Spring Breakers
by Sean "Keanu Grieves" Hanson
EXPECTATIONS: Spring Breakers had me at hello. As March 22 approached, reviews began pouring in. One critic described it as a cross between Natural Born Killers and Girls Gone Wild, two cultural phenomenons that were just itching for a mash-up. Who among us hasn't seen Natural Born Killers and thought, "This needs more woo! girls"? Spring Breakers forever, bitches.
By then, most clubs were packed to capacity and the remaining clubs were charging exorbitant covers. We grabbed a bottle of hooch, made our way to a nearby park and counted down to midnight, at which point I kissed someone who may or may not have been a woman. My roommate and I hailed a cab, the driver of which apparently received kickbacks to shuttle bewildered Americans to this working-class strip club in the weird part of town where second-string strippers crawl way too slowly across bearskin rugs to forgotten Canadian hair-metal ballads.
There was a lot of flannel in the crowd, and after we'd been propositioned for a foursome by a guy who looked like Al Borland, we booked it back to the Civic - momentarily sad that the hooker who gave us directions had found another john - and ended up at Deja Vu Showgirls in Seattle, where we waited in the parking lot until the club opened and ate breakfast while the only two dancers scheduled for 8 a.m. on New Year's Day hatefucked the pole to Nine Inch Nails and Coal Chamber.
So, yeah, sometimes these ritualized vacations don't work out according to plan.
The real ending to our New Year's Eve story.
I've seen Spring Breakers twice, and I feel like I've only started to peel back the layers . It's like examining a shoebox full of Polaroids from a lost weekend and struggling to connect half-remembered images to a narrative thread, much as I did above in my story about New Year's Eve, which contains an unspecified amount of bullshit because I was way too drunk to retain the truth of the finer points. My roommate and I compared notes for weeks to come up with a linear anecdote that still retained a kernel of honesty. Hey, it's the art of storytelling, OK?
Now let's shift the setting from the Pacific Northwest to a Floridian beach. College students Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) long for the kind of spring break celebrated by MTV and Girls Gone Wild but lack the means. Writer/director Harmony Korine imbues Spring Breakers with some biting class commentary here: While their wealthier peers flee the dorms to booze it up on the beach, as depicted in the film 's Girls Gone Wild-esque opening segment, our protagonists fret on the cold tile of their communal bathroom. With only $325, how can they afford gas, lodging and intoxicants for an entire week?
Armed robbery, that's how. And after they successfully rob a nearby Chicken Shack and torch their getaway vehicle, they hop the first party bus to Florida, where their party plans still don't quite line up with those of their peers. While the well-to-do get up to get down around the hotel pool and at the nearby beach, Faith & Co. wind up doing coke with lecherous strangers in a trashed hotel room. The cops arrive and our protagonists spend a night in jail before Alien (James Franco), an enthusiastic rapper-criminal, bails them out with vague plans for a crime spree and ambiguous "partying." Oh, and Gucci Mane shows up.
I don't want to alarm you ladies, but that guy is armed.
If Spring Breakers existed only to explore these sorts of have/have-nots party scenarios, it would grow a little tedious. Fortunately, this is 104 minutes of Korine's best work, simultaneously subversive and accessible in its exploration of a great many themes: the above-mentioned class conflicts, sociopathy, touristic imperialism, voyeurism, self-objectification, sexual violation, ritual hedonism, the fetishization of violence as a vehicle for unspent sexual energy, the oddly comforting cadence of Gucci Mane's speech, etc.
In one of the film's earliest shots, Korine fills the frame with slo-mo jiggling titties while Skrillex monopolizes the audio. It would be hard to defend this shot as satirical if Korine didn't follow it immediately with a shot of a woman ripping from a beer bong and losing half the load in the process, spewing pisswater on the topless bro who's loading the funnel and egging her on. Later, Korine juxtaposes a shot of Cotty, wearing only her underwear and soaked in beer, with a shot of a bikini-clad woman sleeping next to a toilet full of shit and vomit.
