Badboy Indie Director Does An Arty, Subversive Girls Gone Wild!
by ALAN SAMUEL
Smart girls doings bad things may be a bit too charitable summing up the exploits revealed in Spring Breakers, the new film from Touchwood Releasing. Geared completely to the teen age young adult crowd this movie hopes to capitalize on all the good times that go with holidaying it up in March. School is out so check out this sun and sand and drugs and booze tale now hoping to score at the Empire Studio 12, Colossus and Cineplex Odeon cites around B.C.
Parents be warned: this flick is strictly for the teens. Unless you like watching lots of babes in bikinis showing off and other boozed out behaviour. Here bad times are left for good times as four friends decide to leave their dreary lives and head to the beach. Their hope is to score some good times and meet up with some hot guys and leave their lousy lives behind. That’s the plan on the surface. Money problems first confound the girls so their solution naturally is to steal some money. This act of selfigeness sets the tone as Faith, Coty, Brit and Candy burn rubber for Florida and the partying of Spring Break. Young at heart and with figures to prove it are Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine, Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens.
Once in Florida there is wall to wall partying and the gals meet up with a flambouyant rapper named Alien. Believe it or not James Franco (Oz The Great and Powerful) does a complete about face going from a nice guy public image to a true low life. Alien’s objective is not only to “objectify” the girls, which they have no problem with, but also to snare them into a lifestyle of crime. Down the spiral of evil we go as over time these “innocent” naive ladies succumb to a whole new world populated with some truly unsavoury characters.
Yes some adolescent boys will get off on seeing all the “skin” presented here and even some girls may find the gong ho attitude of these holidayers to be fun to behold. More mature people will find the behaviour and actions of all concerned to be rather troubling, to put it mildly. If you want to see a bunch of people doing drugs, making obscene crude gestures of a sexual nature front and centre then you’ll probably enjoy Spring Breakers which, in the final analysis may be a good capsule of the shenanigans when crazy boys and girls get down for some heavy drinking and partying.
Unfortunately a real stupid ending takes any true impact of this movie away. Director and writer Harmony Korine succeeds in doing a small exploitation flick well if you want to see ugly behaviour masquerading as art with lots of bullets and gunplay thrown in for good measure. Needless to say, don’t expect any Oscar consideration here though Franco is quite funny as the manipulative hot wired Scarface pretender.
