Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)

As a filmmaker, Harmony Korine seems to operate on a plane of singularity that maddeningly evokes a curiosity regarding his intentions while expertly evading offering any insight into them. In a recent interview with the A.V. Club, Korine posited, "I’m always hoping [my films are] commercially successful, or that people get to see them. I always want them to play in the shopping malls, but it doesn’t always happen." Anyone who's seen Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) or Korine's last film, 2009's Trash Humpers—which I haven't seen, but the off-putting poster coupled with the fact that it's presented as a collection of grainy, VHS found footage documenting the exploits of a pack of antisocial elderly people in Tennessee running amok and, presumably, simulating sex with piles of refuse seem to pointedly challenge you to endure watching it—may find this statement to be, if not suspect, downright delusional.

Korine was famously assailed by success right out of the gate with the release of Kids (1995), which Korine had written at 19, an icky film directed by icky photographer-turned-filmmaker Larry Clark. Kids had the caché of being a Miramax indie-film happening (see Clerks, Swingers, Pulp Fiction, and Boogie Nights) when such things seemed to occur with some regularity before a few candidates (54, Cop Land, Way of the Gun) turfed out with filmgoers while wearing that crown. The unrated Kids (Miramax decided to release it without a rating after the MPAA suggested it be rated NC-17) was awash in buzz and controversy before it was even released for a bevvy of reasons, including its frank depiction of teenage sexuality and drug use, and its weirdo director, which helped it to catch fire and, on a budget of $1.5 million, bring in over $20 million worldwide.

With the autonomy granted him by the success of Kids, Korine, at 23 years old, went on to write and direct the anarchic and beguiling Gummo (1997) and then, adopting the tenets of Lars Von Trier's Dogme 95 movement, he made the impossibly more anarchic and arguably less beguiling Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) before mostly retreating into his burgeoning drug habit. During the next several years, Korine would resurface here and there in the pop culture landscape, but, rather than garnering attention for his art, it would be for his bizarre, drug-addled antics, including when two of his houses mysteriously burned down and when it was rumored that his next film would feature the filmmaker, high on crack, picking fights with and, subsequently, given a pounding by passersby.

In 2007, Korine, newly clean, resurfaced with the enchanting—and surprisingly coherent, given that it details the adventures of a Michael Jackson lookalike who travels to an island inhabited by other lookalikes, among them Abraham Lincoln and the Pope, to build a stage and mount a performance that they hope will draw an audience from "town"—Mr. Lonely. The film was Korine's most linear and cinematic to date, but, despite being by far his best-looking and least modestly budgeted picture (estimated to cost about $8 million), the film failed to make much of a splash financially—grossing less than $500,000 domestically—or otherwise.

Next, in 2009, Korine seemed to be leaning back on his old habit of invoking outrage through the lens of his Dogme '95 sensibility with the release of Trash Humpers. Only thing is, 14 years had passed since the loose collective was formed, making this type of thing seem like yesterday's news. The film managed to anger a few critics and coax the admiration out of a few more, but it didn't make much of a splash in the cultural zeitgeist; it was as if the elite few who saw it shrugged their shoulders and kind of forgot about it come the following morning.

The only agenda I have in outlining the successes and failures (both commercially and in terms of cultural impact) of Korine's films is in trying to gain an understanding of how we're supposed to digest Spring Breakers, because I think it may be (maybe?) instructive. Is it far-fetched to suppose that after his earlier successes and subsequent time served maintaining a serious drug habit that, after what I'm sure was no picnic in getting his life back to a manageable state, the unceremonious reception to Mister Lonely left him feeling crushed? Is it cynical to think that, after Mr. Lonely failed to cause a stir, Korine tried to recreate his early (relative) success with Trash Humpers and, when that failed to cause a stir, with Spring Breakers Korine is blatantly attempting to court the mainstream? It's a fair question, one that I've been searching for an answer to even though I know one most certainly doesn't exist. And even if that were proven the case, Spring Breakers is so out of alignment with the majority of mainstream cinema that it would thus defy its own raison d'être. Maybe in his attempt and failure to sell out, Korine has found a new, extremely personalized and case-specific formula for success: Spring Breakers cost about $5 million to make, grossed over $30 million theatrically worldwide, was granted instant cult-film status upon its arrival, and has affirmed Harmony Korine's viability as a commercial film director while simultaneously reaffirming his viability as a transgressive filmmaker.

