He has a field of cornrows on his scalp, a mouthful of metal, and a houseful of guns. Alien is a loser, a loudmouth, and a drug dealer, with murder on his mind. You have to admire any actor who thinks that careers should, you know, career, like dirt bikes or stunt cars, and to jump from “Oz the Great and Powerful”-again, a Disney product-onto the planet infested by Alien shows a certain recklessness and style. Drugs are discovered, the girls are arrested, and salvation-or, rather, a grinning damnation-arrives, in the shape of Alien (James Franco), who bails them out and invites them to stick around. The moment at which the camera cranes up, roof-high, to inspect a pullulating swarm of bodies below is like some insane twenty-first-century answer to Bruegel, although the filmmaker, unlike the painter, is scarcely able to contain himself at the spectacle of delight. Thus enriched, they head to Florida, where the mania that we witnessed at the start continues, on a grander scale. That is what Korine’s heroines resort to, threatening the clientele with hammers and water pistols in their quest for cash. On the whole, however, lords and ladies tend not to hold up the Chicken Shack. American teen-agers are no different, in this respect, from the British upper classes, who, until not long ago, would rather be seen dead than not be seen at Ascot, near the Queen. The need to be there, we feel, really is a need-not just a physical longing but a social emergency, to which no alternative can be imagined. Gomez plays Faith, and Hudgens her friend Candy together with Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine, the director’s wife), they form a frustrated foursome, who have finished the semester but cannot afford to go to Tampa for spring break. Then, there are Korine’s leading ladies, half of them-Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens-hijacked from the wonderful world of the Disney Channel and transferred to a pulsing human zoo where cocaine is licked from breasts, bikinis are worn with handcuffs, in front of a judge, and the correct attire for homicide is a ski mask the hue of strawberry ice cream. The cinematographer is Benoît Debie, who photographed Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void,” the opening credits of which provided the liveliest phantasmagoria of the past decade. Is that care loving, though, or mocking? Has the outsider joined the mainstream or has he simply realized that there is no better, dumber place to hold a pool party?Ĭertainly, his hirings are astute. What is new about “Spring Breakers” is the punch of the thing: positively raging with affect and crafted with a care that rebuffs the deliberate, faux-amateur roughness of early Korine. Most of those movies, however, lolled about in itchy disaffection. By now, after works like “Gummo” (1997), “Julien Donkey-Boy” (1999), “Mister Lonely” (2007), and “Trash Humpers” (2009), in which old-timers really do have sex with garbage cans, it’s clear that Korine can hardly spot a hackle that he doesn’t feel compelled to raise. Nonetheless, since the age of nineteen, when he wrote the script for Larry Clark’s troublemaking “Kids,” Korine has applied himself to the necessary, if often tiresome, business of provocation. Whether you can still be an enfant terrible at forty is a matter of debate. The obvious answer is “The candyman can,” but in fact the director of “Spring Breakers” is Harmony Korine. Who, you want to ask, can possibly be the magus behind this bacchanal-this forthright sucking of Popsicles, this spume of beer hosed across bare flesh, this char-grilled day? The music is by Skrillex, who created such tender ballads as “Bangarang” and “Kill Everybody,” while the color scheme, stuffed with explosive pinks and dreamy tangerines, makes Matisse look like Giacometti. Tan, toned, and deaf to all entreaty save that of their rollicking senses, they bend and bulge toward the camera, up close yet oddly impersonal, beating time on our eardrums and daring us to risk our retinas. Such is the considered opinion of “Spring Breakers,” and in particular of its opening minutes, aflame with the seaside carousing of beaux and belles. Harmony Korine’s new movie casts James Franco as a drug dealer named Alien.
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