Spring Breakers

In his most effective film to date, auteur provocateur Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, Trash Humpers) casts former squeaky-clean child stars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson in a tale of debauchery and crime in the girls-gone-wild setting of Florida during Spring Break. The first half of the film plays like a 45-minute psychedelic Sunkist commercial from hell, but then James Franco shows up and, amazingly, the film starts to work. It never becomes a good movie, but Spring Breakers is less maddeningly "arty" than Korine's other films, and he does find a kind of hedonistic poetry in the saturated visuals, repetitive dialogue, and excessively reckless behavior. This is a movie that should be as morally repugnant as Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (one of my all-time least favorite films), except that Korine is able to find a humorous spirit in his depiction of empty, nihilistic, out-of-control youth that the tone-deaf Stone could never understand. James Franco plays Alien, the wannabe gangsta the girls hook up with, as if he’s the bastard son of Willem Dafoe's Bobby Peru from Wild At Heart. I have never enjoyed Franco as much as I did in this film. I'd next like to see a buddy movie where his character and Nicolas Cage's Bad Lieutenant go on a road trip to Tangiers.