But what is Korine's Spring Breakers supposed to be, exactly?

Much has been made of the casting coup of Selena Gomez (as Faith) and Vanessa Hudgens (Candy), both former Disney Channel royalty, as two of the four disaffected college students at the center of the film (the other two are played by Ashley Benson (Brittany) of ABC's Pretty Little Liars and Korine's wife Rachel Korine (Cotty), who also appeared in Trash Humpers). As both Gomez and Hudgens are extremely popular personalities in certain circles, they provide the film with a built-in audience—even a small fraction of their fans provides Korine with a wider audience than he's used to playing to—and are, in turn, afforded the opportunity to star in a bona fide art film, while Korine is afforded the opportunity to exploit and subvert their screen personas and have people call him a genius for doing so (which they have in droves). 

Upon being introduced to our heroines, we are immediately inundated with their desperate, breathy proclamations of needing to spend spring break in Fort Lauderdale—the details of which would seem completely absurd if it bore any resemblance to an actual desire that might befall a single human being here on Earth (but most closely resembles the longing of the characters played by Tom Cruise and James Van Der Beek in their desperation to escape the small-mindedness of their dead-end, football-obsessed towns in All the Right Moves (1983) and Varsity Blues (1999), respectively)—that is so all-consuming that three of the four (Gomez's vaguely Christian character Faith isn't asked to participate) turn into instantly hardened thugs and wind up robbing a local restaurant in the service of following their collective dream. Here, Korine stages the heist expertly, shooting from inside the getaway car, with Cotty at the wheel, peering out the car window and into the restaurant windows, tracking Brittany and Candy as they smash and grab their way through the restaurant before making it back to the car and tearing off. It's thrilling, nerve-wracking stuff, as you're really pulling for them to get away without incident despite the callousness of it all. I'm not sure you would put Spring Breakers on a double feature with Dassin's Rififi as one of the two greatest heist films of all time, but, in its real-time brevity, the sequence works perfectly.

Shortly after our heroines' arrival in Fort Lauderdale, they wind up in the clink after a night of debauchery in a drab Florida apartment complex, only to be bailed out by a creep on the order of a Max Cady recast as a weirdo rapper/drug dealer named Alien, played by James Franco clearly channeling weirdo rapper Riff Raff who, at the time of this writing, in a video taken by TMZ has calmly threatened to sue the film's producers for eight to ten million dollars (though, as with all things Riff Raff, it's somewhat unclear if this is a joke). Franco is good, employing a nice blend of outrageousness and subtlety, though there's still something that doesn't quite track 100 percent in his performance, which may be that he's not quite as convincing a Riff Raff as Riff Raff is. The girls then become entrenched in the dangerous turf war between Alien and his mentor and former best friend, Big Arch (played just adequately enough by rapper Gucci Mane to not be distracting). Two of the girls fall off before the bat-shit craziness of it all reaches a fever pitch and the film concludes.

There's a hallucinatory and heady quality to Spring Breakers that, by no accident, recounts the works of Terrence Malick; particularity The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life. But with its Malick-influenced combination of a chopped up, breezy, and loosely connected images defying an identifiable timeline with breathy, introspective voiceovers, instead of ruminating on the psychological heft of war or the ways in which our private, customized lives have greater meaning and are integral to maintaining the construct of the cosmos, Spring Breakers has its characters ruminating similarly on spring break. It's so effective that you might not recognize how funny it is until after the movie's over.

There is also a confrontational and pervasive sexual aggression in the film that's a bit confounding: there are long, slow motion scenes depicting a parade of bouncing tits and asses, sometimes being drenched in liquor and beer poured by buff, creepy young men. It's all beautifully photographed—Korine has said in interviews that he wanted the film in these spots to look like they were lit with Starburst or Skittles—and masterfully scored by Skrillex, whose scoring of these scenes may best be described as sounding like he's pulling an electric ripcord—but it's a tough pill to swallow. (These scenes bring to mind how, in cereal commercials, milk is poured into a bowl of cereal from an above-average height, causing the milk and cereal to splash over the edge of the bowl in an explosion. It's just not how anyone pours cereal into a bowl. At all.) But is it, objectively, a tough pill to swallow?

