Check out one of the two FREE “Spring Breakers” midnight screenings this weekend at Union South.
The Wisconsin Union Directorate’s Film Committee usually does a stellar job with their midnight selections. Just last week, they opted for Tommy Wiseau’s pet project gone bad, The Room. But this weekend’s late night attraction, Spring Breakers, just might make for a perfect screening.
Whether under the Florida coast’s baking rays or basking in the neon glow of sketchy convenience stores, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is a drugged-out experimental gem. Sample Korine’s filmography — like 2009’s Trash Humpers or his deranged short “Umshini Wam” —  and watch as the director’s subversive tendencies quickly boil to the surface. That provocation may be at its zenith in Spring Breakers, effectively alienating the “ABC Family” crowd that mistakenly turned up to see teen idols Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and Ashley Benson play anything but their friendly TV avatars. The bikini-clad misanthropes journey out east in search of vapid spring break exploits, but when the girls are bailed out of jail by James Franco’s cornrowed drug dealer “Alien,” beer bongs on the beach and crummy hip-hop concerts morph into a “Gangsta’s Guide to Spring Break,” scrawled in gel pen and sealed with four kisses.
A polarizing film upon release, Spring Breakers’ brilliance lies not with its transgressive qualities but in its blending of apathy and American excess. Critics unable to see beyond the bikini butts and phallic popsicle imagery seemed to have miss Korine’s elevation of them to high art. To quote Mitchell Brachmann, it’s “a piece of art that is as malleable as American youth.” The term “genius” gets thrown around far too often, but Korine re-appropriates Britney Spears’ “Everytime,” complete with James Franco’s piano accompaniment, in a scene that more or less determines whether Spring Breakers will jive with you. It’s an exquisite blend of the familiar and the grotesque, blending high and low brow culture like so many midnight movies of WUD Film’s past.
This weekend, look at their sheeyit.
- Spring Breakers plays at 11:59p this Friday and Saturday at the Union South Marquee. And it’s free, y’all. It’s free.