The Salton Sea

The Salton Sea is churning up choppy waves of controversy among critics in the four cities where it opens today (New York, Toronto, Los Angeles and San Francisco). Lou Lumenick in the New York Post calls the plot truly baffling and says that the movie ends up drowning in its own pretentions -- along with, quite possibly, what's left of Val Kilmer's movie career. Kilmer plays a character Toronto Star critic Peter Howell describes as jazz trumpeter, speed freak and the dubious narrator of a revenge story straight out of a surrealist's nightmare. Clearly, Howell finds the movie fascinating. The Salton Sea confounds expectations, he writes. It's a visit to hell with a tour leader you can't trust and probably won't like, but whom you can't help watching all the same. But Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan suggests that the film exemplifies Hollywood at its worst. As long as a young male audience thinks de facto glamorized drug addiction is endlessly fascinating, as long as filmmakers feel immersing themselves in a sleazoids-on-parade world of transgressive characters is completely cool, as long as studio executives assume they're acting responsibly if they tack a credits footnote about substance abuse treatment ... movies like this will continue to be made.