Spring Breakers

2012 girls-gone-wild-gone-wild movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The titular quartet ventures to Florida for some shenanigans. They meet the Wizard of Oz who introduces them to some more violent adventures. 

I don't know if I should like this movie or not. I haven't really liked any other Harmony Korine movie and never expected to. I feel a little dirty for liking this as much as I did. My wife says it's only because of the young girls, scantily-clad Disney princesses and a variety of whorish extras. But I'll tell you what it is. Sometimes, you watch a movie and think that it perfectly matches what the creators had in mind when the idea first popped into their minds. And when the vision is as risky as the one in Korine's noggin, you really have to take notice. 

In a way, this is the movie I was trying to make my senior year of high school for a mass media class. Korine is poking fun at blind conformity, gyrating sheep, wildly-grinning and toothy zombies. My target, juvenile as I care to admit, were people making "not" jokes. Korine is barely more sophisticated than that, but the lack of sophistication in the way he turns the mirror toward society seems to be part of the joke. The first fifty minutes or so of the movie is beyond stupid, like an avant-garde girls-gone-wild-type video or like MTV invited Gaspar Noe to direct their spring break coverage for a week. Noe's cinematographer for the painfully dreamy Enter the Void is used here which helps explain why Spring Breakers is painfully dreamy. And almost painfully stupid. You're really thumped over the head with the idea that these kids are going a little overboard in their efforts to be kids, and you almost start--if you haven't started already--to hate humanity. You lose interest, even think about turning the movie off and watching something with a little less crunchy techno music in it, and honestly, it may have only been the pervert inside me who decided to keep this thing going. But then James Franco (an unrecognizable James Franco) shows up, and things turn magical. Franco just explodes on the screen as this completely unrealistic character, more parody than person, and he straddles the line between absolutely hilarious and genuinely frightening as well as you'll ever see anybody do it. The redundant stupidity of a "Look at my shit!" scene is thirty-five minutes (seemingly) of comedy bliss where Franco waxes stupidic about having shorts in every color and Scarface on repeat. "Constant, y'all!" It's hilarious! He also gets a poignant musical number where he sits at a piano and plays a Brittney Spears' song. The final third of this movie, always threatening to capsize beneath a wave of its own idiocy, is horrific comedy mayhem, the sort that would annoy people who were rubbed the wrong way by Stone's dicking around in Natural Born Killers. Definitely throw this in the pile with the other movies that are not for everybody, and there's a chance that I wouldn't even like it nearly as well if I saw it for a second time. If I do, it'll be because of Franco. Not the tits.