Spring Breakers (2013)

A true modern exploitation masterpiece, Harmony Korine delivers on every single level and then some. Great performances all around... yes even from James Franco. His character is so vile and outrageous, definitely a career best from him in my opinion. The green band trailer really does not do this film justice, what's offered here really is a tour de force. I can't wait to buy the DVD and watch this over and over again. By far the best film of 2013 so far. Highly recommended!

I suspect that young people old enough to see this movie, thinking it was another "Project X" or something like it, were in for a surprise. Sure the movie starts out with all the "B's", i.e. booze, beer, bongs, babes and boobs. And make no mistake, there are plenty to each to go around. But there some shockers on the way.

The story has 4 extremely bored small town coeds focused on getting to the sugary beaches of St. Petersburg, Florida. Running short of cash, three of the girls (Vanessa Hudgens, Rachel Korine wife of director Harmony Korine and Ashley Benson) decide to knock over the local Chicken Shack. It works and later they reunite with the fourth girl, Faith (Selena Gomez) whose name is consistent with her religion. Off they go and when they get there, its party hardy with Faith pulling back a bit and Cotty (Korine) at the other extreme.

In a night of debauchery, the cops haul the young cuties in to the calaboose still in their bikinis. An observer from the beach scene earlier, "Alien" (James Franco) bails the ladies from the grips of the man. Franco in full-on crazy complete with cornrows, a grill and a pimped out Z-28 Camero is quite the character. Raised in the hood, he's all that, just white. He's also trouble, but the visceral excitement he brings is an aphrodisiac to 3 of the girls. Faith, the early focus of Alien's interest has the good sense to head back home.

Sometimes ultra-violent, always sexy, often comedic and usually campy, "Spring Breakers" takes a Tarantino-like turn that takes 2 of the more frisky gals (Candy and Brit) into new territory. Certainly not for everyone, I found the movie exhilarating, highly entertaining and way out of the mainstream.

Buy Spring Breakers (2013) Now

This is one of the best movies I've seen in the last few years. A strange, bizarre fever dream. Bright and colorful. It scares and arouses you. Franco has never been better. Make sure you catch this in the theatre.

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I can see why Spring Breakers is meeting with the greatest financial success of anything Korine's done-well, aside from the fact that the title and poster gives it a built-in "confused audience" who will go in thinking this film is something that it is not. All the revenue-friendly acres of skin totally aside, the film is just plain more slick and mainstream-friendly in its overall look and feel than most of Korine's earlier efforts.

Korine's made mostly uncomfortable films, but in Spring Breakers, most of my discomfort stems from the fact that the main characters (save Alien, whom I never would have encountered on campus to begin with) are the very same types of people I went out of my way to avoid back in college. This film is as close as I ever want/wanted to get to the real spring break experience... and particularly on the big screen, it's close enough, thank you.

But while the slo-mo party sequences seem believable enough to me, my biggest problem with Spring Breakers lies in its believability. Practically out of the box, we see the girls engaging in a criminal act that would be well outside the behavioral scope of 99.999% of college-enrolled millennials, no matter how totally self-absorbed.

That act, as it turns out, is needed groundwork for what happens later in the film, after the four girls meet with James Franco's Alien character for the first time. Alien is a "street entrepreneur." He acts not so much as a devious corrupting influence on the girls, more as a natural catalyst for bringing out their barely-hidden inner sociopaths. If not for the early crime the girls took on of their own volition, we'd never be able to buy what happens after they meet Alien.

Franco's portrayal of Alien is really, really great and truly believable, at least to the point of what he's given to work with in realizing the character. But therein lies the problem: again, in the real world, a foursome of college-enrolled girls would tolerate Alien's creepy advances for about five minutes before bolting, no matter how deep-running their bad-girl streak. Instead, they inexplicably stick around and ultimately help him form a merry, scantily-clad band of gangstas, leading to the film's admittedly fun and totally absurd third-act climax, none of which ever would have happened in a million, billion years in reality.

