane are supposed to have a troubled and distant relationship because Jane is a self-centered free spirit who never really parented her son. But their family history is never more than hinted at, Jane spends most of the movie behaving in relatively appropriate ways and Sam and Jane probably spend less time together on screen than Alex and Jane. The movie tells us there's a lot of disappointment and regret between mother and son, but never explains it and barely displays because the story spends so much time on so many other things.There's also about as much depth to Ian and Jane's love affair as the average couple in a porno movie. They're together because the script says they're together and because there's nothing to that connection, there's no emotional resonance when Ian and Jane get involved with Alex. You know such a threesome is wrong but it doesn't feel wrong because you don't feel anything about any of the characters. It's really just titillating watching the sexy Kate Beckinsale romp around with the equally sexy Alessandro Nivola and the handsome Frances McDormand.Someone needed to sit down and figure out what was the point of this film. Is it about a young couple finding their love challenged by completely unfamiliar surroundings and behavior? Is it about a mother and son getting over their unpleasant past? Is it about a sheltered young woman discovering a new lifestyle and having to decide what kind of person she is? Is it about a young man who has everything he thinks he wants but then discovers something he wants something else? Laurel Canyon tries to be all of that and more. The result is that it ends up being about nothing.This certainly isn't an aggressively terrible movie, though the ending falls completely flat because the story is too busy to properly build up to it. Watching this film, though, is an ultimately unsatisfying and unmoving experience.