Harmony Korine
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It's a movie with a perennially American theme (you may remember the very first Hollywood picture set in the world of "spring break," 1960's "Where the Boys Are"), featuring a cast toplined not just by a few genuine stars, but two from the Disney Channel stable.
Camille Paglia regards Where the Boys Are as a significant and truthful comment on changing social and sexual mores in the 1960s, and Harmony Korine's brash homage to Pasternak's film has attracted similar, if rather more equivocal tributes.
Korine has seen an awful lot of Jean-Luc Godard’s ’60s movies (I don’t think you can see too many), and his borrowed Pop Art devices — repetitive voice-overs, gunshots and barrel clicks as aural counterpoint, mechanistic nods to 1983’s “Scarface’’ — turn wearyingly familiar before the end.
Sporting elaborate cornrows, and front teeth studded with more grillwork than a ’58 Plymouth, Franco is a man in love with his stuff: his gun-bedecked walls, his bed “that’s an art-piece,” his constantly running loop of the 1983 Florida crime classic Scarface.
At his crib, where bongs and blow are plentiful and Al Pacino's Scarface plays on a continuous loop, the coeds live the dream.
In Florida, the girls encounter the personification of their idea of black culture, a celebrity spring break mascot, self-described "straight hustler" and white "gangsta" rapper named Alien (James Franco), a devil figure with a platinum grill, braided hair and Brian De Palma's "Scarface" on repeat in his crib.
A key scene where he proudly shows off his collection of guns - Brian De Palma's Scarface playing on a continuous background loop in his living room - is one of the few times when you sense Spring Breakers may really be about something.
Kids (1995)
Directed by Larry Clark
influenced Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), Spring Breakers (2013)
Themes
Grandma Joyce saw Kids, which starred Korine's then-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny and for which Korine contributed the sex-and-scatology screenplay.
The twisted family of "Julien Donkey-Boy" is captured in a concept pioneered by Danish directors in low-res, jerky, cinema-verite fashion by the mind behind "Kids" and "Gummo."
"Julien" is the second film, after "Gummo," from professional Wunderkind Harmony Korine, who first slouched into the media margins with his screenplay for Larry Clark's "Kids."
That is, unless you go all the way back to the screenplay he wrote for Larry Clark’s “Kids” and then the connection becomes far more obvious, because “Spring Breakers” feels about as close to a modernization of that controversial drama as anything else.
That 1997 directorial debut of the controversial enfant terrible -- who had burst onto the scene at 19 with his script for Larry Clark’s “Kids” -- has been variously compared to the art photography of Diane Arbus and to a gorgeous girl in a bikini who’s been dragged through broken glass .
Those that go into Spring Breakers expecting something more akin to Kids or Gummo will come out disappointed.
American Honey (2016)
Directed by Andrea Arnold
influenced by Spring Breakers (2013)
Themes Characters
In the vein of Harmony Korine’s deliberately affectless teen screenplays like Spring Breakers or Kids , American Honey leaves those questions unasked.
The film evinces a kinship with the disaffected youth portraits of Gus Van Sant, like Elephant and Paranoid Park, and the darker brand of generational nihilism purveyed by Harmony Korine; its raw sexual content, wild energy and moments of reckless crime specifically recall Spring Breakers.
That’s during the day; at night, they drink and smoke and fuck and fight (the film plays, as odd a mixture as it may be, like a cross between Glengarry Glen Ross and Spring Breakers).
It’s a dose of nihilist picaresque to set beside Larry Clark’s Kids , Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Gus Van Sant’s paeans to doomed youth—and, for the first hour of its 162-minute running time, American Honey swarms the screen with vibrantly uncouth energy.
While exhilarating as sensory spectacle, “American Honey” perhaps works most satisfyingly as a femme-driven corrective to Harmony Korine’s comparable but inferior “Spring Breakers,” a notional girl-power exercise that muted its female characters’ perspective in favor of James Franco’s gonzo mentor figure.
LaBeouf, though doing fine work, seems to have been hired just so that his performance — he wears an eyebrow ring, mumble-flubs his lines, and carries himself with an air of mysterious/threatening eroticism — could piggyback on the critical cachet of the James Franco–in–Spring Breakers brand.