Of course, what is considered attractive or sexy is subjective. It's a whole lot of frustrating to figure out just how we're supposed to feel when confronted with this particular brand of manufactured sexuality. Is it supposed to be titillating? Depressing? Unnerving? Perhaps Korine is using sexuality here in the same way folks have said Spielberg uses violence in the Normandy Beach scene of Saving Private Ryan to further an anti-violence agenda; but this is further complicated by there not being much beauty to be found in bullets ripping through clothing and flesh and the face-down corpses of soldiers bouncing ever so slightly when the tide rolls in to shore while there's plenty of beauty to be found in the female form. However, there's also a lot of ugliness to be found in degradation. And a lot of sadness to be found in self-degradation. Are we meant to feel challenged by this, or are we simply supposed to get off on it? Are there people watching Spring Breakers, a Harmony Korine film, in this very particular context, who enjoy that particular brand of sexuality?

No one comes off very well, but even as we're taken deeper down Korine's nightmarish rabbit hole, what resonates in Spring Breakers is the wide-eyed wonder, longing, and, ultimately, innocence radiating from the central characters—even as they're engaged in such unsavory activities as armed robbery, alcohol and drug abuse, and divergent and aggressive sexual behavior—that's both supremely enchanting and really, really dumb at the same time. Their pursuit being so infantile and virginal as they navigate the pitfalls through a fever dream of medium-time thuggery and caustic sexuality is something to behold, if you're up for it. Still, I'm honestly not sure who this movie is for—it seems to me that the dudes who watch it for the sex would be put off by or at least bored with the more philosophical passages of the film, while those cuing it up for its art-house pedigree might be put off by, well, possibly the whole fucking thing.

In the aforementioned A/V Club interview, Korine says, "I’m not telling anyone what to think. I’m not trying to even defend it in that way, or say that this is my intent or that’s my intent, or that’s what I’m trying to say. That’s not for me to argue. I’m trying to make something that’s amazing, something that’s beautiful, something that lasts." I don't know that Spring Breakers is beautiful, exactly, but it's something else, and there is a poetry to it and an elegance in its neon-tinged mysticism, even in its crassest and basest moments. I've thought of little else since I watched it, even though I can't tell you for certain if I enjoyed it or not.

Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013)

Fans of the Man of Steel had to wait 19 years after 1987's cautionary tale (not so much in terms of its plotline but, rather, its makeshift filmmaking, and its poor production values and money management) Superman IV: The Quest for Peace whimpered in and out of theaters for 2006's reboot, Superman Returns, which, despite its relative critical and box-office success, seemed to have left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Seven years would seem too short a time to reboot a superhero franchise if we hadn't just weathered The Amazing Spider-Man, which hit theaters five years after Spider-Man 3 and felt far too familiar to make much of an impression, and the five years between Hulk and The Incredible Hulk, neither of which really resonated with film audiences. But Man of Steel has a freshness to it, retelling a story we've all heard before but not in a way that makes as much sense as it does here.

Like most superhero origin-story fare, the portion of the film before the central character becomes an icon offers the most interesting and dramatic moments (see the first Iron Man film). Man of Steel is no exception, and, despite their relatively short appearances and (for the most part) relegation to the film's setup, both Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner cast a large shadow over the film's entirety, providing gravitas and the emotional heft needed to re-energize a well-worn story in the brooding way the filmmakers intended. There isn't a lot of joy to be found in Man of Steel, but there is discovery: Superman's (or Kal-El's) appearance—both his coming to Earth and, physically, how he looks in his suit—makes sense here in a way that has never seemed as feasible before.

And like most superhero origin-story fare, the parts after the central character becomes an icon are the most bombastic and tiresome (see the first Iron Man film). The film culminates in an absolutely ridiculous (in both a good and bad way) battle royal between Superman and General Zod (played by Michael Shannon, who is excellent and almost manages to turn Zod into a sympathetic character) where miles of concrete are pulverized into dust as the two clumsily pummel each other, with each landed hit sending them both flying for several city blocks. It gets a bit tiresome; a friend of mine recently wisely noted that "watching CG guys fighting is like watching hotdogs boil in a pot." Director Zack Snyder goes all in here, but about halfway through, you feel like you're being bullied into validating the filmmakers' decision to mount the greatest fist fight of all time, and I found myself withdrawing from it altogether. 

