Spring Breakers: "Better not bring yo' kids"

Every once in a while there arrive moments in life where you stop and wonder whether you are laughing because something is funny, or whether you are simply laughing to get through the weirdness of it all. For me, quite a few instances come to mind; a bad encounter with Mexican food in Florida among them, but it looks as though I will have to add Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers to that list as well.

I'm not quite sure what it was I was expecting when I went to go see this movie- perhaps a farce starring ex-Disney channel princesses having a Hangover-type experience whilst on holiday ,but that was not what I got. The movie seems to start out that way, as we are introduced to a sleepy college somewhere in Kentucky that is rapidly clearing out for spring break. Faith, the appropiately named supposedly-religious girl played by Selena Gomez, is planning to go down to Florida with her childhood friends, who for whatever reason have chosen quite a different moral path. The problem, it turns out is that they have no money, and thus no real way to get down there. Criminal activity ensues as the girls rob a chicken place to get money and then go down to Florida where upon renting scooters and snorting cocaine (how much money did these girls steal?)  things obviously go wrong.

credit to Eric Moyer for this gem

The thing that makes this film so interesting is the aura it gives at different times. Enter a world of neon lights and neon bikinis, of weird techno sequences not unlike those in Drive playing throughout some of the crucial moments in the film. Korine somehow manages to take a disney-channel original movie setup and make it dirty and grisly, forcing us to laugh even when maybe it isn't that funny. Korine seems to delight in beach party sequences that show wouldn't-want-your-mother-to-walk-in-and-see-you-watching-this-nudity, a dramatic emotional scene and the restatement (three or four times) of some saccharine line about wanting the best ever spring break. In fact, it's so over the top that at points the format can be maddening, but the people in the movie know this and run away with it.

James Franco is at his best as rapper/gangster Alien, the metal-grilled "friend" the girls make on the trip. If this is a tale about the distortion of innocence, Alien is a strange pied-piper figure leading our girls to lower levels of human depravity, every now and then spitting creepily delivered mini-poems and haiku that make you laugh because of the ridiculousness of the situations. In what is soon to be an iconic scene, Franco manages to turn his sung rendition of Britney Spears' Everytime into a surprisingly dark song.

Franco's "Everytime" scene

Franco is probably the only reason the movie works , and a lot of the other characters don't seem to make much sense or really fulfill any real purpose. In the end, only Alien pulls together the neon lights and twisted themes to make us feel like we've watched anything at all, and it's a shame he's not in the first half an hour of the movie. Spring Breakers was definitely a much better film than it could have been- it's a smart, funny, self-aware satire, that seems to want to hanker back to an eighties-film with its sequences.

Oz the Great and Powerful:

Even when I was a little boy, I always knew what sort of children's movies my parents would or wouldn't like. It had to be intelligent, witty and have the balls enough to send some rather dirty jokes right over the heads of kids to the parents to reward them for the hefty price tag that comes when you take your whole family to a multiplex. After I saw Oz the Great and Powerful, I was very confused indeed. I wasn't quite sure what type of kid's movie I had seen and the following is a list of reasons why.

The Acting : Oz  is an origin tale of the "wonderful wizard" we encounter in the classic Wizard of Oz.  Oz starts out as a scheming womanizer known as Oscar Diggs, with no real magical talent who dreams of greatness but doesn't seem willing to do the work to get it. At the same time, our hero is constantly needled by a desire to do the right thing, which of course doesn't happen until the end of the movie. Poor James Franco is probably more confused than we are the whole time. Every once in a while he gets a look on his face that tells us he really is uncomfortable in such a clean children's movie. At times I could almost hear the "that's what she said" jokes going off in his head to counter all of the ridiculously over-saccharine elements of the script. Acknowledging the ridiculousness of the film, Franco gives us some good chuckles every once in a while but ultimately cannot give this movie any real help. While I am happy Johnny Depp passed up on this one (do we really want a repeat of his Michael Jackson-like Wonka?), I can't help but think that Robert Downey Jr. would have been the perfect man for this role had he not turned it down himself. I would have thought that a Zach Braff and James Franco pairing would be an extremely funny pairing, but in the end Braff just isn't given anything to work with. Some briefly funny moments at the beginning of the film are great, but they stop there, and somehow the makers of this movie didn't see comedic potential in Braff voicing a flying monkey? Just scandalous. Mila Kunis seems to do relatively well at the start of the movie, but in the end her turn as Theodora, the eventual Wicked Witch, just doesn't seem to make much sense. When her character is a good witch , she's also somewhat of a jealous crazy girl, so when she turns evil the character development never happens. Word on the street is that this lack of making sense has her in the running for a razzie . The only people that seem to commit well to the movie  are Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams, and even they are turning coals of dialogue into diamonds. 

Special Effects: In the original classic Wizard of Oz, the change to colour upon arrival in Oz is one of the most iconic moments in the history of film-making  Thus I expected Oz to pull out all the visual stops when they opted to do the same thing and start out the movie in black and white. Unfortunately, after a year of seeing movies like Life of Pi, Oz's decent special effects and created world did not inspire any awe at all. It almost seemed like a mockery of the classic colour change to show the land of Oz so half-heartedly and no child born on this side of the millennium will bat an eyelid at the computer generated characters. 