In these one-two punches scattered throughout Spring Breakers, Korine is emphasizing the violence and defilement that's coupled with sexuality in our cultural representations of what the kids are up to when the parents aren't around. It's not a new critique - Korine has been rattling this cage since Kids - but the fact that Korine managed to bring this to the multiplex at a point when American pop culture has hit its nadir is nothing short of a miracle. By disguising this critique as a candy-colored heist film, Korine or whoever is responsible for marketing Spring Breakers has committed one of cinema's great pranks : The kind of filmgoer Spring Breakers exists to bait, the 18- to 25-year-olds who think any display ofnudity in this prudish culture is itself a sex act , is the same filmgoer who will nibble at the brilliantly misleading trailer.
Watch the road! That's so dangerous!
A real, no-shit running motif in Spring Breakers is the abstraction of oral sex into garish displays of technique and violations. Early in the film, female characters simulate blowjobs on Popsicles and air cocks while male characters jet beers through hoses into other female characters' mouths. This motif culminates in a scene glimpsed in the trailer. Alien, at first unwillingly, gives a simulated blowjob to two submachine guns held like cocks by Candy and Brit. After it's over, he tells them he'll "suck (their) dicks every night." That, of course, is the ultimate abstraction of oral sex and maybe the key to understanding Spring Breakers: The blowjob is reduced to a ritual of submission between one lovestruck sociopath and twowomen who phallicize guns because they weren't born with cocks.
That kind of sexual confusion - and the idea that the penis is the weapon - mirrors the spiritual confusion that permeates Spring Breakers. What can we do but laugh when, in voiceover, Faith (a born-again Christian) tells her grandmother they've had a spiritual awakening of sorts in Florida while we're confronted with yet another montage of debauchery?
Spring Breakers isn't criticizing its protagonists; it's criticizing the spring break pilgrimage, during which college students of means blow off steam by having adventures they won't remember at the expense of locals they despise, and it's also questioning a society that allows misadventures so long as they fall within the parameters of controlled rebellion and benefit the local economy.
For what the trailer promises, Spring Breakers is heady. It's also abrasive and occasionally tedious, but it's one hell of a ride, undeniably gorgeous, an astute homage to Apocalypse Now and among the most original films to receive wide distribution in recent memory. It also has a lot of titty. Go see it for one of those qualities, and hopefully you'll learn to appreciate the others.
| Titty | 9/10 |
|---|---|
| Guns | 9/10 |
| WUB-WUB-WUB | 9/10 |
| Violence | 9/10 |
| Drugs | 9/10 |
| Overall | 45/50 |
MINORITY REPORT: Somewhere in comedy heaven, Johnny Carson places a blue envelope to his turbaned forehead. "Ted Bundy, Roman Polanski, and Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis," he says. He opens the envelope. "Name three people less suited to be working with teenage girls than Harmony Korine." The divine audience laughs. Ed McMahon's spirit lets out a "Heyyy-ooooooooo!" that echoes into eternity. - Martin R. "Vargo" Schneider
The Croods
by Ian "Professor Clumsy" Maddison
EXPECTATIONS: "What is a Crood?" I hear you ask. Well, not really. Because you know damn well what a Crood is. You're sick of seeing them in every available marketing avenue. You're surrounded by Croods. There's a Crood in every shop window, a Crood for every child; there's probably a Crood staring at you right now. Yes, a Crood is a character from the new animated feature film The Croods. Given Dreamworks' rather spotty track record, this could really go either way. Will it be a Bee Movie or a How to Train Your Dragon? Only one way to find out.
REALITY: Let's face it: You, the person reading this now, are not the target audience for The Croods. If you are, then maybe you should talk to your parents about putting some child protection on their computer. This is a site for adults to make poo and fart jokes, no kids allowed! Anyway, the point is that if you're seeing The Croods, it's not really for you, you're doing it for the kids. All you want to know is whether it's going to be completely unbearable. Well, worry not, for The Croods is actuallypretty good.
Me personally? Yes, I would imagine so.
This film spends some time making you think that Eep is the lead character early on, just like my little plot synopsis up there did. Once the clan leaves the cave, though, the focus shifts to Grug and his stubborn reluctance to change his ways. This is fine, but it seems a little odd to put all that early emphasis on Eep and her desire to move on only to switch the emphasis to her dad once she gets that wish. It's like her entire little arc exists solely to fill a lengthy prologue, and the real film is about seeing if Nic Cage's extremely unique acting style translates well into animation. Thankfully, it does.
