Year: 2012
Director: Harmony Korine
Country: US
Language: English
The director of Gummo, Mister Lonely, Julien Donkey-Boy, and Trash Humpers, Harmony Korine, has made her most accessible, mainstream, and controversial film yet with Spring Breakers. Critics find this picture polarizing. It is often viewed through two perspectives; either a genius satire of American pop culture or it is mindless sleaze on the level of a Russ Meyer venture. I tend to lean toward the former.
Four college girls hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. While partying, drinking, and taking drugs, they are arrested, only to be bailed out by a drug and arms dealer named "Alien" (James Franco)
Spring Breakers is not the type of film you should bring your mother to. The film doesn’t show much in the way of graphic sex acts, aside from the one don’t-try-this-at-home scene of man-on-gun fellatio, but it does contain A LOT of gyrating T'n'A. The camera lingers on long shots of bikini clad women, partying to their hearts' content. You'll be forgiven if you mistake this for a feature length Girls Gone Wild video.
Lingering beneath the booty-ful surface is great satire. With Spring Breakers Korine holds a mirror up to America's scary obsession with guns, drugs and sexual exploitation. It shows the emptiness of that existence and the complete lack of meaning our generation gets from always trying to have a "good" time. Deliberately crude in its construction, Korine’s affectless spectacle comments on debauchery, alienation, and sexism by unironically, even lecherously, wallowing in it.
Spring Breakers is a well made piece of Cinema that will have viewers pondering its message long after the run-time is over. Indulgent, funny, dark, provacative and controversial, Harmony Korine's directorial effort is certainly noticed and appreciated.
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