Countdown to the Oscars: Best Song Re-imagined

Today Cinema Romantico re-imagines the slowly-becoming-irrelevant Oscar category of Best Song as if it was one combined category and the songs did not have to be "original" or fit some other antiquated piece of Academy criteria and I and I alone was judge and jury in regards to the five nominees.

5. Take Me Away by Lucero in "Mud". "Mud" is pure storytelling but it also provides an unforgettably straight-up sense of place, a dying way of life alongside a river, somehow feeling both modern and bygone. A particular sequence, scored to to Lucero's one-minute-and-twenty-one second snippet of a tune, finds our protagonist, teenage Ellis, and his father skimming along the pavement of their southern small town in dad's truck, delivering fish out of coolers. A great many movies can last ninety to a hundred twenty minutes, if not more, and not so ably capture the graveled melody of life's struggle.

4. Let It Go in "Frozen." The unfurling of this likely actual Best Song Oscar winner charts Elsa's (Idina Menzel) transformation from kindly Princess to exiled Ice Queen. Maybe it's just because I like Ice Queens, but I saw it as a Disney version of Katy Perry going from Christian songstress to California Gurl. And yes, I mean that whole-heartedly as a compliment.


3. Hang Me Oh Hang Me by Oscar Isaac in "Inside Llewyn Davis." When I watched a Robert Mitchum film last year with my Dad and my Stepmom, I referenced what I like to call Tragic Inevitability. To which my Stepmom, understandably, replied, "Isn't that just Fatalism?" To which I replied, "Well yes, but doesn't 'Tragic Inevitability' sound more poetic than 'Fatalism?'" An example: the melancholy, self-absorbed, folk-singing title character (Oscar Isaac) of "Inside Llewyn Davis" introduces himself to us by singing the words "Hang me oh hang me, I'll be dead and gone." I mean......that's Tragic Inevitability.


2. Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites by Skrillex in “Spring Breakers”. In pontificating about Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” (the whole album), Robert Christgau, the self-appointed Dean Of Rock Critics, compared its “synthesizers” to “doom dybbuks”, which is just about the most wonderful thing ever. Dybbuks, in Jewish mythology, are believed to be the dislocated souls of the dead, and watching all the spring breakers do as spring breakers will in the rapturously smutty opening credits sequence of Harmony Korine’s opus seems very akin to a Miami beach full of “doom dybbuks.” “But when he swears rock n' roll will take you to the mountain,” Christgau concludes of Skrillex almost in spite of himself, “he's being sincere.” Nearly a year later it still stuns me to think this scene takes me to the mountain, but it does, and “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” goes a long way in making it happen.

1. If I Needed You in "Broken Circle Breakdown." I can explain it to you, how Didier and Elise meet and fall in love and sing harmonies in a bluegrass band and have a daughter and lose that daughter to disease and wonder if their daughter's spirit lives on in lieu of their daughter's tangible self and fall apart and break up and reconcile, kinda, but are uncertain if reconciliation is even possible in the face of  such pain and then come to the above moment on the stage and......but no. I can't explain it to you. This film is so much about the physical, and you have to feel this whole film to feel this scene and feel each of those close-ups of hands and how they want to reach out and touch one another but metaphorically can't even if figuratively they can. (Watch the scene here. But seriously, just watch the whole movie.)

Spring Breakers: Opening Scene

As the title card "Spring Breakers", in a sort of neon pseudo-confetti appears on the screen, the soundtrack strikes up the sounds of Skrillex. We cut to assorted shots of revelers on a pristine beach. The revelers are noticeable for their activities, age and attire - lewd, young and skimpy. They are primarily female - at least, at first.

Then we see a dude. He's grabbing his crotch, as if he was raised on rap videos (which he might have been). Another dude just over his left shoulder is giving us the finger. Then we see a girl with her back to the camera, shaking her moneymaker. Then a beer bong. Then......well......I believe Seth MacFarlane wrote a song about them - namely, boobs. We see boobs. We see beer being poured on them as they sway to and fro in all their admitted glory. And then the camera jump cuts......but to the exact same shot, just a little bit closer. It's as if the director, Harmony Korine, is saying prior to the jump cut, "Oh? You're offended." Jump cut. "How offended are you now?"

For a normal movie, this might be enough. This is not a normal movie. It keeps going, perfectly matched by the stop/start nature of Skrillex. A dude mimes jerking off with a beer bottle. Another middle finger. More boobs. Then girls sucking on red/blue/white ('merica, bitches) popsicles, a la Kate Upton. Now are we done? Nope. More boobs. Dudes "urinate" out of beer cans onto not-entirely-clothed female faces. More popsicle sucking. Cut to black.

(Wipes brow.)

So, why do I find this opening as majestic as I do scuzzy? Can those two even co-exist? If so, how? I mean, are these sixty or so seconds any different from "Girls Gone Wild" (or, as "Arrested Development" might say, "Girls With Low Self-Esteem") and its hideous, jaw-dropping exploitive nature? Well, sure. For one thing, "Girls Gone Wild" is really nothing beyond soul-rotten home video tripe that exists to sell a product - albeit a product to the sort of dudes we see in "Spring Breakers" grabbing their crotches and pretending to jerk off.

