7) Spring Breakers
Some people will watch Spring Breakers in hopes of witnessing former Disney starlets Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens break bad. And that’s just fine, if it means that more people will see Harmony Korine’s brilliant, darkly hilarious ode to the hedonistic, candy-colored fantasy of spring break.
Nightmarish, neon-heavy camerawork captures the intensity and opacity of the haze of drugs, sex and alcohol in which the film’s young stars find themselves, and it also drives home the sense that Korine is filming a paradise lost. His messages in Spring Breakers are dark ones: materialism has fostered a disconnect between actions and responsibilities so severe that American morals have been irreversibly eroded. The American education system has failed, so much so that the girls at the film’s center feel so wound up and infuriated by the pointlessness of it all that their shaking off of responsibilities involves indulging in the same boozy gun fantasies imparted to them through a lifetime of violent video games. Korine films it all with the intrusive, sleazy gaze of a Girls Gone Wild choreographer.
“Bikinis and big booties, y’all, that’s what life is about!” howls James Franco’s gonzo gangster Alien in one scene. He’s that party boy who never went home, completely committed to the booze-soaked wonderland he calls home. And Franco plays him brilliantly – watch him proudly proclaim, “Look at my shit!” to Hudgens’ Candy and Ashley Benson’s Brit as he displays everything from dark tanning oil to loaded semiautomatics, and you’ll understand why Annapurna’s Oscar bid for him is deadly serious. Hudgens and Benson are also both terrifically unhinged.
In a word, Spring Breakers is unforgettable. But this is a film that deserves so much more than a one-word consensus. It deserves to be discussed, analyzed and watched countless times. See it and soak it up, because Spring Breakers is Korine’s most thought-provoking work since Kids.