You don't cast Nicolas Cage in your lead role if you don't want him to Cage it up. That's the mistake they made with films like Stolen, Trespass and Season of the Witch: If you ask him to do a muted version of his outrageous act, it all starts to feel a little pointless. Good thing, then, that his performance here is loaded with the appropriate level of Caginess. He often shouts gibberish at animals, and in one scene he suddenly decides to talk like a stoned hippie. Why not? It's Nic Cage.
Which one of these is Nic Cage?
Aesthetically, there are some interesting flourishes peppered throughout The Croods. During action sequences, the characters will run toward the "camera ," get as close as possible and then the camera will whip round and they will continue away from it. It's obviously done as a way to capitalise on the use of 3-D, but it becomes an interesting motif independent of that. The thing is, in most of the shots throughout the film, we see all of the main characters operating together. It's important to note when films do this, because so often we have scripts that try to play up the relationships between characters, but we don't always see it. The Croods gets it right.
Remember that Miami Vice movie with Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell? The two main characters almost never spoke to each other, but they were almost always operating together in the same cinematographic space. With Django Unchained, Tarantino devoted much of the film to central cast members being dishonest to each other in the same frame. In The Croods, the ensemble moves together, hunts together and eats together. It's a great way to focus on character development without loading your film with expository dialogue.
The point of this whole film is that families should stick together, especially if they're the last family of cave-humans on the planet (I think we're all descended from Croods somehow). It's not a groundbreaking message for a family film, and it's a little blinkered with "good old-fashioned values" to be all that universal in the modern world. That said, your kids are going to love it, and you'll enjoy it too. It's bright, funny and Nic Cagey.| Voice Acting | 10/10 |
|---|---|
| Character Design | 9/10 |
| Visuals | 9/10 |
| Humour | 7/10 |
| Nic Cage Steals Every Movie He's In | Even When He's a Cartoon Caveman |
| Overall | 35/50 |
MINORITY REPORT: I'm not sure I know what's worse: A guy using a monkey to hold up his pants, or a belt that talks and does other stuff that belts typically don't do. Chris Sanders, you're just trying to give me a headache, aren't you? - Joseph "Jay Dub" Wade
Little-known Chris Sanders secret: This movie is a prequel to Lilo and Stitch. Of course, since it's about cavemen, this movie is actually a prequel to every movie. - Martin R. "Vargo" SchneiderOlympus Has Fallen
by Joseph "Jay Dub" Wade
EXPECTATIONS: Here comes yet another in Hollywood's long line of cinematic slapfights. Did you know there are two movies coming out this year about the White House under attack? Isn't that an oddly specific premise for two different studios to produce at the same time? Volcanoes, I get. Ants, asteroids, Mars; I get those too. But terrorists attacking the US by taking over the White House? Come the fuck on. At any rate, Olympus Has Fallen looks fun enough to pull 2013 out of its ridiculous slump, so I'm hoping for the best here.
REALITY: It's been said a hundred times: With the right cast and crew, even the worst screenplay can become a decent movie. Enthusiasm and energy count for a lot in this game, and Olympus Has Fallen is no exception. First-time writers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt lazily copy/paste the script for Die Hard into Microsoft Word and replace 'skyscraper' with 'White House', leaving director Antoine Fuqua, Gerard Butler, and everyone else to do all the heavy lifting. The result works more often than it doesn't, but it just can't escape being a thoroughly shameless Die Hard clone. Olympus Has Fallen steals entire scenes from John McTiernan's magnum opus, changes the names and then moves on.
The intense looks on their faces are there to remind you that they aren't cuddling for fun. This is serious cuddle time.
After saving the president's life in a car crash that leaves the First Lady (Ashley Judd) dead, Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) resigns and takes a desk job in Washington DC. Eighteen months later, President Asher (Aaron Eckhart) hosts a summit with the Prime Minister of South Korea. The meeting is interrupted when North Korean terrorists (led by a quietly disturbing Rick Yune) storm the White House and take Asher and his staff hostage. Banning sneaks in undetected, gears up, and sets about rescuing the President by any means necessary.
One of the central conflicts in Die Hard is John McClane's strained relationship with his wife. As the film opens, they've been apart for ages, and McClane spends the bulk of the story fighting terrorists in an attempt to win her back (and save her life, but first thing's first). Olympus Has Fallen rewrites the role of Holly Gennaro as the President of the United States. This film opens by establishing the gulf between the two after Banning fails to rescue the President's wife. But this time, Banning isn't trying to win back the President's trust. No, he's fighting terrorists in order to win back America (and save the President's life, but first thing's first).
