Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is the quintessential neo-noir movie for the 2010's. Why? Because it's a perfect dissection of the society of the spectacle and the futile dreams of the said society we live in. There's no psychological motivation to drive the action, because the psychological motives don't move us anymore. There are only some meaningless ulterior motives, like money, which makes your pussy wet.
And all this is crusted with the abrasive music of Skrillex and the hyper-active editing of YouTube-era party videos.
8 comments:
I dunno. Haven't seen SPRING B yet, but have to wonder if any of the Clark/Korine films express much more than their desire to show off young flesh and try to Shock Shock us while doing so. Much as Debord and the Sits seem to be mostly about saying things that are popular and gaudy that they don't like are spectacular and the ones they do like are subversive. Particularly if you change the lettering, sloppily.
There was a time where there were a lot of un-futile dreams and aspirations?
I kinda knew you'd say that. I liked Clark's KIDS myself and I must say I didn't find SPRING BREAKERS trying to be erotic even though it shows lots of young flesh. The girls in the film are not objects to be looked at (even though one must say that at the same time they are not clearly active subjects).
This one would need better scrutiny than I gave here, I might save it for my Finnish-speaking blog. After all these years of blogging in English I find it pretty hard to reason argumentatively in other than my mother tongue.
Well, that's it...I thought the two breakout young women stars of KIDS were good, but that there was much of a muchness to the rest of it...yes, there are stupid, unloved, pack-running kids. If you were unaware of this, bad on you...BULLY was a slightly better film dealing with the same sort of thing. While THIRTEEN, from another set of filmmakers, was about a Well-Meaning, confused Mother dealing with this sort of situation with her daughter, and I found it less impressive than many did. The all strike me as THE EXPLOSIVE GENERATION for the '90s.
And all sympathies with your attempt to marshal your thoughts in an alien language. My weak grasp of Spanish involves all sorts of compromises and improvisations in sustaining the simplest of conversations with my Hispanophone office-mates.
I think the young actresses in SPRING BREAKERS are posed to be looked at quite frequently...from the stills. Albeit until such time as I see it, I can't agree or disagree with the woman on a podcast who noted that she'd never seen so many different ways of shooting (with a camera) a young woman's bikini'd butt-cheek before.
Yeah, but if I said that's the point, you probably would just disagree :)
I'm easy to arouse, but there wasn't a minute in SPRING BREAKERS when I would be aroused. (Of course I realize this proves nothing, but I do think I get what Korine is driving at: exposing something in the culture. Maybe it's about how we watch these girls.)
Haven't seen THIRTEEN btw.
I try not to be default disagreeable...but I'm allergic to the notion that the likes of Korine have profound insight, when I've experienced their work before, and it's the opposite of profound. It might be that the new work is a quantum jump beyond previous work, and I'm being unfair...but I'm hoping you might take my suggestion that it's possible you want to see critique where there's mostly just exploitation of that desire for critique...and the opportunity to show former/current teen stars' rumps off, for both the opportunity to do so and to mock the desire to have them so displayed. This is not a sophisticated critique, if that is the intention. It just isn't.
Yeah, you're not the only one to say this to me.
Like Todd I have not seen this, but one thing is certain - this is a movie that generates discussion.
Swedish reviews so far have been very mixed - it's described as everything from anything from masterpiece to dumb T&A exploitation in pretentious disguise. Your description "the abrasive music of Skrillex and the hyper-active editing of YouTube-era party videos" makes me suspect the guy who simply described it as "exhausting" got it right.
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