Friday, January 18, 2013

Watchin' Trailerz with Doug (Jan. 18)

Bikinis and big booties, y'all! That's what life is about!

Spring Breakers
Release date: TBA



*Quick note: if the above embedded trailer becomes disabled or gets taken down (YouTube!), visit MTV's site here for the official version. Also, if you click that link, be prepared to read possibly THE WORST trailer summary ever penned by a young writer desperately trying to get a gig at Access Hollywood.

If you're anything like me (you are[n't]), you've seen (not heard) a lot about Spring Breakers, the new film directed by a dude named Harmony(?) Korine, scheduled to be released sometime this spring (March?). More specifically, you've spent hours poring over the movie's myriad promotional photos showing the four young starlets -- specifically, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens and Rachel Korine (reminds me of the nepotistic casting of Jennifer Schwalbach in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) -- wearing incredibly skimpy multicolored bikinis in the skeezy, scummy underbelly of Tampa, Fla. (which is to say, the city of Tampa, Fla.) For the uninformed, here's a gallery of pics (pace yourself, perverts). Mr. Korine is a bit of a mystery to me. His IMDb profile page looks like he populated the content himself with lots of shorts and documentary-type videos that, I have to imagine, very few people have seen. A few legitimate highlights -- he wrote (and played an uncredited "club kid") in Kids. He also wrote Gummo. And, supposedly (again, uncredited), Julien Donkey-Boy. Other projects have names like Mister Lonely, Trash Humpers, Act Da Fool and Snowballs. You know, all names that sound like bands featured on SiriusXMU. Re: this just-released trailer for Korine's latest motion picture -- if you like harsh green/yellow/fuchsia lighting, shaky, handheld cinematography, pretty girls in dirty situations, and a platinum-grilled, cornrowed performance by James Franco (playing a rapper named "Alien" [you can't make this up!]), then you'll love Spring Breakers. Quick plot summary: Four college girls who land in jail after robbing a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation find themselves bailed out by a drug and arms dealer who wants them to do some dirty work. Listen folks (LISTEN) -- I will definitely see this movie (according to garbage MTV, it's "sure to be one of the most buzzworthy and talked-about films of the year!"). But, is this kind of gutter art even shocking anymore? I mean, I guess it is. AS A FATHER, I would be horrified to see my baby girl (OR BOY [we're not finding out the gender]) in situations like these. Guns, drugs, African-American men (I KID). But how much of this is prep school fantasy (i.e., rich suburban "artists" with access to mommy's medicine cabinet), how much of it is real and how much of it is art? Not that it matters, I guess. Art is art, and movies are movies. Also, I'm not implying that shit doesn't go down regularly on any given spring break. We've all seen (and had Erika buy for us over the phone before the Internet was a trusted means of purchasing goods) Girls Gone Wild. And we've all been duped when that horrible company automatically sends you subsequent DVDs, even though all you wanted was the first one, and now you're too embarrassed to return the second movie (and, really, what's another $20?). But I'm getting off track. My point is: what IS this movie? Is it neo-Kids? That's probably Korine's aim. But it's also looks comically terrible (like, BAD), as evidenced by Franco's "performance art" shtick (and silly clothes and affects). Hey, if Joaquin Phoenix can do it in I'm Still Here (and the Late Show with David Letterman) and then rise from the ashes like a majestic phoenix (Majestic Phoenix is his kid sister) to deliver a tour-de-force performance (I'm told) in The Master, why can't James Franco? And if Franco's proven anything, it's that he does whatever the hell he feels like doing. Does including an electro-house score by Skrillex give Spring Breakers more legitimacy? It's hard to argue against such phat beats, but isn't the fact that Skrillex created original music for a major motion picture production further evidence of "going Hollywood" (i.e., the shine is off the dubstep)? Couple that with some weirdly placed Inception "BWAAAAs," and you've got yourself one schizophrenic preview. But all of this is moot, as we're only seeing a trailer that was most likely cut by an editor with no relationship with the movie's production (pretty standard practice). And, if film advertisements from 2012 showed us anything, it's that most trailers are misleading. Ultimately, none of this matters. Who cares how it was received at the Toronto International Film Festival? Who cares if Franco was given early Oscar buzz (for real? FOR REAL) before the movie was pushed back to 2013? Who cares whether or not the hipsters at SXSW embrace it? What matters is how YOU respond to the film. How it makes YOU feel. Are you turned off by its seedy, unseemly nature, or does the prospect of seeing tween babyfaces getting their slut on -- including a scene in which Hudgens, Benson and Franco have a threesome -- give your boner pause? Questions for the ages. "Spring break forever, bitches!"

8 comments:

  1. Wow. I feel that you obviously spent more than 10 minutes of your life on this, that I would at least donate 10 minutes of mine. You're welcome.

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  2. Doug, you've done an absolutely incredible job of writing just like a manic person talks (minus the many parentheses, of course). Kudos!

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  3. If Access Hollywood doesn't take you after this then they don't deserve your rich analysis of today's most pandering films, i'd say F them.

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  4. I thought Upholstery was what life was all about....

    ;-)

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  5. This could be what I wanted out of Domino :-)

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  6. How could this be made by the same man who made "Trash Humpers?!"

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  7. He did write and direct "Julian Donkey-Boy". He couldn't take credit because it was a Dogme 95 film, which meant you can not put your name on the work.

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  8. God, between this and that Michael Bay movie about kidnapping body builders (or whatever) we'll be drowning in the cute bodies with guns running around Florida sub-genre pretty soon. Did "Miami Blues" become hot and rewatchable all of a sudden?

    Oh, and my new-to-me movie for Friday, 1-18-20:

    the American Films Institute adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's MURDERS AT THE RUE MORGUE (1971): http://www.dvdverdict.com/juryroom/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=6028#p74511 .

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