Speaking of which, the prologue in which the First Lady dies seemingly has no bearing on the relationship between Banning and Asher. The head of the Secret Service (Angela Bassett) casually mentions that the President still resents Banning for letting his wife die, but beyond this one throwaway line, we're never shown any evidence of this. Asher seems to have no problem with Banning saving his life; in fact, he eggs Banning on as he stabs terrorists in the face. This prologue really only exists to explain why our hero isn't already in the White House. Or maybe the writers have something against Ashley Judd.
Remember this deleted scene from The Dark Knight?
I gave director Antoine Fuqua hell for making his last film a boring mess, but this time he steps it up and delivers some incredibly dynamic action sequences. The first-act raid on the White House is cold and calculated, like watching a bunch of experts play a round of Counterstrike. And yet while the action in the film is certainly spectacular, the sense of spectacle is decidedly muted. This is an exciting film, certainly, but situating the plot as a precursor to all-out war keeps things from becoming fun. When an airplane crashes into the Washington Monument, the audience doesn't "ooh" and "aah." They lean to the person sitting next to them and say, "You know, this could actually happen..." Sure it could, uncle Bob.
A third-act twist that introduces nuclear weapons and a giant red countdown clock dials up the cartoonishness, but by this time it's just too late. The movie commits so hard to the "White HouseDie Hard" premise that when we finally start buying Gerard Butler as our hero, there's nothing left to blow up. The movie then decides to become an episode of 24 by trying to explode the planet.
The violence in this film is gruesome and chilling; at times, it seems to go too far over the top. Dozens of people, military and civilian alike, are unceremoniously shot in the head, and the torture scenes are barbaric. Olympus Has Fallen does more than enough to earn its R rating, but forcing us to take our action so seriously leaves us with kind of a hollow experience. Especially coming on the heels of a Die Hard film that actually understood what it meant to rip off Die Hard, Olympus Has Fallen plays on one of our favorite power fantasies by reminding us just how terrifying the global political climate is. If that sounds like your idea of a fun evening, then this one's definitely for you.
| Action | 8/10 |
|---|---|
| Direction | 8/10 |
| Spectacle | 6/10 |
| The Die Hard Script | 5/10 |
| Morgan Freeman | Is In This Movie Too, By the Way (+5) |
| Overall | 32/50 |
MINORITY REPORT: Isn't it a bit drastic to continue the pro-guns argument by presenting what would happen if terrorists took over the White House with a gun-friendly President in power? Does this film end with Aaron Eckhart looking directly into the camera and saying "Now, imagine what would happen if I were Obama?" - Ian "Professor Clumsy" Maddison
Admission
by Martin R. "Vargo" Schneider
EXPECTATIONS: Paul Weitz is a director. He is a director of good movies, like About a Boy andBeing Flynn. He is a director of terrible movies, like Meet the Fockers. Mostly, though, he's a director of movies that I enjoy, but the directing is a giant mess, like American Pie and In Good Company. It's a crapshoot; I can only wonder which version of Paul came out to play this time.
REALITY: Yeah, I still don't know.
Admission is a friggin' checkerboard of a movie, hopping back and forth from "part I like" to "stuff I can't stand," often in the same scene. Sometimes in the same line. It feels so indecisive in tone that I'm having difficulty even telling you whether I think you should see it. Maybe watch it and go to the bathroom a lot? It is the perfect movie for people with urinary tract infections.
That is just severely inappropriate. I am trying to work in here.
Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, admissions officer for Princeton University, who is competing with her rival (Gloria Rueben) to secure the job of her retiring boss (Wallace Shawn). This brings her to the experimental Quest School to meet with socially awkward genius Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) at the behest of school founder John Pressman (Paul Rudd). However, John has ulterior motives for arranging the meeting between the two of them: He believes that Jeremiah is the son that Portia secretly birthed and gave up for adoption in college. See, John coincidentally happened to know the only other person who knew about the baby, and he happened to remember the kid's time and date of birth eighteen years later, and he happened to have access to Jeremiah's birth certificate. A lot of things had to "happened to" while setting up this situation.
