Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2013)

On its face, Spring Breakers is such a quantum leap forward for Harmony Korine that it is easy to overlook what a logical progression it is for the director. Its recursive editing, not merely repeating actions but occasionally anticipating them, reflect the patterns used to chart the directionless movements of Korine’s prior characters, a loose, non-narrative structure that gradually reveals milieu over plot. His settings tend to alienate before they assimilate, and that certainly holds true for the slow-motion shots of Floridian bacchanal that open the film to the oppressive strains of Skrillex. Like a lenticular “wish you were here” card, the montage starts with innocuous shots of young adults out on the beach before a turn reveals bikini tops flying and phallically positioned beer cans pouring on women’s faces. The allure of spring break is laid bare, though Korine has barely even scratched the surface of the hell he will conjure in St. Pete.

To a group of undergrads chafing with boredom at their small college, however, those images are utopia, a heaven on Earth compared to the suffocating tedium of their surroundings. When Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) mime oral sex to each other during an auditorium class, they stick out not for their licentious behavior but for being the only people in the room not staring blankly at personal screens that merely reflect what the giant screen at the head of the class is showing. Faith (Selena Gomez) is a church girl in a phase of awkward transition for Christian youth outreach, featuring such incongruities as a youth minister (neck tattoo, Ed Hardy-esque crucifix shirt and all) standing backlit before stained-glass windows and using the story of Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of mankind to demonstrate just how little awe the word “awesome,” a word originally intended to connote a religious feeling, has lost all of its impact. Even goody two-shoes Faith needs to get away, and spring break seems as freeing to her as it does her more raucous friends.

Sucker Punch

Zack Synder's latest tribute to slow motion, Sucker Punch, tries so hard to be cool the director might as well have put sunglasses over the camera lens. Maybe he did, as that would explain why everything looked so dim. At times, I wondered if the movie was actually a minor step forward for 3D, one that did not require the use of special glasses. Of course, showing the film in 3D is the only way Sucker Punch could be any more offensive aesthetically: freed from the nominal requirement of honoring someone else's vision, Snyder can now assert his purported prowess to fully serve his own ends. But when you get closer, you find that his sandbox is filled with dried cat turds.

To be fair to the film, nothing that happens in it can or should be taken seriously. Its first moments open theatrical, revealing production and distribution company logos on curtains that rise to reveal a flat, clearly artificial set that only becomes a fully immersed location once the camera spins around the two-dimensional setup as if leaving drywall and furniture behind it to fill the space. This overt suggestion of the film's harmlessness graciously allows one to set aside issues of plausibility and, far more importantly, those of morality.