The cast is uniformly good, though Henry Cavilll—despite his best efforts and through no fault of his own—as the titular Man of Steel can be distracting at times; he's too ripped and aggressively squat, and his hairstyle is only slightly less distracting than that donned by Nicholas Cage as in Tim Burton's proposed Superman treatment.

Man of Steel is mercifully short on jokes; those few that are attempted fall with a thud. And not all of it works: most egregiously, the film's last five or so minutes—when the smoke clears and the film's story has come to an end—are lazily mounted and wholly unsatisfying. Still, I found myself having a good time watching Man of Steel, despite the filmmakers' attempts to ensure I wouldn't, which makes me think that maybe it's time to stop taking these types of films so seriously.

Cyrus (Jay and Mark Duplass, 2010)

I really wanted to like this movie (and I suppose I did, slightly), especially given how much I enjoyed Baghead (2008) in a completely different manner than I expected going into it. Though devoid of the element of surprise present in the filmmaking and construction of Baghead, there are things to admire here starting with the assured and likable cast. Jonah Hill plays Cyrus who, at 22, still lives with his mother Molly, near-convincingly brought to life by the embodiment of can-do-no-wrong, Marissa Tomei. (If I could take credit for pulling this observation from the mire I would: my wife Melissa pointed out that in Molly, we have a seemingly rational, intelligent, genial person who is so inept at recognizing the co-dependent relationship she has with her son and detecting his devious and parasitic activities that the minute you start questioning how these contradictive qualities can exist in the same person—which is almost immediately—her character, along with the film itself, crumples beneath the weight of it.) And the always excellent John C. Reilly plays divorcée John, the poor sap whose falling in love with Molly (apparent immediately in a well-scripted yet entirely unbelievable post-modern “meet cute”) threatens—at least in Cyrus’s eyes—to decimate the all-encompassing bond between mother and son.

The film has a few other grace notes. One worth mentioning, oddly, is the use of locations, especially the house where Cyrus and his mother live and setting where a pivotal party scene unfolds, which uncannily ground the proceedings in reality, nearly making you believe the goings-on as they unfold. Also, the film’s ending is better than most of its kind, and Cyrus has exactly one great, kinetically giddy scene, where John confronts Cyrus in the middle of the night: the momentum builds to a fever pitch, but rather than capitalizing on this momentum, the film subsequently grinds to a halt without ever regaining its footing.

I admire the gentle nature of the screenplay and that the film never goes for a cheap and easy laugh; say what you will, but Cyrus isn’t lazy. But in the end, it’s either a comedy that’s not particularly funny or a drama that’s a little too quirky to resound with any gravitas. Cyrus is generically sweet like kindergartners’ exchanging valentines that they’ve each scribbled their perfunctory signatures on, because that’s what they do, rather than achingly sweet like a working stiff trying to find the perfect Valentine’s Day present for his lady when he only has $20 in his bank account and doesn’t get paid again until the 15th, because that’s what he has to do. Which is what, I think anyway, the Duplass brothers are aspiring to here.

Inspector Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, 2009)

Terrifically nuanced performances from Gérard Depardieu as Bellamy and Marie Bunel as his impossibly graceful wife propel this strange, laconic crime drama, the last film from Claude Chabrol (1930–2010), who along with contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut wrote for Cahiers du cinéma in the ’50s and went on to found the French New Wave of cinema. The titular character (apparently based on George Simenon’s Inspector Maigret mystery novels, none of which I have read or was even aware of when I watched this film), a famous Parisian inspector, stumbles into a mystery involving a horrific car crash while vacationing with his wife.

