Spring Breakers (2013)
Directed by Harmony Korine
After four college girls rob a restaurant to fund their spring break in Florida, they get entangled with a weird dude with his own criminal agenda.
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29 films that influenced Spring Breakers
What critics say influenced Spring Breakers
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.
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.
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.
The quartet of youngsters at the film’s core also impress, the film reminiscent of Kids - Korine’s breakout as a screenwriter – in its depiction of youth seemingly far more truthful in spirit than Hollywood’s, and also when Korine approaches Larry Clark levels of lecherousness as the camera lingers on their scantily-clad frames.
Harmony Korine has been polarising audiences from the time they were first introduced to his dark vision of American teenagers in his script for director Larry Clark’s acclaimed Kids (1995) .
Actually, this universe belongs to Harmony Korine, the brat provocateur whose previous movies — including 1995’s “Kids’’ (which he only wrote but everyone gives him credit for anyway), 1997’s “Gummo,’’ and 2009’s “Trash Humpers’’ — have enraged proper-thinking audiences and critics while building a small, devoted base of cult followers.
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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.
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.
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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.