Harmony Korine, for whatever anyone wishes to say about him (and feel free), knows how to implement the camera and cuts and music and any number of in-editing tricks to create something beyond a mere product, something Jiff Ramsey would have termed "film de cinema."

Except that simply enlisting a French cinematographer, Benoît Debie, prettifying the whole picture in a visual sheen that makes it seem as if you're watching all this debauchery through aviator sunglasses while high on mushrooms, does not automatically make it any more tolerable or excusable.

What struck me upon re-watching "Spring Breakers" (my original review), even more than its Malick-ian overtones, reliance on montage-y images and voiceover, is that underneath all that deliriously glossy surface is something surprisingly traditional. Girls go on spring break. Girls get sick of spring break. Girls go home. Seriously. That's what it is, right down to the end. Which is not a bad thing. The last shot, God save my soul, actually made me wistfully smile. And all of this makes the shameless opening sequence so vital.

The opening exists apart from everything else in the film, just as spring break itself exists apart from everything else in the world in some sort of mystic spring break continuum. Ultimately we can hate it, be discouraged by it, frightened of it, rail against it, but it doesn't matter. The beat goes on.

Spring break forever, y'all.

Spring Breakers

Director Harmony Korine’s latest foray into God-knows-whatism opens with a roughly two minute montage on a Florida beach of iniquity, the camera making a pass at a plethora of well-toned and tanned twenty-somethings gulping from beer bongs and taking bong hits, drinking and gyrating, gyrating and drinking, and even sucking on red/white/blue popsicles in the manner of scantily clad GQ cover girl Kate Upton whose vapid if elemental sexuality probably makes her Korine’s queen. This does not merely set the sweat-glistened exploitative stage but underscores the style Korine employs throughout.

He is far less interested in some sort of assured narrative than he is in the image, returning to the same ones of interchangeable spring breakers (in various stages of undress) again and again, interlaced with dialogue in voiceover, often words we have already heard at another point in the film, letting it all coalesce. The reference may irritate the hoity-toity but it’s akin to Terrence Malick – that is, if Malick had come of age watching Daisy Fuentes hosting MTV Spring Break.

The plot turns on a quartet of photogenic college females yearning to break free from their dormitory/classroom shackles and aim due south for the Sunshine State and spring break, the most wonderful time of the year. A problem emerges: they have no cash. Thus, they hatch a scheme and decide to rob a bank – er, a Chicken Shack restaurant. Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Cotty (Rachel Korine), so intertwined with one another they may as well exist as a single entity, armed with pink skimasks and squirt guns, wage terror and make off with stacks of cash to fund their party-hardy jihad. We see this robbery twice at different points and from different points of view and what’s telling is Korine’s blasé attitude toward the whole affair. We are conditioned to expect cinematic comeuppance for this Skrillex-era Bonnie, Clyde and Buck but it never really happens. You know what they say – it’s only illegal if you get caught. 

Our three mouseketeers then haul their winnings back to their pious pal Faith (Selena Gomez), a churchgoing soul who rather quickly and easily succumbs to temptation, wiggles into a string bikini with the rest and takes a walk on the wild side while making phone calls home to her Grandma and espousing about how “beautiful” everything and everyone is while Korine “slyly” pairs these monologues with shots like, say, the gal pals, uh, relieving themselves post too many Corona Lights. In fact, all of Faith’s confessions come across absurdly shallow but I dare say that’s the intention. A person who has never been drunk getting drunk for the first time would spout the sort of inane platitudes Faith spouts.

It would seem Faith is meant as the audience’s through-line, the connecting tissue to beginning and end, but midway through Alien, a cornrowed white gangsta and wannabe rapper, enters the ladies’ lives, becoming their automatic weapon-sporting Buddha and leading them astray even as he leads them to a skewed version of enlightenment. Alien is played by a wholly committed James Franco, assuming gold teeth and zestfully overdoing every line and gesture. He is so invested that you may have trouble deducing whether he is explicitly mocking the type of person he is playing or if he is entirely sincere and utterly embracing the persona (which is kind of what the movie itself is doing). His brazenness, in fact, leaves the four girls in his wake. Perhaps Benson and Hudgens sorta rise to the challenge but perhaps that is because they are shooting for the same sorta psycho. 

The movie turns again when Alien winds up in a showdown with his gangsta mentor (Gucci Mane) in a bit of plotting that appears out of thin air simply to provide Spring Breakers with dramatic closure. The mentor is paper-thin, barely a character, but then no one here is really a character. How can you have actual characters when the majority of your movie is a montage? The ever clever Korine knows real characters demand real consequences and real lessons and who in their right mind goes on spring break worried about consequences and lessons?

So, with such superfluous and conscienceless characters running amok, we enter that out-of-date danger zone of what wondering why we “care” about these people. The recurring mantra of Spring Breakers, repeated most often in Franco’s put-upon whisper, is “Spring break forever, y’all.” Spring break itself is nothing if not shallow. The characters are shallow. Korine’s viewpoint throughout is shallow. But the one thing you can’t say about Korine or his characters or all those writhing spring breakers obliterating themselves on booze is that they aren’t wholly committed to their end game.