It’s a treat to watch Depardieu’s Bellamy as he not so much investigates the mystery as lets it wash over him, almost as if he’s in a perpetually meditative state. And the plot is important, yes, but perhaps less so than the way the characters relate to each other, specifically Bellamy and his wife and Bellamy’s fuck-up brother, who brings a black cloud up for a visit. Their relationships bristle with joie de vivre, jealousy, denial, longing, relapse, and deep-rooted regret, sometimes all at once. Even with a few missteps—some of the point-of-view camerawork seems woefully out of place, especially given its (thankfully) minimal use, and, though the interaction between characters on the whole digs at truth, the day-to-day interactions and reactions of the major characters seems faintly at odds with the naturalistic filmmaking—it’s a beautiful film, with a conclusion that offers up an unexpected bookend that chills to the bone.

Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)

It’s funny: film critics used to accuse the genre-defining blockbuster films of Steven Spielberg (starting with Jaws) of bullying the surrender of meaningful cinema in favor of box office receipt-driven bombast and spectacle, and now the critics are calling J.J. Abrams’ homage to these films, Super 8, the antidote to standard summer trash like the Transformers films because of its firm emotional core. Though Super 8 may be a little nastier and harder edged than such films (perhaps reflecting the times we live in), the critics are onto something: the idea of caring one bit about let alone shedding tears the way people did in, say, E.T. over any character’s demise in the Transformers franchise is beyond improbable. But Super 8 is magically burdened with real emotional heft, and it's something to behold. Sure there’s drooling monsters, single-minded villains incapable of summoning an ounce of compassion, and things exploding left and right, but there’s a feeling of there being more at stake than in many summer films of late, because you genuinely care about what happens to the people on the screen. This is because the writing and performances plant these characters firmly in the "reality" created for them. In fact, the fate these characters may suffer due to the travails threatened by the fantastical elements in the films may be bested by those in their everyday existence.

Though much has (deservedly) been written about Elle Fanning's performance, the cast (especially the kids, led by the remarkable Joel Courtney) is uniformly (and unusually) solid. Without giving too much away (the less said the better), a group of misfit, film making kids (you can be forgiven for comparing them to the characters from The Goonies) navigating their way through small-town life in late '70s witness a horrific train crash while filming their latest opus, and find themselves witnesses to something that defies simple explanation.

The film doesn’t transcend the criticisms leveled by Kael and her contemporaries when the summer blockbuster was in its infancy, criticisms that, though they have their detractors who argue that such critics are humorless snoots, impervious to the charms of special effects, certainly hold water. And there are clunky passages, a few plot device missteps here and there, and interweaving themes (film making being the primary one) that never gel 100 percent. But at this point on the trajectory in the lineage of what the summer popcorn film template has become, it’s refreshing (and familiar) to surrender to a film that uses bombast and thrills in a manner that furthers the storytelling, rather than obliterating it to fiery metallic bits.

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)

It would be just as easy (and lazy) to ascribe the words “whimsical” or “charming” to Woody Allen’s 41st(!) film as “well-intentioned” and “creaky.” But the truth lies somewhere in the middle—the conceit of the film is an interesting one, and though the execution of it works more often than not, the misfires occur often enough to all but ensure a disconnect between the audience and what’s happening on the screen.

Still, Owen Wilson as all-but-defeated screenwriter Gil Pender, on vacation in the city of the title with his improbably shrewish fiancée (Rachel McAdams, dutifully allowing herself to be trapped by the character’s confines) and cartoonishly dreadful in-laws, comes off as one of the better Woody Allen surrogates, either because he’s savvy enough to steer clear of Allen impersonation or he’s too “Owen Wilson” to effectively impersonate anyone. Either way, it’s a winning, slightly revelatory performance. And Allen frames and photographs Wilson’s face without cutting prematurely, allowing us to be persuaded by Gil's reactions to the fantastical events (each night at the stroke of midnight, Gil is transported back to the Paris of the 1920s populated by the likes of Hemingway, Dali, and Fitzgerald) unfolding before his eyes; rather than seeing things through Gil's eyes, we see them registered on his face.

