Spring Breakers (2013) - Harmony Korine

Cotty, Brit, Candy, and Faith have been best friends since grade school.  Currently in college, the girls live together in dorm, bored with their mundane lives, desperate for a real adventure.  Though the girls are strapped for cash they view Spring Break as their ticket to escaping from their lives which leads Cotty, Brit and Candy to rob a diner to fund their trip.  When the girls arrive in Florida for Spring Break they feel like the world is their oyster until a serendipitous encounter with Alien, a gangster rapper, threatens to change everything.  Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is a pulse-pounding, stylistic trip into the superficial world of youth driven culture.  With Springer Breakers, Korine captures the mysticism of spring break, presenting it as this euphoric state of peace with each girl looking for something different out of their spring break experience.  The film's early narrative drive centers around Faith, the most innocent of the girls, who is thrust into this hyper-sexualized world of booze, drugs and sex.  What's interesting is how about halfway through the film Korine seems to get bored with this narrative-fueled approach, turning Spring Breakers into this quazi-existential experience.  Candy and Brit have no limits to the "fun" they want to experience and what ensues in the second half of the film is their neon-soaked exaggerated reality.  The vivid, bright and blurry aesthetic of Spring Breakers perfectly captures the Spring Break experience of these girls, with Korine routinely using various stylistic decisions like hazing up the lens for example, to visually capture Faith, Candy, Brit, and Cotty's point of view.  Spring Breakers' biggest fault is probably its lack of emotional resonance in dramatic scenes.  I never really found myself caring about these characters even when it seemed we were intended too, with Faith's character arch being the best example of that.  One cannot write a review of Spring Breakers without mentioning James Franco, who as Alien, really steals the entire film.  Franco completely loses himself in this flamboyant and over-the-top character, providing so many memorable scenes from both a comedic and horrific standpoint.  With a loud, chaotic soundtrack and neon infused visuals, Spring Breakers is a cinematic experience and commentary on the superficial emptiness of a youth-driven culture looking for "adventure".
8/10

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