Spring Breakers (2013)

Spring Breakers (R) - Review

"Girls Gone Riled"

4 college girls are left behind in their dorms as their peers make the yearly exodus to the mythical Florida beaches for Spring Break, The gal pals don't have the funds for the trek despite saving and scrimping all year.  3 of them are particularly ambitious and decide to fund the vacation by robbing a chicken restaurant by watergun point.  These girls need their bikini freedom and nothing will stand in their way of being with their   This forms the basis for director Harmony Korine's (Gummo, Kids) new movie, Spring Breakers, an exasperatingly beautiful night out in a scary part of town.

In this post-adolescent, pre-adult world, Spring Break is the ultimate release, the golden hued freedom and mystery that normal college life keeps from them.  To the Innocent Life is partying, and there's no party like Spring Break.  Eventually the girls fall under the influence of a local rapper/drug dealer Alien portrayed elegantly by James Franco (Pineapple Express).  Much like the girls, Alien isn't a two dimensional caricature, he believes everything he says and has depth and emotion beyond his gold tooth fronts and dollar bill neck tattoos (Franco is at his absolute best).  The gal pals have gotten into trouble, inevitable with their innocent yet out of control attitudes towards booze, drugs and sex.  Alien takes them under his protective wing in his blinged out pimp mobile at his scarface like beachouse full of guns, knives and gear.  Eventually we discover that he is being truthful, he loves them and cares for them and it is no game to him, they fullfill something in his life that was missing, as he puts it "Y'all are my soulmates," and the line is both funny and insightful, indicative of the entire film's experience.

The constant bikini and flesh, the neon colors and neon lighting all become the norm as the film unrolls.  There is a constant repetition here, things said and thought over and over, pictures that return to us again and again with psychotic regularity.  Harmony has allowed us into the dim yet lazer straight mindset of the American young adult, focused on freedom of their body while being confused about the skin they now possess.  To these girls, for some unknown reason, selfawareness and enlightenment can only be achieved through beach drinking and hotel keg stands and we the viewer must accept that and wonder why, there are no answers in Spring Breakers.  Goaded into a reprisal by the remaining girls, his loyalty and man hood questioned, Alien must set out with his posse to "kill my best friend," a former mentor and rival who threatens their new found lives together.  He cannot deny them their retribution despite his fear of the outcome.


The power these girls have is frightening, there is something wrong with them, their inability to use their intelligence beyond tying their bikini tops frustrating.  What are they escaping from?  As they put it, the monotony of life, of class rooms illuminated by simultaneous laptops presentations, of gossiping Christians and  slutty professors, of seeing the same streetlights day after day (their adulthood looming).  Selena Gomez, fresh off her star making stint as a Disney protege, plays a good girl torn between her faith and her friends, about what she craves and what the outside world gives.  The other girls are wilder to varying degrees, but this is what attracts the whitetrash rednecked Alien, he's been living in a world that is Spring Break Forever for his entire life, and is what they have in common.

Definitely one of Korine's more entertaining films, and especially one of his most accessible.  A lot of Korine's work require getting the joke, or seeing the black humor and enjoying the twisted centers of humanity and society as he does.  Here that is still true and yet parts can still be enjoyed just for what they are, the thrill of shooting a gun, smoking a bong, seeing some young flesh gyrate in slomo to electronica.  Of course, you'd have to have a pretty limited scope to not notice that while the movie is fulfilling all those base desires for both the audience and the protagonists (nudity, wantoness, uninhibited hedonism), how it shows it, how it sounds is a deft scalpel dissecting those universal urges without judgement or answers.  "Sowing ones oats" has long been seen as healthy part of our short youth, a window of time where Girls can Go Wild with their parents ignorance (if not their approval).  It is only later when the regret can set in, where the shirts have to be buttoned and jobs attended or else America will judge you a stranger to societal norms (one of Harmony's preferred motifs).  Alien's sociopathic lifestyle of "Spring Break Forever" forces him to live and die on the fringes of society while most Spring Breakers make it back from the brink of their wild times and live among us, their bikinis long forgotten under piles of yearbooks and pledgepins, mementos from their previous younger selves.

8.5 Ocean Side Brittany Spears Recitals out of 10 (GREAT)