Spring Breakers

The really odd thing about this minor dayglo, dangling little softporn is how lacking in excess it is. It seems to be about excess - spring break foreva, an endless mantra, a slow-witted prayer - but continually shies away; this is less excessive than the computer games that inspire the girls, wrench their volition, besmirch them. There's almost a scary lack of sex itself; it feels like the end of the world because no one is actually bothering to abandon themselves in coitus.

When Alien and the girls say "I think I might love you" or whatever this isn't just a qualifier; they genuinely have no way of knowing...

This is about articulating the (deliberately, motivated) inarticulate and laughs at and with gangsta culture (and reminds us that the difference between Scarface and, say Goodfellas or The Corleones was culture itself), thus having its cake (Cake) and eating it.

The non DUB dubstep of Skrillex, with its pastel whoops, it's attenuations, it's breakdown down downs is apt.

It feels like a baby Noe film (a No! film). It looks like one, wants to be a bigger picture. It could be as desolate as that, you sense it wants to lose itself in the neon (it almost does; it's beautifully photographed) but whereas Gaspar Noe drags us slowly into black-light (and no one watches his movies twice, surely?) Spring Breakers feels itself sucked back towards the whirlpool of breast-indifference where Piranha 3DD et al (and before that Girls Gone Bad trailer trash) dwell and decides the only way is to dissolve the tragic logic in time, to fracture the relentless drive towards gamifying life into distinct chunks, glimpsed like a trailer.

If this was a trailer, or a collection of out-takes on the 2 disc collectors edition, you might not notice and this is ostensibly its Art and its commentary; the fragments are real, that is how time is. This is ADHD slowed down on Ritalin (that old paradox - speed making everything slower). It's a slow slap in the face, a wake-up call to no one at all.

An email isn't a communication; it's someone shouting alone in a room.

The girls look beautiful, of course and they spend the entire film in bikinis, which are beacons, which are strip lights. I'm not sure how anyone BUT me is supposed to feel about this. This feels like the film maker is my age (he is). This is for me and against me. I wish their African American lecturer had chased them to Florida, harangued them in situ, understood what it was that He and they were up against. I wish he'd turned into Travis (Bickle, though the Scottish Brit band would have been even better) instead of them. This film didn't need these avenging angels. Their vengeance is lost, is trickling, is already apparent. There doesn't need to be realisation. The real isn't needed at all.