“Spring break forever, bitches!”
The H-Bomb: Four college friends decide to do what no college student has ever done before; head down to Florida for Spring Break. Three of them (Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine) are total wild chicks who are into boozing, smoking dope, and shoving various powdered substances up their noses. The fourth one, Faith (Selena Gomez), is a goody-goody two shoes who’s into prayer groups and is not at all a party girl. Why she’s BFFs with these other chicks is anybody’s guess.
Anyhow, the four of them have been planning and saving for several months for this trip, and much to their dismay, when they pool their savings together, they only have around $300. So the girls, minus Faith, go about procuring additional funds, with the help of a couple of spray painted squirt guns and some ski masks… that’s all I’ll say about that.
So, with said additional funds raised, the bikini-clad foursome finally hits the sunshine state, where they ride motor scooters, dance on the beach, drink, smoke (not cigarettes), and play cocktease with some douche bag jocks. Then one night, they all party just a little too hard, and they end up in jail, where they’ll have to spend two whole days if they can’t pay the fine. Now, our fab four are in a real bind; they have to either spend the rest of their Spring Break behind bars, which would be like such a bummer, or call their parentals for bail money, which would so totally suck, as well.
Fortunately, the young lovelies are spared from making such a painful decision when they are bailed out by a mysterious benefactor… “Alien” (James Franco). Who (or more appropriately, what) is “Alien?” A white boy gansta/rapper/drug dealer guy with dreadlocks, a mouth full of gold teeth, and an unhealthy fixation with Britney Spears, who claims to be from another planet… a claim this reviewer is inclined to believe. The girls (rather inexplicably) fall for Alien’s charms, as he brings them into his world of drugs and sex and money (and guns, lots of guns). But Alien’s world is a truly dangerous one, and the farther the girls descend into it, the more their dream vacation threatens to turn into a total nightmare.
Spring Breakers, which is perhaps the most artsy-fartsy beach movie since… The Beach, comes to us from writer/director Harmony Korine, a filmmaker who first made waves back in 1995 with his screenplay for Kids, which I cannot deny was absolutely brilliant. It was haunting, provocative, and overall just a deeply disturbing work. As for everything else he’s done, Holy Christ… let me do a rundown; Gummo was garbage, Julien Donkey-Boy sucked donkey dick, and Ken Park… don’t even get me going on that vile pile of ass vomit.
As far as I’m concerned, Korine is a gutter auteur of toilet bowl cinema, and I’m not exactly a fan of his. However, if there is one thing being un critic du cinema has taught me, it’s to go into every single film, even the ones I think are going to blow beaver butt, with an open mind… as doing so can periodically bring about a pleasant surprise. Such is the case with Spring Breakers. I expected to despise it, strongly, but I ended up kind of liking it.
Now, I should point out that this is not a movie for the masses. In fact, I’m a little surprised it’s gotten such a wide release. Many who go to see this film are really not going to like it, for perhaps a couple of different reasons. The art house crowd, who would recognize Harmony Korine’s name, are going to see the first half of the film and think it’s just a polished Girls Gone Wild video. The moviegoers of less sophisticated design, who show up for the T&A, which is supplied in abundance, will probably be put off by the artsy-ness of the whole thing.
What am I talking about? Well, the way the film is edited, we’ll see montages of people partying on the beach accompanied by moody, dreamy music and/or quasi-deep narration from one of the characters. Another bizarre artistic touch is when certain lines of dialogue are repeated for no apparent reason. Maybe it’s meant to imply that those lines have some greater significance…? Fuck if I know. Let me put it like this, if Terrence Malick ever directed a beach party movie (after dropping a shitload of acid), it would turn out something like this. For many out there, I imagine it won’t go over very well… at the end of my screening, when the closing credits came up, somebody shouted, “What the hell was that?!”
For me, however, it more or less worked. Like Korine’s past films, it gets incredibly sleazy, and sordid, and made me want to take a shower afterwards, but I was also invested in what was happening, intrigued as to where it was going, captivated by the gorgeous cinematography by Benoit Debie, stimulated by the bodies on display (I am a dude, after all), and, for the most part, entertained, particularly when the flamboyant Franco enters the picture.
The first half plays like a slightly pretentious version of Project X, with Gomez and Hudgens doing things that Walt Disney most definitely would not approve of. This front section of the film does get a tad repetitive and tedious, what with all those seemingly endless montages of smoking, drinking, and fucking. And aside from Gomez, none of the lead girls are well developed as characters and are more or less interchangeable.
Then Franco comes into the movie, and when he does, it becomes his movie entirely. He has to be the craziest white dude with dreads this side of Gary Oldman in True Romance, and hot damn is he a blast to watch. A long way from the Land of Oz, his “Alien” is a disgusting, creepy, little scuzzbucket… but he’s also absolutely fucking hilarious. Everything he does, from talkin’ black, to playing the poolside piano for his ladies, to sucking off a Beretta, is just priceless, and he more than makes the movie. This is probably my favorite performance of his, and if the Oscars had any balls (which they don’t), they would nominate it, for sure (which they won’t).
Thanks to Franco, I had a lot more fun with Spring Breakers than I ever should have been allowed to. But his outlandish turn aside, I really enjoyed the film overall as I was watching it. So, why the relatively low rating, you ask? Well, when it was all over, I was left with one burning question: What was the point? What was Korine trying to say with this? I mean, it’s obvious from the heavy stylization and the introspective voice overs that he was going for more than pure exploitation here. So what, then? That bad things can happen to out-of-control college kids on Spring Break? That was the apparent point up until the last ten minutes, where the story makes an absurdly ridiculous turn that is so unbelievable that it invalidates such a point.
It was then that I came to the realization that Spring Breakers, with all its depictions of excess, decadence, and hedonism, really doesn’t have a point. That is such a shame, since Korine, as a director, has finally made a film that’s worth a damn, he just forgot to give it a purpose, and when it ended, I was left feeling kind of empty… despite the strangely good time I had with it.
