You're welcome! The Wife and I watched Spring Breakers, so you don't have to!

Well, gosh, I guess Harmony Korine is just too meta for me.  I wish I was as smart and hep as Korine, smart and hep enough to appreciate this masterpiece of tedium and schlock, but I fear I never will be.

Look at the pastel colors! What a splendid soundtrack! What genius to stretch out a twenty minute film to feature length! Dang, if there is not some real Spring Breakin' drunken foolishness footage cut in between the drama, too! Whoa, did you catch that? Korine uses slow motion! (A lot.) And, he is literally blowing my mind, jumping us backwards and forwards in time with editing! Has any one ever done that before? Damn! And he uses the sound of a gun being reloaded for punctuation at the end of nearly every single scene! That is filmmaking! Oh, I almost forgot! The Terrence Malick-like use of endlessly repeated voice-over juxtaposed with beautiful nature images! Wait a minute! Is there a Scarface poster on the gangsta's wall? Is Scarface really running on a loop at the gangsta's house? That is so impressive! Is there anything Korine can not do?

Yeah, make a good film, apparently.

I guess the rules have changed in our post-post-modern, death of irony culture today.  But, back in the day, even if you made a surrealist, fantasy, farcical, or satirical film, it still had to be grounded in reality.  Otherwise, it does not work, because the audience does not believe, and does not care.  An obvious example is Masculin Feminin by Godard.  Korine has ripped off the sound design of Masculin Feminin, which uses the sound of gunfire to punctuate scene changes, yet Godard's film is an authentic anti-war, anti-Capitalist masterpiece about Parisian youth culture. Precisely because you believe in all those characters in Masculin Feminin.

Nowadays, it seems irony truly is dead.  Artists like Korine seem compelled to provoke merely by displaying awfulness without any artistic distance between the artist and the creation.  Korine, and other artists like him, seem to suggest that those who do not appreciate the vapid, tedious, ugliness that they put upon us are fools.  Fools for not recognizing that their art -- to them, at least -- is an accurate description of real life.

That is crap.  I am not deluded.  I am not naive.  These are not rose-colored glasses I am looking through.  And, what a perverted, warped way to treat your audience.

Man, watch Masculin feminin instead.

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PS:  My favorite customer review of Spring Breakers on iTunes was:  "Don't watch, don't buy, stay away."

xxxoooxxx,
Go Rangers! I'm going to the game today!,
Michael