Spring Breakers Blu-ray UltraViolet Digital Copy

I wouldn't recommend reading this unless you've seen the film. The bright sun glistens off the bright blue water as the warm sand squishes between your toes. Laughter and joyful screams fill the air. The beer funnel is full again and you're up next. "Woooo!" echoes throughout the beach. Smiles surround you and everyone is inviting. This is Spring break. This is the dream. Though just as all dreams do it is sure to come to an abrupt end. Bright lights and neon swim wear can only last so long before the harsh world comes bounding upon you. How far would you go to make it last? What would you be willing to do in order to have spring break forever? These are just a few of the questions Harmony Korine posits in his newest effort Spring Breakers. A study on the youth culture today and how amoral and corrupt just having fun can become. Korine's nonlinear editing is a thing of genius here and really drives the film on. The constant foreshadowing and hints of the future assure that the tension never lets up and the view is never able to be at ease. Something isn't right here. Even through all the partying and seeming happiness something darker lies just beneath the surface. It will not be all laughter and smiles. Something will go very wrong. This feeling is met with truth as the film unfolds. Korine uses erratic dubstep music and quick cuts to illustrate the ever decomposing attention span of today's youth, then slowly eases the film into a more lingering and abstract statement on the moral decay of society at large. Selena Gomez and Rachel Korine do well with what they have to work with. Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and James Franco however knock their parts out of the park. In particular Hudgens and Franco. Hudgens' Candy is so disconnected from reality that when a friend who she's known since kindergarten is fearful for their lives and wants to go back home her first instinct is to roll her eyes. Her constant finger gun shooting is very telling. She wants to "have fun" and do whatever she wants no matter the cost. Life to her is a video game. A movie. Drugs, alcohol, mindless robbing, unlimited money and no consequences. Sound familiar? Almost like a description for the newest Grand Theft Auto video game. This is her perception. This is how she makes the world around her. This is her reality. A girl making out with another girl and dancing raunchy is considered edgy and when she sees this happening at a party her reaction is to gyrate around and scream in joy. Something that many girls would do as well, but this is only a small glimpse into her psyche. It's not the act that excites her it is the fact that it is edgy and considered by some to be wrong. Money excites her because of the power it brings with it. She, several times, becomes aroused in the presence of money. Of all the girls she is the one who seems to be the first and most accepting of Alien and his lifestyle. After Cotty has been shot and tells Brit and Candy that spring break is over Candy again seems to not care. Just as Faith wanting to go home this only interrupts Candy's fun. She just wants this annoyance to be over. Get back to the fun stuff. Get back to being bad. "I always wanted to be bad." A statement made by Franco's Alien that completely defines his character. Guns, drugs, money and power are his American Dream. Alien's idea of having fun is robbing spring breakers and blowing tons of money at strip clubs. He is gangster rap fully realized and defined. As he tells the girls he is a hustler and a rapper. It is quite important that he lists them in that order. It's as if being a rapper comes with the territory of being a hustler and plays second fiddle to it. The idea that all gangsters and hustlers are also rappers means he has to be one as well. Music is not his first love nor why he does this. He just wants to be bad and rappers are "bad" so he must do it. Scarface is the ultimate bad guy so it plays on repeat in his house. He surrounds himself with what he sees as bad. The necessities of being a bad guy. Just as when he is explaining his back story he says it's the same old sob story. It doesn't matter. All that matters is being the baddest guy he can be. There doesn't have to be a reason why other than he simply wants to be. This is his ultimate downfall. Spring Breakers is worth seeing for Franco's performance alone. Hudgens performance, Harmony Korine's brilliant direction and hyper sensual style are just the icing on the cake. After seeing this for the second time it only got better. I expect the third time will only reveal more about this masterwork. 10/10. Read more

I am probably just as surprised as you are: Spring Breakers is actually a really good movie. It follows a deceptively simple plot, of a Good Girl and her longtime friends, three Bad Girls, who are bored in their university setting and are desperate for any kind of change. Their solution is to go to Florida for a wild and unforgettable Spring Break. Even after saving money for months, they are unable to afford this excursion, prompting the Bad Girls to rob a local eatery. The bad behavior continues at the Spring Break resort town, eventually landing them in a local jail and involved in a greater crime ring. One of the drug lords is played to over-the-top perfection by James Franco, who delivers a chilling yet comical portrayal. The story is told with an engaging intensity unique to films of this genre; we've seen plenty of movies like this before, of young girls gone wild, so the direction doesn't waste time on the narrative. What's interesting is how the story is told, through lucid montages flashing around through time and space, often with disembodied voice-overs describing the sequence we are viewing, as told by characters before or after the incident actually takes place. Take one scene, for instance: We know the girls are going to get into trouble. We knew that from the movie poster. So for the scene in which they get arrested, we get flashes of the different girls in police cars with red and blue lights shining on their faces; then we return back to the incident in which they get arrested. This constant back-and-forth makes this movie, whose narrative is otherwise simple, consistently compelling. But it's not just the storytelling that makes Spring Breakers a fascinating work, but the story and theme itself. Simple, yes, but also profound. This is a twisted representation of the American dream, almost a contemporary remake of Where the Boys Are, of young women rejecting mainstream society and opt to make a life for themselves in any way they can. The plays of power move so instantaneously and so driven by individual initiative, that one can't watch without the unsettling feeling that power, and perceptions of it, are so fluid. On its surface, Spring Breakers is a sticky, neon trip of house music and marijuana smoke but at its heart (or lack of one), it is a disturbing and revealing look at what we value in our American life, and how far we will go to achieve it. Read more

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