There are other believability problems with Alien himself which aren't Franco's fault. Namely, we are supposed to believe he's a big / rising player in his local underworld, requisite for the plot to advance as it does. Alien's definitely not the sharpest razor in the pack. If this were the real world, he'd have ended up popped from one boneheaded move or another before advancing past the corner-dealer stage. But answering deeper questions about his actual suitability as a major criminal force on-screen would definitely cause the desired plot trajectory to come completely apart, so we're just shown a bunch of dope / guns / cash and asked to buy in.

This film moves surprisingly slowly. The slowest-moving section is the first act, the process of the girls figuring out how to get out of Dodge, slow / overdone to the point where when they finally get to meet Alien roughly at the film's midway mark, it already felt like third-act time to me.

Maybe Korine wanted us to get to know these characters in detail, but there's simply not enough to them as people to get to know. The four central girls are purposely one-dimensional characters with nary a personal thought or genuinely reflective tendency in their heads, and I'm quite sure that's by Korine's design, so he should have known better than to try and explore what simply isn't there.

Adding to the pacing issue is the repetitious, heavy-handed editing. In addition to repeating scenes as flashback fodder, Korine is fond of playing snippets of the same dialogue over and over during montages to "make points" about the characters or over-explain their motivations. It's irritating and unnecessary. I can't emphasize enough how much better the film would have been without this eye-roll-generating dialogue-looping. I was reminded of The Room's endless "transitional" shots of the Golden Gate Bridge except that I rolled my eyes *less* at that.

I strongly disagree with a read of Spring Breakers as some kind of "cautionary tale." To do so would be pure cynicism about millennials, borne of the perpetual generation gap. I don't think much of what happens in this movie could possibly apply or happen to real people resembling these archetypes. I left the theater saying, "So... what was the point of all that?", which is something I sort of expected going in based on past exposure to Korine's work.

Still, the film did stick with me somehow. The visuals / cinematography make up somewhat in terms of realism for the aforementioned problems with plot, dialogue and character development/interaction, giving the film a distinctive, palpable vibe.

This is a guilty pleasure movie, not even so much for the copious amount of flesh on display, but just as a pure escapist / style flick that does have just a little more brains, soul, and squirm-in-your-chair to it than the average mainstream escapist flick.

Is it an arthouse film? If so, barely. Is it a must-see? I definitely wouldn't say that either, but at the very least it should make for interesting water-cooler discussions with the fellow indoctrinated.

Want Spring Breakers (2013) Discount?

I am probably just as surprised as you are: Spring Breakers is actually a really good movie.

It follows a deceptively simple plot, of a Good Girl and her longtime friends, three Bad Girls, who are bored in their university setting and are desperate for any kind of change. Their solution is to go to Florida for a wild and unforgettable Spring Break. Even after saving money for months, they are unable to afford this excursion, prompting the Bad Girls to rob a local eatery.

The bad behavior continues at the Spring Break resort town, eventually landing them in a local jail and involved in a greater crime ring. One of the drug lords is played to over-the-top perfection by James Franco, who delivers a chilling yet comical portrayal.

The story is told with an engaging intensity unique to films of this genre; we've seen plenty of movies like this before, of young girls gone wild, so the direction doesn't waste time on the narrative. What's interesting is how the story is told, through lucid montages flashing around through time and space, often with disembodied voice-overs describing the sequence we are viewing, as told by characters before or after the incident actually takes place.

Take one scene, for instance: We know the girls are going to get into trouble. We knew that from the movie poster. So for the scene in which they get arrested, we get flashes of the different girls in police cars with red and blue lights shining on their faces; then we return back to the incident in which they get arrested. This constant back-and-forth makes this movie, whose narrative is otherwise simple, consistently compelling.

But it's not just the storytelling that makes Spring Breakers a fascinating work, but the story and theme itself. Simple, yes, but also profound. This is a twisted representation of the American dream, almost a contemporary remake of Where the Boys Are, of young women rejecting mainstream society and opt to make a life for themselves in any way they can. The plays of power move so instantaneously and so driven by individual initiative, that one can't watch without the unsettling feeling that power, and perceptions of it, are so fluid.

On its surface, Spring Breakers is a sticky, neon trip of house music and marijuana smoke but at its heart (or lack of one), it is a disturbing and revealing look at what we value in our American life, and how far we will go to achieve it.

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