 Dialogue: Don't misunderstand me, Oz is a children's film- I understand. Nearly all of my childhood  favourites (still my favourites) have some incredibly cheesy themes and lines. Lines like "I do, I do, I do believe in fairies" are just part of the gig. But at least most of them had the decency to tell me all about their hopes and dreams in a song instead of delivering it unconvincingly in the middle of an otherwise serious conversation. Part of what makes the original Wizard of Oz cool is that there are those ridiculous songs in it, and apart from one weird "munchkin song", which brought back politically incorrect echoes of the oompa-loompa songs in the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there was no effort in Oz to harden the mushy message. Some may claim that the age of sing-along children's movies are over, but as Tangled shows, movies that focus in only on the kiddy- viewers can still do very well with those sing-along elements. 

Maybe fifteen years ago I would have enjoyed this movie. But I like to think that kids around the world are smarter than this muddled attempt at a promising premise.Despite a final third that is actually quite enjoyable, Oz will never be iconic in any shape or form, tossed aside a day after mummy buys it along with such movies as The Ant Bully, and The Land Before Time 6 (or 7,8,9 etc.). To make matters worse, box-office reports have been stellar and they're making a sequel! At least franchises like Ice Age started out somewhat seriously before dumbing down its content value and robbing families blind. 

Side Effects: Questionably bad title. Great movie.

A couple weeks ago, a friend expressed his desire to watch a movie with me because he thought it would be a very different experience. I think he was expecting to see me show up to a cinema with notebook and pen in hand to jot down notes for my reviews, but I very rarely write down anything at all when preparing to write one. I do however, do some brainstorming in my head- working out different approaches to each film.  Normally I'm spot on in the first hour of the movie in what I expect I'll say, that was until a couple weeks ago when I saw Steven Soderbergh's latest work entitled Side Effects.

In fact, such was the complex nature of this drama, complete with plot twists bold enough to shock even the most jaded of moviegoers, that it is actually hard to even describe what this film is about without giving away parts of the film that are extremely important.  I guess the most inoffensive summary I can give you is that Side Effects is a drama about a troubled young woman named  Emily (Rooney Mara) who experiences some ridiculously disturbing results after she takes a drug prescribed by her new psychiatrist (Jude Law) to combat her depression. Such a summary actually well describes my initial attitudes towards the film about a quarter of the way through its viewing. Here, I thought, was a rather stark social commentary about our medical system and the cronyism involved between doctors and the drug industry. It was perfect fodder for a great review; I would talk about the quality of the movie and then segue into some meaningful paragraph about the commercialization of medicinal products. Hell, one of Side Effects' leads Catherine Zeta-Jones even suffers from bipolar disorder. A great film about a pertinent issue inspiring a great review. But it was not to be, and the film's sharp turn in direction is something that I could have only expected from someone like Soderbergh, whose CV includes some of my all-time favourites.

Side Effects may soon be added to that list of Soderbergh gems, with literally every aspect of the film working extremely well. I've never been much for the whole maniacally crazy routine, but Rooney Mara was probably as good in this film as I've ever seen her. There is a classic Hitchcock-femme-fatale quality about her facial expressions that makes it all the more effective when she zips from emotion to emotion throughout the film. Mara can be angry, vulnerable, sincere, then snide all at different times during a two-minute conversation without it ever seeming forced or over-dramatic. Jude Law also puts in a great performance, which coincidentally is the first leading role he's had in a while that actually lets him use his natural English accent. As an Englishman myself, I may be biased, but I'm pretty sure the droves of women who worship these actors won't mind if they use their real accents. How much more badass would Idris Elba's character in Prometheus have been if he had been allowed to let that East London slang come through? Fortunately, with Side Effects that is not a question we have to ponder, and besides his usual amount of charm, Law adds a dose of his dramatic flair as as the psychiatrist. 

They originally wanted to hire Blake Lively as the lead...madness

The real cornerstones of this film are the direction and screenplay, which seem like such a breath of fresh air. The plot twists never seem mechanical, the suspense never dulls and more importantly Soderbergh never feels the need to spoon feed everything to you. There are clues along the away that can tip-off the most observant of viewers, but the resolutions to so many of the film's questions don't get answered until they absolutely have to be. This makes Side Effects a great movie to watch with a bunch of friends because everyone will react in different ways based on how many of those clues they have picked up. Any of us that have watched The Walking Dead this season (slight spoiler alert ahead) know that balancing plot twists with unstable characters is no easy task, and I think I appreciate Soderbergh's subtleties even more as a result. 

We all know that 2012 was one of the best years for movies ever, but now it almost seems like Hollywood is hungover from all the past year's revelries and successes. There are plenty of movies to get excited about in 2013, but these past couple months have been rather event-less apart from Warm Bodies. Personally, I left the Christmas season feeling rather drained from having seen and reviewed so many awesome movies, but Side Effects is just the dose of aspirin I needed and the best film of 2013 I've seen so far.