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The colorful, in-your-face youthfully brash poster for Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers
Four young college girls must get away for their spring break; away from their depressing dorms to sunny Florida, even if their vacation is only made possible through a violent robbery. During their time there, they wallow in drink and drugs and send reassuring messages home to their families.
Spring Breakers, by writer-director Harmony Korine (Gummo (1997)), is a visually persuasive and impressive argument. - But for, or against, what? It seems too sophisticatedly made to be just a trite scare story about the dangers of guns, crime, drugs, uncontrolled partying and Miami spring breaks. One can easily project a lot of oneself into an analysis of the film, which doesn't stand out as strongly as related predecessors like Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Irréversible (2002).
The visually sensory-based, light-stressing universe is reminiscent of a Nicki Minaj music video (with cinematography by Benoît Debie (Get the Gringo (2012))) and, - together with the almost constant, wavy music (score by Cliff Martinez (Drive (2011)) and Skrillex (Smog City (2012, documentary))), - weigh up for the fact that the story moves slowly and at times feels secondary to the stunning visuals. It is incredible that Korine has managed to get the four promising young actresses to join him in this wild movie. SPOILER Their characters are mostly deeply unlikable, but so are the people that they kill, so any major reaction to these misdeeds remains absent. James Franco (Howl (2010)) is great and gives perhaps his career's most transformative performance as the silly-idiotic drug dealer Alien.
[Spring Breakers premiered September 4 (Venice International Film Festival) and runs 94 minutes. Korine has said he wanted to make the film to make up for his own missed spring breaks, which he used on skateboarding instead of pursuing hedonism. Emma Roberts was in talks to star in the film. Filming took place in Florida in and around March 2012. The film opened #27 in just 3 theaters to a huge 263k $ first weekend, peaking at #6 in 1,104 theaters in the US, where it grossed 14.1 mil. $ (44.5 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were France with 4.6 mil. $ (14.5 %) and Canada with 1.7 mil. $ (5.4 %). Rapper Riff Raff has announced that he would sue the producers for "sampling" his life in Franco's character, but the suit doesn't seem to have materialized, perhaps unsurprisingly. Many critics included the film on their top 10 of the year lists, and Franco campaigned unsuccessfully for Oscar attention for his performance. Spring Breakers is fresh at 67 % with a 6.3 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
In Kids, we follow a group of very unsupervised New York kids and teens over the course of just over a day, as they indulge in the different activities that make up their lives. These activities include thieving, violence, sex, drug-taking and talking, mostly about sex.
The film takes its time in getting us into the environment, before the suspense element gets introduced: SPOILER One of the girls learns that she has gotten HIV from the only boy she has ever been with, and we then follow her despairing journey to try to find the boy and stop him from infecting another young girl. Cross-cutting between the dark and lonely place where she finds herself, and the boy's routine advances to a young teenage girl is quite effective and terrible. It seems clear from especially the first half hour of Kids that the film finds these juveniles charming in a way; worthy of our attention, and, despite their many flaws, not deserving of an unloving movie in their name. Different audiences will feel that different parts of Kids is transgressive: The kids disobey so many basic rules of social conduct and are provocative and crude, but also the curiosity that the film allows its audiences in lingering in sex-related conversations between its young actors that often don't have any direct connection to the plot is provocative, and some have said lascivious (and even worse things.) I did feel voyeuristic at times, watching these scenes, but, more importantly, I didn't 'get enough' or reach a state where I had gotten tired of them; (appropriately, Kids is held at a tight 91 minute playtime.) The voyeuristic quality of this look inside the lives of some kids in a major metropolis just makes the experience all the more troubling. One can discard Kids and its characters with a swift justification that they are abominable, and certainly their behavior is very, very bad, (but, importantly, is presented unexcused by the film-makers, as especially SPOILER the shocking violent scene cements), but one must wonder and ask where the parenting generation is in their lives. And I laid most of my 'blame' for all the troubles presented in Kids at the doorsteps of these neglecting parents. In the film, we in fact only meet one parent, and she is a home-mother "without a cent to [my] name", simultaneously chain-smoking and breast-feeding her newest creation.
The details:
Kids' gritty guerrilla-style of film-making is accompanied by a great, contemporary soundtrack and four fine lead actors, who are all debuting. Especially Chloë Sevigny (Boys Don't Cry (1999)) is incredible as Jennie, and so are the two boys, Leo Fitzpatrick (Storytelling (2001)) and Justin Pierce (A Brother's Kiss (1997)), who plays Casper and very much was the kind of lost skateboarding kid of the streets that he portrays in the film. Pierce had run-ins with the law and drugs and tragically hanged himself in his hotel room in the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas in 2000 at age 25. Kids is a forceful, great debut film for all involved, although its production does raise questions: Scenes like the one in the picture below where four minors are smoking weed would be interesting to read about, but I can find no such information.
Are these kids actually smoking weed and getting high in Larry Clark's Kids, or how was this scene achieved? If you know, shoot a comment about it
The film in itself doesn't glorify the troubled kids, in my opinion, but it successfully portrays the moral vacuum that they lead their random lives in, and it doesn't make many adult audiences ever want to bring up a family in New York I suppose. It was written by a just 18 year-old Harmony Korine, who debuted as a director with Gummo (1997), and is directed by Vietnam veteran Larry Clark (Ken Park (2002)), who with Kids succeeded with one of the most controversial and strong debuts of a film director in recent American history.
Cost: 1.5 mil. $ Box office: 20.4 mil. $ = Huge hit [Miramax bought the worldwide distribution rights for this small, independent film for 3.5 mil. $. As the film got an NC-17-rating, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, owners of Miramax, had to buy the film back from their company due to Miramax's rule to not release NC-17-rated films, although the film was eventually released unrated in the US. Under another company name, Shining Excalibur Films, Kids went on to enjoy a warm reception both domestically (7.4 mil. $) and abroad, and the Weinsteins are said to have profited as much as 2 mil. $ each from their distribution of Kids.] What do you think of Kids? Any information on its making is very welcome
