dvd of the week
When I saw Harmony Korine’s exploitation art movie Spring Breakers, I knew what I was getting into: I was hoping to be horrified by the wrongness of the movie, but the kids in theater where I saw it were surprised by how horrifying, pornographic, disturbing and weirdly funny the movie is.
To say that the movie is bad is true, but that’s too straightforward. It’s too effective – too deliberately funny, titillating and discomfiting – to be just be bad. It’s also a little bit brilliant. Four girls desperately want to go to Florida for spring break, but they don’t have enough money, so they steal it.
Faith (Selena Gomez) is a naive, depressive Christian who wants to break free, while Candy (Venessa Hudgens) and Brit (Ashley Benson) just want to party and have sex, and Cotty (Rachel Korine, Harmony’s wife) is along for the ride.
After the four of them get way too drunk and high and then arrested, James Franco, with long, scraggly corn-rows and a gold grill in his mouth, shows up. He bails our girls out of jail, and suddenly the movie leaves the spring break genre and becomes a weird mash-up of Scarface and Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill with a Britney Spears and Skrillex soundtrack.
Franco is so creepy, so funny and so balls-out involved in his character that whatever occasionally slow-moving absurdity Korine has his characters involved in becomes entertaining.
