In addition to his evocative showcasings of oddballs and outcasts, writer-director Harmony Korine’s work has always exuded a strong sense of place, and in his latest film, the audacious, neon-veined Spring Breakers, the often confrontational auteur transforms St. Petersburg, Florida into a decidedly modern synth-pop mélange of ecstatic heaven and drugged-out hell. In knee-jerk fashion, detractors will take aim at Korine’s proudly prurient work as an empty glorification of brainless adolescent posturing, but it’s actually a rich, smartly tied together provocation — an allegory for the corruption of innocence and the fear of blossoming female sexuality, powered by a hallucinatory musical score from Drive composer Cliff Martinez and the throbbing electronic dance music of Skrillex.



Good girl Faith (Selena Gomez) has been friends with Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Cotty (Rachel Korine, Harmony’s wife) and Brit (Ashley Benson) since grade school. Bored at college, they anxiously await their spring break vacation, but are short on cash. So with Cotty driving getaway, Candy and Brit rob a restaurant. From there, loot in hand, the girls head off to Florida, where pastel scooters and all manner of bikini-clad debauchery awaits. After a police bust lands the girls in jail, they’re bailed out by a local drug peddler/rapper/arms dealer, Alien (a delightfully skeevy James Franco, sporting cornrows along with an assortment of tattoos and garish jewelry), looking for some angels. Faith is unnerved by his scuzziness, but the other girls gravitate toward Alien’s wealth and outlandish displays of machismo, as well as the danger he represents, unwittingly getting sucked into a turf battle between Alien and his former friend and mentor, Big Arch (Gucci Mane).

From its poppy, peppy opening — with heaving bosoms, the shotgunning of much beer and the fellating of popsicles — on through much darker terrain, Spring Breakers exudes a stylistic adventurousness of a certain piece with something like Oliver Stone‘s Natural Born Killers (a film that, thematically, feels like something of a cousin), even though it’s shot, by Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie, entirely on celluloid. Korine is intent on making viewers never forget that they’re watching a movie — and having to process that, along with the actual narrative and the sheer, careening joy and swagger of its overall packaging. In darkly satiric sum, the film then forces viewers to consider the folly of slick, guns-and-tits entertainment.

Korine doesn’t really take a traditional approach to character development; he trades here largely in snapshot moments, and embraced attitudes and wild gestures. The movie also commingles fantasy sequences with its plot proper, returning again and again to the bacchanalia that serves as its opening — the teens’ idealized vision of the new horizons that spring break affords. It’s not for nothing that Faith is seen getting “jacked up on Jesus” at a church youth group meeting, while another character repeats over and over, “Just pretend you’re in a videogame; act like you’re in a movie or something.” In taking aim at the impact of entertainment and pop culture, as well as its general hypocrisy and some of its more soul-deadening qualities, Korine offers up his most compelling and fully rounded big screen vision yet, along with a collection of characters every bit as fascinating as those Kids from his screenwriting debut. In Spring Breakers, he threads the needle between character specificity and stand-in attributes.

In one of the film’s more memorably quotable passages, Alien — an avatar of celebratory materialistic ignorance — holds forth as a backwater, Rap Age Scarface, ranting in sing-song fashion about his various possessions. It’s a call-back of sorts to a moment earlier in the movie, when Candy, literally rolling in stolen cash, opines that “money makes [her] pussy wet, and tits look bigger.” In offering up this portrait of girls gone really wild — with unicorn ski masks and semi-automatic weapons — Korine is reflecting in exaggerated fashion the abundant, free-flowing energy of youth culture, and specifically toying with the overwhelming feelings of panic and uncomfortableness that assertive young women coming into their own sexual ripeness engender. It’s an exercise in gonzo metaphor that triggers tripwires of both titillation and alarm. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (A24 Films, R, 92 minutes)

A good number of actresses, including Penelope Cruz, have worked for years in multiple languages. And while it seems a bit less common with actors, recent James Bond villain Javier Bardem scored a Best Actor Oscar nomination for 2010’s Biutiful while speaking in his native tongue. But apart from Kristin Scott Thomas — and recently Will Ferrell, who took up Spanish for the comedy Casa de Mi Padre — few native English speakers aim to flex their bilingual skills on the big screen. And that’s a big part of the reason writer-director Ana Piterbarg’s Everybody Has a Plan, starring Viggo Mortensen in what is actually his third Spanish language film, is interesting, given the otherwise slow, dangling drama of its assumed-identity conceit.

Agustin (Mortensen), a married pediatrician in Buenos Aires, is on the precipice of adopting a child with his wife (Soledad Villamil), but still gripped by a suffocating malaise. When his terminally ill twin brother Pedro (Mortensen again), from whom he is estranged, shows up, Agustin decides to slip into his identity, returning to the bayou-like Tigre Delta where they grew up as boys. Pedro worked there nominally as a beekeeper, but also as the muscle for a local thug (Daniel Fanego) operating kidnappings and other schemes. Agustin, as Pedro, then feels his way through a flirtation with a girl (Sofia Gala Castaglione) helping with his honeycombs, while also trying to carve out a safe haven for his new life.

While from Dead Ringers on through dozens of other examples on the big screen identical twins have been used to juicy effect, here they’re in large part a catalyst for… brooding. Everybody Has a Plan — rather ironically titled, since neither Agustin nor any other character really seems to have one — is a work of mist-shrouded atmosphere. So inscrutable are Piterbarg’s interests, in fact, that even calling it a mood piece is to elevate the movie to a plateau of psychological certitude it doesn’t really achieve.

Mortensen grew up in Venezuela and Argentina, so he has a great grasp of not only the language but seemingly some of the in-the-marrow cultural ambiance the movie seems to want to channel or explore. Piterbarg, though, in her feature film debut, doesn’t have a keen sense of how to exploit the danger with which she lines her narrative. The wan, incomplete result is a story stretched too thin, across a running time of nearly two hours. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox International, R, 118 minutes)