Anyway, Portia and John team up and try their best to get Jeremiah into Princeton, Portia debates whether to tell Jeremiah she's his mother, and the movie attempts us to convince us that this is somehow better than colleges accepting legacy students whose parents donate boatloads of money. It's not nepotism if he really deserves it, you guys.
The film's initial failure appears to be that none of these characters are likable in the slightest, with the notable exception of Jeremiah. Portia is whiny and neurotic, while John is smug and self-obsessed. Portia's mother (Lily Tomiln) is a radical feminist author who insists Portia call her by her first name to avoid the "mother-daughter roleplay scenario" and won't buy dog food because "I'm not their slave, dogs are carnivores." She's basically a feminist as written by Fox News, and I cringed every time she was on screen. Then I slowly started to realize that we're not supposed to like these characters - that's the point. The film is a call-out of liberal smugness and hypocrisy.
Is it just me or does Paul Rudd walk like he's pretending to walk? Like, he's not sure how it's really done so he just approximates it.
Even better is the call-out of John, who purports to be a world traveler and doer of good deeds when he's actually a poseur who is too busy fixing other people's problems to listen to his son for five minutes. (Oh yeah, John has a son. That he adopted from Africa. Because of course he does.)
When we realize we're not supposed to like these people, they somehow become more likable, because they're inherently flawed characters, and they start to realize it right around the time we do. (Except for Tomlin, who is pretty much unbearable throughout.) It's a movie filled with all those insanely frustrating people whose general philosophies you agree with on a conceptual level, but you still just want to punch them in their smug, self-righteous faces.
I'm making all of this sound a lot more interesting than it really is, by the way. Most of the film revolves around Portia's back-and-forth over whether to tell Jeremiah she's his mother, culminating in an incredibly unfunny montage of her trying to become more matronly, grabbing people's babies out of their arms at the store and whatnot. I just do not understand something about Tina Fey. She is one of the funniest, most talented women in Hollywood, but when you make her the star of a movie, it's always lousy to-mediocre. Is she only funny when she's doing her own material? Does she have Hollywood's biggest case of text anxiety? I don't get it.
Anyway, Nat Wolff is a surprising standout here, pulling off Jeremiah's awkward rambling with an odd amount of charm. Jeremiah's brain works a little differently than most people's, but he's still able to make friends very easily. He's a weird kid; he's not "The Weird Kid." I respect this portrayal, and I believe Wolff's performance comprises most of it. The film's second-best moments, and the only time Weitz's creativity really appears, are when Portia imagines the "spirits" of all the students she has to assess and reject, and is particularly haunted by the image of Jeremiah as she reads through his history. The film's actual best moment is when a Princeton officer tells Paul Rudd "Oh yeah, you look like a teacher." Because, well, Paul Rudd totally does.
I'm not really sure what the point of Admission is, and I'm not really sure the film does, either. This is a film that rails against the corrupt university applications process in America, but the entire plot is centered around us hoping a kid gets into Princeton because his mom works there. It's chuckle-worthy in parts, but not enough to bill it as a successful comedy. The script throws some curveballs in the third act that are interesting, but mainly because they left me wondering "Shouldn't this film be over by now?" What we're left with is something that's basically okay, a movie no one will ever really love or really hate. However, when you take two of the most charming and likable people in Hollywood and create a movie with absolute minimum appeal, you've done something wrong.
| Nat Wolff | 8/10 |
|---|---|
| Everyone Else | 6/10 |
| Liberal Smugness | 7/10 |
| Point of the Movie | 3/10 |
| Paul Weitz's Batting Average | .500 |
| Overall | 24/50 |
MINORITY REPORT: It's amazing, the hoops characters jump through to get to the opening credits.Imagine how different Admission would be if the characters had failed to hit some of those checkpoints along the way. Portia uses birth control: No movie. Portia gets an abortion: No movie. Jeremiah's born with Down Syndrome: Portia's moonlighting at Denny's just to pay the bills. John Pressman's wrong about that birth date: Portia's bending over backward to guarantee admission to a child that isn't even hers. Worse, John Pressman hates children: Portia has no idea that she just fucked over her own kid by rejecting his application. It's amazing what standards characters must meet when they're preparing for a plot. - Sean "Keanu Grieves" Hanson
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