The reference, of course, is to the famous single-take car's-eye-view bank robbery in the 1950 film noir masterpiece, "Gun Crazy," and Korine's staging and shooting are brilliant.
The Neon Demon (2016)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
influenced by Spring Breakers (2013)
Music Themes
Cliff Martinez's (2013's " Spring Breakers ") cosmically sublime score of synthesizers and sonic crystals accompanies Natasha Braier's darkly lush, lavish imagery, the magic-hour-and-beyond lensing a seeming emulation of a rainbow leading straight to Hell.
In this vein, the production design from Spring Breakers alum Elliott Hostetter deserves praise.
Production Design by Elliott Hostetter ("Spring Breakers") makes great use of photographer's paper, creating white spaces in which Refn's characters exist in a bubble of perfection.
"The Neon Demon" recalls Dario Argento's "Suspiria," Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" and Harmony Korine's "Spring Breakers," but is ultimately its own outrageous, seductive thing.
Saying that, "Gummo," is reminiscent of the mindblowing, controversial, virtuoso 1928 short film, "Un Chien Andalou," by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, which is now considered a classic, is probably the highest compliment I could give it.
Somewhere between Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers lies the rebellious mood of Elizabeth Wood’s White Girl, a Sundance firecracker that easily finds its place among the cinematic canon of great dramas cut from the good-girl-gone-bad cloth.
The movie, which observes the world from Leah’s entitled perspective, is the latest in a continuing line of shockers (including “Kids” and “Spring Breakers”), whose depictions of greedy drug-taking and promiscuity are inescapably titillating.
Like “Spring Breakers,” or “Kids,” “White Girl” speaks to youth in tailspin using its own prickly, audacious language, and in doing so announces Wood as one of 2016’s most vital new voices in filmmaking.
Leah’s careless cavorting through the grimy underbelly of New York—where cocaine and oral sex are more abundant than cabs—has earned White Girl comparisons to Larry Clark’s provocative Kids and Harmony Korine’s hedonistic Spring Breakers.
But Leah’s awakening is an entirely different kind of beast than Clark’s Kids, or Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers , another film White Girl has been compared to.
If this sounds like the kind of thing we’ve seen before, whether in “Kids” or “Spring Breakers” or any number of kids-do-shocking-things-these-days films, it is.
Next to Matthew McConaughey's Moondog, Jeff Bridges' the Dude in The Big Lebowski could pass for an insurance adjuster.
I get that the guy is supposed to just “abide” like Jeff Bridges’ Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” but such a reading willfully overlooks all the pissy little petulant grace notes with which Bridges shaded his now-iconic character.
The proud cinematic subgenre known as the “stoner comedy” gets a flashy new entry with The Beach Bum , in which Matthew McConaughey plays a washed-up Florida poet who’s like an amalgam of Hunter S. Thompson, The Dude from The Big Lebowski , Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High , McConaughey’s own Wooderson from Dazed and Confused and McConaughey himself (or at least the version of him that lived in a Malibu trailer and was once arrested while playing bongos naked).
Like Jeff Bridges’s legendary The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” Moondog is a shaggy rebel who hates conformity because he despises the idea of a routine or any semblance of discipline.
Whereas movies like Inherent Vice or The Big Lebowski depicted characters with some opposition despite their naturally copacetic (if sometimes paranoid) demeanors by placing them in situations that didn't always welcome or flatter them, The Beach Bum takes none of Moondog's obstacles seriously — in fact, they never even read as obstacles.
If so, however, he also has a bit of the Dude from “The Big Lebowski” in his pop-cultural DNA, plus a few lashings of Alien, the millennial-thug-life Gatsby so memorably played by James Franco in “Spring Breakers.”
The opposite of Korine's relatively posh, celeb-impersonator snooze, Mr. Lonely, Trash Humpers suggests a cretinous remake of John Water 's Pink Flamingos or perhaps a musical created by the brain-eaters from the original Night of the Living Dead —and, like Jack Smith 's Flaming Creatures, compounds its sins by pulverizing the rules of "normal" filmmaking.
It's like he watched Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers several thousand times to prepare for making a family melodrama.
The first half shares some of the sexed-up, Florida-humid flamboyance that production designer Elliott Hostetter helped bring to Spring Breakers (whose director, Harmony Korine, cameos here).
He’s borrowed Harmony Korine’s production designer from “Spring Breakers” and put Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in charge of the score.