If you’re a Paris-in-the-'20s fetishist (I’m guessing you’re probably not), there’s a lot to feast on here—the set design and photography have a much-needed and impressive transportative quality—even if some of the setup is hackneyed. Some scenes come off as near-miss variations on tighter-scripted Allen moments, where closing-scene punchlines meant to linger as the film segues into its next scene are instead only suggested by the cutting, relying on the audience's collective recall of similarly structured, more successfully mounted scenes from other Allen films rather than the precision of the punchline. And I think we can all agree that it’s more than a little tiresome to have the Woody Allen surrogate as the only character with any perspective; his fiancée is a drag, his object of affection (a thoroughly winning but elegiac Marion Cotillard) lives in a bygone era, and the impossibly glowing, agreeable and fetishized sales clerk he encounters at a flea market is way too young for him (which makes for, in the universe of Woody Allen, a perfect match).

Midnight in Paris is a clever, slight, handsome little diversion, and you might just enjoy it, as I did, as long as your tolerance for known celebrities playing historical figures is high, and you’re not looking to laugh out loud too much or be moved emotionally.

The Switch (Josh Gordon and Will Speck, 2010)

You know you’re in trouble when the ineffable charm and comic wares of Jason Bateman can’t rescue your film from coming off as an affront to mediocre romantic comedies, a sub-genre defined by its apologists (I know it’s schmaltzy, but, etc.), or the poster is by far the best thing about it.

Both are true of The Switch, a film whose contrivances are bested only by the level of boredom it manages to inspire in its audience. Apparently based on a short story, "Baster" by Jeffrey Eugenides, the film deposits us in New York seven years in the past, marked by the insane and impressive mass that is Jason Bateman's hair. Wally (Bateman) finds out best friend Kassie Larson (a blander-than-normal Jennifer Aniston) has decided to find a sperm donor and have a child. What better way to do this than have your kooky friend (Juliette Lewis) throw you a party where you artificially inseminate yourself, which, we're ensured, is what everybody's doing these days. Wally, who doesn't particularly like the donor—could it be because he's in love with Kassie?—gets really drunk and happens upon the donor's canister of semen in the bathroom. While fucking around with it, he accidentally spills it in the sink. Therefore, he must replace it with his own. Due to his state of extreme inebriation, he has no recollection of this occurrence.

Seven years later (the present day), the story picks up as Kassie, who had moved away, is moving back to New York with her fucking annoying son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson), who seems to have similar characteristics to a now more reasonably coiffed Wally. One of these similar qualities is the particular brand of hypochondria that befalls people only inasmuch as it indicates a character trait for the purpose of comparison rather than an actual condition. Someone like Sebastian exists only in the movies, coming off as an amalgam of that "special child" you've seen countless times (the character is even endowed with Jonathan Lipnicki character's penchant for using big words and spouting out weird facts in Jerry Maguire). But Sebastian's character quirks are so unlikely—he collects picture frames and keeps the generic pictures they come with and creates stories for each of them—you'll find yourself rolling your eyes when your not scratching your head.

That the characters relate to each other in ways that people don't relate to each other may be perplexing ("Hi, I'm out of town with this dude I like right now, and I really don't want to have to come back there, but I just found out my son has lice. Can you do me a favor and go pick him up and perform a rigorous regimen of rituals to see if you can get rid of them? Thanks. And when I come back, and you've taken care of my son for me, and scrubbed his head and laundered his sheets, and gone through his hair with a fine-toothed comb, I might yell at you for not being happy for me and my new boyfriend," says the heroine of the film), but the film's real downfall is the laziness inherent in Allan Loeb's screenplay. It seems defiant in its tendency to string together elements we've seen before in other movies, but without any meaning behind them. Bateman's voiceover, offering the coda to the film displays this perfectly, as he declares "Maybe the human race isn't a race at all," possibly hinting at slowing down and enjoying life? Who knows, because this sentiment is completely independent of anything that happens in the fucking movie.

Only Jeff Goldblum, who manages to wring one or two laughs from the hackneyed material, seems like he's having any fun here; on the sinking ship, where everybody's running around waving their arms and panicking, he's sitting back and getting drunk, because, Why not? We're all going to die anyway.

Thoroughly improbable, utterly unfunny, and sometimes even mean-spirited (the film seems to have something against homeless people, offering at least two shameful throwaway jokes at their expense), The Switch foolishly relies on the knowledge of its audience to make inferences from and draw comparisons to other, better movies it's already seen and apologized for, even while recommending.