TIFF 2012 Review: Spring Breakers (The Substream)
In the all-time list of movie meetings I’d like to’ve been a fly on the wall at, the one where Harmony Korine–he of Trash Humpers, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy–convinced Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens to put their kid-friendly, new-car-smell possessing talents in a film whose first four minutes consists of Skrillex’s hyperabrasive dubstep opus “First of the Year (Equinox)” over ultra-slo-mo shots of dudes squirting wiener beers all over babes’ heaving bare neon boobs is, well, pretty near the top. Did they have doughnuts? Coffee? It’s been discernible from the bikini-ridden promo material that’s been made available over the past few months that Spring Breakers was going to be provocative, and the never-boring Korine doesn’t disappoint. He’s delivered a film that manages in weary, seen-it-all 2012 to be shocking, puzzling, smart, sexy and more than a little bit of a challenge to take in, and kudos are more than due to Gomez and Hudgens for the not inconsiderable risk that being in his film has presented for them.
Broke and faced with another spring break spent at school seeing “the exact same thing” and sleeping in “the exact same bed”, best friends Candy, Brit and Cotty (Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) decide to steal a professor’s El Camino and rob a chicken shack. They scoop up their fourth, the devoted, serious Faith (Selena Gomez), torch the car and immediatey hit the road for St. Petersburg.
They get drunk, they get high, they let two identical twin thugs snort coke off their stomachs, they phone their parents and recount the spiritual beauty of the self-discovering, chaste trip they’ve embarked on as profoundly drunk teens punch the ceiling out of motel rooms across the city. Eventually, they wind up in the clink, busted for narcotics possession, and are bailed out by the avid, leering Alien (James Franco, complete with diamond-encrusted grill, Carrera shades and corn-rows) who spots them shivering nervously in bikinis in front of a judge. A gang is formed, drive-by shootings are suffered and revenge is enacted, in a film that has as many surprisingly somber moments as it does anarchic ones.
Of course, there are moments in Spring Breakers that meet the initial expectations one’d have of four fit, nubile just post-teens in a Harmony Korine movie about spring break. There are multiple kinetic montages of terrifying excess and violent nakedness of exactly the imaginable type, but the film upon the introduction of Franco as Alien shifts gears completely, becoming a profoundly difficult film to parse. As often as Korine focuses his camera very specifically on the pantied crotches of his cast during the moments that they’re playing leap-frog in a hall, the film also set pairings of the four heroines up as ultimately bad-ass young women gangsters.
The four enter a drug-dealer dispute between Alien and his one-time best friend Archie (Gucci Mane) as naïfs, bailed out of jail, but they immediately assert their dominance as matching-ski-mask-wearing, gun-toting terrors. As much as Korine’s camera fixates on their individual parts–asses, crotches and breasts*they are as characters allowed to control their aesthetic definition, conjuring forth a pop-art scene in which they play ring-around-the-rosie holding shotguns wearing matching pink balaclavas while James Franco belts his way through a Britney Spears ballad played on a sea-side outdoor piano.
The effect, in the end, is utterly baffling and terrifically enjoyable. It’s nearly unreadable, and it’s extremely difficult to pluck any specific bit of meaning out of the film. If there’s any uproar upon its release next January it’s less likely to be from offended teen Gomez fans than folks who might wish Korine would focus the potency of Spring Breaker’s brief into some more easily digestible point.
But Spring Breakers isn’t so trite a film, and it’s much more fun the way it is. It’s a difficult, gorgeous mix of satire, sincerity, heaving flesh and abrupt violence, gross male voyeurism and transgressive teen female self-definition. Korine structures much of the film in such a way that snatches of dialogue repeat over and over and over again, layered on top of flash-forward footage, which all seems like prelude before an impossible-to-predict and absolutely fitting art-punk meets gang-land conclusion. It wanders, it loops back on itself, it lets Disney teens shoot drug dealers with sophisticated automatic weaponry. It’s confusing, weird, hilarious and bawdy in a way that’s simultaneously thrilling and deeply embarrassing. There is no one else in America that’s making films that mix au courant hip-hop aesthetics with serious-minded artistic filmmaking, and while Korine’s film ultimately remains baffling, it does so in the most entertaining, vital way possible.
Another review!
or may be just sleeping in the rain 
i hope u won't work in **** anymore 
