Spring Breakers: It Says a Lot About You
SPRING BREAKERS “Seriously, your honor—who has the best rack?”
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Here are some of the problems you may have with director Harmony Korine's already-infamous Spring Breakers: (1) The young college gals depicted in the film invite degradation upon themselves with voracious, proud abandon. (2) Plotwise, there's probably less here than meets the eye. And (3) perhaps most importantly, Spring Breakers may make you come to the sudden, surprising realization that you have a big stick up your ass.
Korine is well-known for pushing viewers' buttons—whether in his nihilistic screenplay for Kids, or by directing the glue-sniffing Gummo and the sociopathic, trash-humping Trash Humpers—but in Spring Breakers, he takes on a topic much closer to home, or at least our imaginations. Spring Breakers is a stark, dreamy, and horrifically hilarious tip o' the hat to Girls Gone Wild—where the girls go one step wilder.
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Former Disney princesses Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens (along with Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) are bored students at a boring unnamed college, trapped by their surroundings and future—so of course they're going to rob a chicken restaurant to fund their spring-break trip to Florida. Upon arrival at their destination, they happily succumb to the riptide of unbridled bacchanalia, where an endless parade of tits are exposed (whether requested or not) and dead-eyed boys mime urinating into the mouths of random girls with endless pours of beer. Coke is snorted off bellies and nipples, and the possibility of gang rape is never very far away.
So is it a surprise when things go wrong? Umm, no. But an unlikely savior, in the form of local rapper/drug dealer Alien (James Franco), provides momentary rescue—that leads the foursome into (if you can imagine it) even more menacing territory.
This is one hell of a polarizing film, and I'll say right now that, as someone who's sick of stale, predictable Hollywood product, I loved Spring Breakers. I loved the lack of judgment it placed upon its characters. I loved the constant twists, turns, and dead ends. I loved the dreamy, looping snippets and dialogue that fuck with the film's timeline. I loved former High School Musical star Hudgens's balls-out performance, as well as Franco, whose ridiculous, menacing drug dealer is one of the funniest, saddest, and (yep) deepest portrayals of such a character I've seen so far. But most of all? I loved the dearth of easy answers.
There's a chance you'll see and despise Spring Breakers—but there's also a very good chance that your reaction will reflect less on the film and more on you. 
Obviously, a lot of young girls ARE rebelling by doing all of the things that are depicted in the film, and there's definitely an interesting story to be told about that. I just don't trust that Harmony, who met his 26-year-old wife/star of the film "Ten, I mean, eight years ago" is the right one to be telling it.
I do want to see it for James Franco's wacko performance, but most of the reviews I've read say that the female characters are written totally one dimensionally. In which case, you may as well just be watching GGW videos.
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AND THE NEW YORKER REVIEW (DOUBLING AS A PHD DISSERTATION PROPOSAL): http://nyr.kr/147yiVT
SPRING BREAK FOREVER!
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Just before the candy-colored apocalypse comes to Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” you hear the peaceable murmurings of a beach, of lapping water, calling gulls and playing children. They’re nice, these sounds of summer, promises of carefree, youthful pursuits like building sand castles and shrieking at waves. The first image of what looks like a beach party keeps the happy vibe going. Dozens, hundreds of gyrating, dancing young women and men are basking in the honeyed light — as the beat goes on and the smiles sour into sneers — though it becomes evident that they’re also marinating in a tsunami of beer. The beer doesn’t flow, it floods: over heads, writhing torsos and the bared breasts that wiggle like puppies and wag at the camera like the middle fingers that more and more revelers raise. Welcome to the party, dude, Mr. Korine seems to be saying (or is he snickering?), now sit back, relax and enjoy the show. He proves an excellent ringmaster and a crafty one too. In “Spring Breakers” he bores into a contested, deeply American topic — the pursuit of happiness taken to nihilistic extremes — but turns his exploration into such a gonzo, outrageously funny party that it takes a while to appreciate that this is more of a horror film than a comedy. If the laughter at times catches in your throat, well, that’s part of the queasy, transfixing experience that is “Spring Breakers,” which plays with some of the same ideas in Mr. Korine’s last feature, “Trash Humpers.” In that movie, shot on VHS tape, four characters in rubber masks run amok, getting down and dirty as they compulsively, even ritualistically grind their pelvises against anything — garbage, of course, included — in a creepy, joyless yet also amusing burlesque. In “Spring Breakers” Mr. Korine has traded in his plug-uglies for a far more seductive and commercially viable female quartet that includes two former Disney teen queens, Selena Gomez (as Faith) and Vanessa Hudgens (Candy), along with Ashley Benson (Brit) and his wife, Rachel Korine (Cotty). — Manohla Dargis
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- GGW
- MTV Spring Break pseudo-porn
- Gangsta Rap and Scarface
- Disney
- Teen rebellion
You know, if this were with four black guys instead of four white girls, nobody would be talking about it. But with the four white girls who are clearly willfully subjugating themselves and their bodies at every step, they're taking control of what they want. The only time we see them prostrate is at the hands of the law, and that's only because Korine's gears grind a bit when shifting. His transmission is out of oil.
It's also a satire of everything youth. Gummo and Julian Donkey Bot were boringly perverse films, and Kids was just dull as fuck, they were mind-numbingly forward. Spring Breakers was satirical, ironic, hilarious, and everything commercial all in one big ball of fuck yeah, fuck you. I could see Korine saying, "If this is what audiences want, they can have it...in spades!"
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