Written by Markus Robinson, Edited by Nicole I. Ashland
Markus Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
Rated R for strong sexual content, language, nudity, drug use and violence throughout
Now playing at Century 20 Oakridge Mall in San Jose, California:
From the writer/director of “Gummo” comes…For many of you, that’s probably all you needed to know in order to be dissuaded from seeing “Spring Breakers”. That said, for as much as I hated EVERY SINGLE ONE of Harmony Korine’s prior films, “Spring Breakers”, starring James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and even Gucci Mane, while problematic, is more than just ex-Disney channel girls in bikinis or boobs for days. The story Korine attempts to tell actually has a lot of potential, in conjunction with some beautiful camera work and underscored with a fascinating script. It’s just too bad that he almost ruins it, simply because he can’t get out of his own way.
The Story: “Spring Breakers” is a tale of two halves. In the first half, which belongs to Selena Gomez’s character Faith, we get a story about four college girls whose goal is to have the most memorable spring break imaginable. This particular storyline is quite strong, with an interesting “pure girl corrupted by the big city” motif. But once James Franco’s character Alien, a more thugged-out version of Kevin Federline takes the reins (about 45 minutes in) that particular storyline goes right out the window. The second half follows this white rap sensation, as he sets out to corrupt these girls (or maybe it’s the other way around). But while the latter half of this film is forcibly injected with a shot of adrenaline, headlined by a larger than life performance from Franco, it unfortunately contains such flawed storytelling, that it all becomes a bit tiresome, repetitive and just downright weird; especially during a scene of simulated oral sex and a montage scored by James Franco singing a Britney Spears ballad, that is sure to have audiences snickering in disbelief.
Here are a few more issues with this film:
1. And this is a problem which plagues almost all of Korine’s past films. There is only about 30 minutes of actual plot here. Not to say that the 30 minutes isn’t well thought out, but by default everything else comes off as an overlong, desensitizing music video montage, set to repeat. This aspect may be the most detrimental to the viewing experience because it causes a 94 minute film to seem like a 120 minutes, as “Spring Breakers” overstays its welcome.
2. As I mentioned before, Korine has a nasty habit of not being able to get out of his own way. In the case of “Spring Breakers” this translates into Korine’s Spike Lee-ish tendency to stop the progression of his story dead in its tracks, in order to make continuous points. This technique of pumping the breaks on a film to make a point about sexuality, or violence or violent sexuality, or sexuality in violence, completely takes audiences out of the film, and slowly mutilates the plot. In short, as Korine stops to make more and more visual points with extensive montages, the more audiences completely forget about the story itself.
3. As creative as I thought this storyline to be, it still doesn’t erase the fact that the situations and dialogues Korine creates are overwhelmingly exaggerated in order to make a point everyone in the audience should already be aware of. Example: In “Gummo” he makes his white trash characters extremely physically and emotionally filthy; or extremely white trash, and in “Spring Breakers” he makes his skanks skanky to the extreme, by putting them in constant states of undress, no matter what the situation. But we get it already! I don’t need another boob montage.
4. Being an admitted hater of the High-Defness in movies of today, when Korine makes a movie like “Spring Breakers”, which, at times, looks like a big budget Michael Bay film, and uses Top 40 hits as his soundtrack, he is obviously trying to make a condescending point about beauty and the American culture of today. But to your average viewer who hasn’t had the displeasure of sitting through “Julien Donkey-Boy” or “Trash Humpers”, “Spring Breakers” may come across as uncomfortably free formed and simply too strange, with no context to pull from.
The Acting: With all of its flaws, the acting from Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens was a high point within some of the messier portions of this film. But the real star of the show is Franco, in a performance which admittedly took me a few minutes to get into, but ends up as the best performance of his career; and maybe worth the price of admission alone.
Final Thought: Writer/director Harmony Korine is essentially the creepy kid with the camera from “American Beauty”. He claims to be attempting to find beauty amidst the filth of the world, but in reality he comes off as a provocateur/non-conformist, who seems to have a distain for the subjects in his films. And that all would be fine, if he just presented a coherent story, that wasn’t disjointed with his form of ultra experimental filmmaking. With that said, “Spring Breakers” is Korine’s most accessible film, with his most coherent (and deepest) storyline to date. So, while I thought a lot of this film was too over-the-top for its own good, there is stuff here that I liked very much; enough to recommend that people see this film, but only if you know what to expect.
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