Waves will likely be overlooked this year as the most recent film in the A24 “Florida Series,” including the experimental and pretty films Moonlight , Spring Breakers , and The Florida Project .
His Spring Breakers is a deliberately ugly picture, looking at the world as if from the inside of a jukebox, to use Vincente Minnelli's description of his own late 1950s film Some Came Running .
Younger audiences lured by the promise of Disney Channel royalty doing very un-Disney things will have found their Less Than Zero.
The movie does reveal an actual artist at work: French cinematographer Benoît Debie, who filmed Gaspar Noé’s truly transgressive Irreversible and Enter the Void.
Because the montage is shot by Benoît Debie, the favourite cinematographer of that other enfant terrible Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Enter the Void), the sequence possesses an eerily hallucinatory quality at odds with the genre’s fun-in-the-sun norm.
Korine and French cinematographer Benoît Debie (who lensed the searing images in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible and Enter the Void) capture the widescreen action with hypersaturated primary and fluorescent hues, as if the film itself has been baking in a sun-drenched vat of beer.
Benoît Debie, the camera master who shot Irreversible , washes the screen with lurid color that turns your eyes into pinwheels.
Equally unhelpful in this regard is John Leguizamo’s off-the-rails performance as a babbling white b-boy drug dealer, which has the unfortunate effect of recalling James Franco’s similarly annoying turn in Spring Breakers.
John Leguizamo turns up doing a decent impersonation of James Franco from “Spring Breakers” but, beyond that, you’re scraping the bottom for anything resembling entertainment.
But thanks to cinematographer Benoît Debie (Enter the Void, 2009) and a dubstep/electro soundtrack featuring DJ Skrillex and Winding-Refn’s composer, Cliff Martinez, you are sure to forget that thought within seconds, and instead find yourself trapped in a loop of booze, beach and boobs yet again.
The movie does reveal an actual artist at work: French cinematographer Benoît Debie, who filmed Gaspar Noé’s truly transgressive Irreversible and Enter the Void.
Because the montage is shot by Benoît Debie, the favourite cinematographer of that other enfant terrible Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Enter the Void), the sequence possesses an eerily hallucinatory quality at odds with the genre’s fun-in-the-sun norm.
Korine and French cinematographer Benoît Debie (who lensed the searing images in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible and Enter the Void) capture the widescreen action with hypersaturated primary and fluorescent hues, as if the film itself has been baking in a sun-drenched vat of beer.
Think Enter The Void and you’re on the right track.
If the Floridian beach town of St. Petersburg is shot by cinematographer Benoît Debie (2010's " Enter the Void ") as a kaleidoscope of sunshine and sunsets vaguely shielding the grimmest of underbellies, it is James Franco's fearless, note-perfect performance that accentuates said threat.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Directed by Oliver Stone
influenced Spring Breakers (2013)
Themes Plot Characters
Korine’s “Spring Breakers” is “Girls Gone Wild” meets “Natural Born Killers” with a chaser of social satire.
The last quarter of the movie takes an unexpected swerve into Natural Born Killers crime-spree territory.
With a greater emphasis on sex than violence, “Spring Breakers” is a more enjoyable guilty pleasure than “Natural Born Killers” and just as acute about our cultural devolution.
Korine gestures toward social criticism, but essentially this is just an hour and a half of bongs, beers, tits, and ass, thinly dressed as Natural Born Killers.
But writer-director Harmony Korine (“Gummo”), an acquired taste, manages to make much of the film into a “Natural Born Killers”-style pop patchwork with a "Grand Theft Auto" lack of morality.
As it turns out, the two girls are just as bad — if not worse — than Alien in a way that conjures up Natural Born Killers.
Likewise, cinematographer Benoit Debie (Dario Argento’s The Card Player and Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void) employs the garish color scheme of a vivid fever dream gone horribly awry, a tone that’s perfectly complimented by Cliff Martinez and Skrillex’s intense electronic score.
As if predicting the inevitable extreme of dysfunctional creative energies breastfed in the world of elitist one-percenters, Korine’s latest is at least thematically familiar to his past filmography, like the Pleasantville (1998) version of his 2009 Trash Humpers .
I want to go home,” Faith repeats again and again, as Alien whispers in her ear and caresses her cheek, like De Niro seducing Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear.