what is your Only reason to watch this crap...?
i like Vanessa Hudgens, she is so beautiful she is the only reason to watch this movie... i know this movie is a crap but i have a reason. what's yours?
shareCause it's artistic, beautiful, disturbing and a well made film...
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/terror-town/x/4958664]My movie's indiegogo!
It is really funny to read all these pseudo-intellectual reviews on this movie (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/spring-breakers-2013-1); reviews which flailingly attempt to find some great underlying meaning, to provoke thought and invite discussion of the "symbology", to read into it things which I don't believe I've missed, but things that I'm sure aren't actually there. The main characters are (to say unsympathetic would be to do a disservice to the entire history of unsympathetic film characters) one dimensional, wet cardboard. The "growth" that they experience, through the situations they place themselves in, was not only inorganic but quite obviously faked solely to advance the plot. The camera style is that obnoxious, MTV, ADD style that is becoming far too prevalent in films. Would they have actually edited the film together in chronological order (and by that I mean without the constant jumps five minutes ahead or five minutes back, nothing quite so interesting as Memento I'm afraid) it would've been about twenty minutes shorter; it really tests the viewers limits of endurance, seeing the same scenes played over and over ad nauseum. And the plot? The story? There was none. A celebration of hedonism, I don't have a problem with, but masturbatory filmmaking without purpose, I will not abide. I cannot. I have a brain that still works. And before you "poo poo" me as just another stodgy old man who "doesn't get 'it'", I'm in my late twenties....
Spoilers, so if you do decide to watch this film and waste precious hours of your finite lifespan, you deserve them:
I found this film silly and boorish and stuffed to the gills with banality--yet still with a nebulous sense of self-importance--but never self-aware or smart enough to be socially significant or (the now meaningless word) "ironic". This generation's Fight Club it is not. There is no social commentary, there are no thought provoking questions or quandaries, no over-arching message or greater meaning... so perhaps it is in fact this generation's Fight Club. Who knew?
In a movie that had already strained credulity within its first half hour, the ending was especially absurd. Two untrained teens, in bikinis (id est it is important in that they were unable to carry spare magazines, more ammunition), charge head first into a den of armed iniquity and take out at least a dozen heavily armed men, all with incredibly well aimed head-shots and all without ever taking so much as a scratch or, surprisingly, losing their bikini tops. Especially amazing, as they didn't seem to use the sights on the handguns (and as someone who has fired a variety of small arms in a variety adverse situations, I can assure you that it ain't that easy; it is important to be well trained or--at the very least--to try and aim). And I do believe that one girl fired her handgun in the sideways pose made ever-so-popular by rap videos and videogames, a place where there are most certainly no sights and you're very likely to have a stovepipe jam (although real world physics might not have affected these girls or their guns, as there never seemed to be any recoil). In a ridiculous movie devoid of thought or meaning or reason (save for excuses to show mild drug use, breasts, softcore petting, and have decidedly non-Bond Girls firing guns while in swimwear), it wasn't at all surprising to have this sort of an ending: the girls kill all the bad guys, steal the "kingpin's" Lamborghini, and then ride off into the sunset to become... what exactly? The twin tween Twenty-First Century's Tony Montanas?
And if I had to hear James Franco in his incredibly painful, faux Florida panhandle accent murmur "spring break... spring break... spring break foreva" one more time (like it had some actual meaning, like "Rosebud" or "Keyser Soze"), I was going to have to kill him myself.
This is a movie that, I suppose, is for whom it purports to be....
Does anyone take away from this film... anything? The ending did have White, blonde, middle class girls gunning down a dozen or so black men. Any significance to that?
something terribly clever.
You got a lot of free time I guess. I agree with you basically, but you seem to be think that this movie failed because it had no profound meaning, deep characters, "smart" plot. Pretty obvious there was no attempt at this. This was about images and voice overs taking you to a different world. Just relax and let it take you away...
share
I type quickly.
something terribly clever.
savcam500 said it best.
i will simply add the nice use of color being the only good thing about the heap of dung. it seemed like the writer/director was looking to create a vehicle for his wife, while nurturing his (and his male friends on the project) pre-midlife crisis. that was actually the most glaringly obvious symbolic message of this muck. people love him for kids and gummo, but their blind loyalty has shrouded their ability to be unbiased.
I never knew about the marriage connection, thank you. And Kids is an amazing "cult" classic that I thoroughly enjoyed; it and Gummo are thought provoking in many ways, though they also make you feel as though you need a shower after watching them.
Those who are so blindly and vehemently defending this film, holding it aloft as a shining example of "outsider art" and all the while decrying those who attempt to examine the film critically (not necessarily synonymous with "criticism") have been blinded by Korine's earlier success (in my best Bane voice, "Victory has defeated you!"). If his name hadn't been on the marque, I never would have guessed that he had a thing to do with this film....
Visually this film did have its moments, but these were things I've seen a hundred times before and done better each and every time.
I do believe that you've hit the nail on the head, you've found what I could not, the true symbolism behind the film. Well done Nearvana!
something terribly clever.
Spending an entire paragraph, and a sizeable one at that, nitpicking the lack of pew pew realism, complete with comments about iron sights and "stovepipe jam" - in a scene that was essentially one big metaphor and replete with symbolism - is both inadvertently hilarious, and indicative that you did indeed not "get it".
shareI'm so sorry that some of my biker buddies showed up at your house, smashed dishes in your kitchen, roughed up your wife, slashed your car tyres and then held a gun to your head and forced you to read my comment. They went too far, they know it and I know it. And am I to take it that you'd prefer that I write shorter paragraphs? That I should take less care when choosing the words that I use to covey my thoughts and feelings about something? Why do I bother, why should I bother in trying to construct a readable, understandable and occasionally entertaining comments?
That aside, I offered criticisms on the film as a whole, choosing several examples that demonstrated what a vapid, pointless film this was. I had hoped for so much more, Korine having made Kids, an amazing and seminal film. That anyone can find a plot to interest or entertain them in this jumbled, silly, over-produced mess of a film (much less some sort of meaning, allegory, or actual purpose for the film to exist) is beyond me.
What metaphor? What symbolism? What meaning and purpose?
It was less that the film lacked pew pew realism and more that it lacked structure, meaning, interesting and realistic characters, or a purpose for existing. And what's wrong with pointing out that they held their firearms stupidly? Seriously, tell me please. I didn't get it because there wasn't anything to get....
It was monotonous, meandering, terribly acted, the characters interactions with one another seemed inorganic and forced, faked solely to advance the plot.
Was that short enough for you? (and just how many girlfriends have you said that to?)
something terribly clever.
The film was simply pointless. I am not one to engage in ad hominem attacks, and I do not do so lightly, but: If you found any actual meaning in it, or were otherwise entertained and mentally engaged by this film, then you are little more than a boorish fool, unable to engage in higher brain functions for fear of the gears all grinding to a halt.
something terribly clever.
As one reviewer put it "[it's] a pop artifact that simultaneously exploits and explores the shallowness of pop artifacts." To me, I felt the film was being facetious. Pounding away at these coardboard cutouts and cliches, as you put it, to stress how stupid it is. Also, I loved the style. There was something very disturbing yet beautiful about it. Like Corine said in an interview, it was meant to illicit a certain feeling and I think I got it. I liked it. 8/10.
sharesavcam500, I am very sorry that you failed to get this film.
I could take you on point by point and tell you exactly why you are so very wrong, but it would be a pointless exercise. You know, like teaching a sheep how to dance. Just forget about these types of films in the future. They are not made for someone like you.
Why do you assume that every character is worth developing? Not every person is interesting or dynamic, or genuine. Thats the point. This is a depiction of the most shallowest people in America, and they're everywhere!!! They Live!!! This false assumption that good story must contain character development is a pox that beseeches current film. Many filmmakers, for better or worse, want to focus on the dark side of humanity. It is ugly, unreedeming, and nasty.
shareDid you.. did you actually just refer to Roger Ebert as a 'pseudo-intellectual' film reviewer?
Seriously?
This film was, at least to me, pretty crap and a waste of time. I struggled to find any artistic merit or entertainment in it at all. And yes I was very surprised to read Eberts review and see that he praised it. But then the man has different tastes to me, and he's probably the most well informed and learned expert in cinema. So each to their own.
But to resort to your level of arrogance to insult a man like R.E. and actually label him a pseudo-intellectual... *beep* me.
You just finished your first year of college kiddo? It sounds like it.
Well, if you really want my Curriculum Vitae and for me to extend my bona fides, here they are:
I worked as a roofer in High School and drove a forklift at a lumberyard in College. I dropped out of College about a decade ago after spending a few years working on a degree in Political Science. I then spent several years restoring vintage Mercedes race cars and the much vaunted 300SL (both Gullwings and Roadsters) at one of the foremost restoration shops in the country. I grew restless, moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, and began working at a Midas; first as a mechanic and then as a service writer and manager. Again growing restless, I moved to the mountains to run a shop of my own. I bounced around a bit; I was equal parts riffraff, brawler, and intelligentsia. I've read Hermann Hesse and Rand, analysed Clausewitz and Keynesian economics, I have knuckle tattoos and have dated strippers, I lost more fights than I won, I've built my own cars from the ground up, I occasionally work as a "gun for hire" writing term papers for a website for kids too lazy or wealthy to write them themselves, and now I'm married with two kids and run a horse farm/training facility with my wife, who graduated UConn with degrees in English literature and Philosophy....
I mightn't be the "most well informed and learned expert in cinema", but I do watch films and have an analytical mind stuffed into a brain that still (miraculously) works. "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones." If I find Ebert's review to be pompous and out of touch with the reality which I perceive, if I find it to be in the vein of a "pseudo-intellectual" who is desperate to find some greater meaning in a film painfully devoid of such... then I feel quite confident in saying so. The who of what was written is unimportant to me, the substance of what was written is. That is all that matters.
Take from this what you will, but never presume to know something which you obviously cannot. Ad hominem attacks make your already tenuous position all the more untenable and fallacious....
something terribly clever.
' And before you "poo poo" me as just another stodgy old man who "doesn't get 'it'", I'm in my late twenties....'
Wow, you've lived a rich life for someone in their late twenties.
Could I attempt to 'read something into' this film you find so utterly devoid of meaning? Here goes.
In the beginning of the film there's a scene in a lecture hall which - besides being aesthetically pleasing, all those kids gently lit by their notebook screens, like a counterweight to the neon saturated fever dream that will follow - serves a thematic purpose: the class is on the African Americans's equal rights movement, and it's the narrative of emancipatory movements that Korine subverts in Spring Breakers.
The film boasts four leading female characters; two of them are shown to be drawn to violence and they go from mimicking guns with their hands and filling up squirt guns with booze - consider the significance of firing those phallic instruments into your own mouth - to robbing a diner, also with a play gun, but with very real results. Ultimately it enables the girls to go to Miami - which, not by coincidence, is Tony Montana's stomping ground in Scarface.
So let’s analyse this some more. There's a party scene in the beginning of the film, that shows one of the lead females playing craps and taking the money. Playing craps is a trope in roughly 90's hip hop culture - more on that later - and a typically masculine pass time. The robbery too sees - although we initially don't get to see more than the occasional glance through the window - the females adopting a souped up masculine, criminal machismo. We see them acting out an a-moral fantasy of masculinity, all the while physically stressing their femininity.
Fast forward to Miami. We're introduced to Alien, a white rapper/criminal - another trope in 90's hip hop culture: the 'gangsta' rapper, the hustler, the pimp - sporting corn rows and a grill, who was raised in a black neighborhood and who's turned the cartoonish gangsta tales Dr Dre raps about into a lifestyle. 'look at all my s_hit,' is Alien's materialistic mantra, 's_hit' signifying his dope, guns and money - and apparently his, continuously played Scarface (!) dvd. He’s basically a white caricature of an of itself caricatural branch of hip hop culture.
And what does Alien do: he buys the women – do I need to point out the historical reference to buying people?. Then there’s a key scene. When Alien’s about to subject the ladies, who are at this point essentially his slaves, to his male dominance, the roles are reversed and the girls 'pimp' the pimp, penetrating him with his own (!) guns – no need for an extensive knowledge of Freudian symbolism to interpret this . The male character is dominated via phallic penetration – btw sexuality and violence/guns are linked from the beginning not only visually, but also acoustically, i.e. the recurring sound of a single gunshot - and the typical ‘gangsta’ scenario of hyper-masculinity, of male superiority, is inverted, turned inside out, in other words the gender roles are reversed.
What, I think, Korine is doing here, is dismantling the misogynistic mythology that dominated a significant part of 90’s hip hop culture, and assembling it again in the context of female emancipation. In other words: the narrative that was used to objectify and subjugate women, is now used by women to quite the opposite end.
It’s no big surprise then, that the film that’s so overly present in rap music, is quoted in the surrealistic ending of the film; Scarface’s ending is basically turned on its head. I don’t think this scene, in which the females are shown to definitively put an end to the perverted amoral dream of male dominance, literally gunning it down, should be interpreted metaphorically per se, but there’s surely something to be said for not reading it exclusively literally. The ending symbolically completes this tale of emancipation: the two female leads penetrate the bastion of male superiority and tear it down by using the exact same myths, symbols, or weapons that were used to establish it in the first place.
Great film.
Ghosts and lovers, they will haunt you for a whileshare
The 'pseudo-intellectual' article was writen by Richard Roeper, btw. I think Ebert was just a few days away from death at the time it was published.
Ghosts and lovers, they will haunt you for a whileshare
Yes, I've been around; lived the life I've lived, grown and changed with time as we all are (hopefully) wont to do....
I'm glad that you were able to find something redeemable in this film, especially as I was unable to. I suppose much of that is because of how powerful of Korine's Kids was; it had a tremendous impact on me as I was about the age of the characters when I first saw it. It was aesthetically ugly (and necessarily so) but it was so fundamentally forceful and intoxicating, gritty and realistic, violent and hateful, sick and rotten to its core... it had to be so! Kids was something truly unique at the time, it exposed a darkness that few cared or dared to shine a light upon.
Now in this film, it seems that Korine has traded a powerful message for pretty colours and distracting cinematography. It may very well be commentary on the state of this up-and-coming generation (the iGeneration? Generation Meh?), an extreme exaggeration used to show the hedonism (however no worse than in my own youth) and detachment and alienation from society.... Any message or meaning is so mired and muddled, so slovenly and slipshod that it is lost underneath all that frenzied and frenetic energy that the film so gleefully expends, such that it simply becomes another "Teens go *beeping* WILD at the beach" movie. All these disparate aspects of the film simply do not form any cohesive (even abstractly so) story, and certainly not an interesting or entertaining one.... This is a careless, hackneyed, weak film that fails ab-so-lutley. It is impotent and ineffectual.
I believe Korine has traded any deeper message for smoke and mirrors, pomp and ceremony, sound and fury... and doesn't that complete quote from Macbeth just fit?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
I find the film boorish, brutish and boring. I've seen every sort of film and found something to admire in many. Yes, violence can be beautiful (as I found it to be in Dredd). Yes, there is a certain delight and perverse amusement in the sadistic suffering in a film like Excision (DO watch that film!). And no, the actual orgiastic satisfaction of desires in Caligula did not turn my stomach. I haven't shied away from much in film (while I found the Human Centipede films to be all shock, little show and no story, I still dutifully sat through them, and all the while drumming my fingertips...), but Spring Breakers was superficial and misleadingly attractive, in dire need of something more... substantive. It definitely needed better dialog, acting and direction ("direction" in all senses of the word.).
Ambition and the blessed simplicities of action don't always quarter in comfort.
Break what he can; what he can't, set those parts against themselves to weaken....
Again, I don't care who wrote the review, I was only responding to the rather specious argument that if Ebert wrote it, it must be true.
something terribly clever. share
Roger Ebert didn't review this movie.
shareIt's not a movie with deep symbolism. Harmony Korine hasn't aged mentally since he was 19 and wrote Kids. This movie is a celebration of this teenage dream of spring break and being young and having sex, getting a lot of money and doing crazy things, like stealing and shooting people. It's not realism. It's all a dream.
shareWell, all of those things you pointed out were precisely the point. It is a film about surfaces from the stunt casting to the narrative vapidity and the one-dimensional characterizations, not to mention the almost 3 dimensional TITTIES.
This film is very blatantly satirical, and your post suggests that the hyper-active day-glo aesthetic's ascendance into "hyper-reality" soared well over your head, which is also something the film was aware it would be doing to its audience from its very inception. The "MTV" style, the gangster-posing, the absurdity of the repetition and the emptiness of the plot are all quite intentional and executed with purpose, I can assure you.
Moreover, to critique the film on the basis of "realism," as you have done with regard to the Rambo-esque final shootout, is to misread the film's intentions entirely. This is a cinema that exists quite literally on the plane of subconscious cultural fantasy.
It hijacks a visual style and archetypal narratives that are today so familiar and ubiquitous as to be "banal," as you put it, but presents them in a fashion that is meant to bring about a repugnant dissonance rather than the "immersive" qualities that American cinema is so bent on exploiting for the purposes of commodification.
Of course the two white girls in bikinis annihilate an army of African American thugs. Isn't is wonderful how the film manages to bring up conversations about portrayals of race in Hollywood films?
Lastly, "Rosebud" is a poorly chosen example because the "actual meaning" of the name of the sled in Citizen Kane is precisely the very elusiveness of what it might mean. "Rosebud" is essentially the Hitchcockian MacGuffin, a metaphor for those eternal mysteries that plague our subjective experience of reality and force us to attempt to derive meaning and satisfaction from what isn't there. It's really quite profound the way in which Welles managed to make "nothing" mean "something."
Anyway, for a closer reading of Spring Breakers, check this out:
http://openinterpretation.tumblr.com/post/92293194012/peering-into-the-neon-mirror-the-emotional-dissonance
Maybe there is no reason to watch the film.
But you realize there is a reason Korine made the movie
and included two very different views of the same robbery at the Chicken Shack.
That repeated scene, and some other scenes showed that two of the girls, Brit, and Candy (Benson and Hudgins) were born to be violent predators who fall in love with the power of a gun,
despite looking like pretty little girls.
spring break....
spring break....
spring break foreva