Thursday, March 12, 2015

James Franco, Spring Breakers, and Relating to Characters


I was watching a news show the other day in which they were discussing James Franco, quite sardonically, in reference to the film Spring Breakers. Not only were they saying that it was a "bad film" in such a factual manner, but they went as far as to mock it. Like clearly nobody actually thinks this thing is any good. As someone who loves this film, I was a little miffed.

 While the film did get some pretty great reviews from certain critics, it always felt like a lot of people did not consider it worth taking seriously. They felt it was gratuitous, trashy, over-the-top, offensive, and violent. Oddly enough these aren't traits that typically deem a movie "bad". Rather quite the opposite as I'm sure you could say the same things about a handful of Tarantino films, and I'm pretty sure he is quite highly lauded. Maybe an aspect that people felt was lacking from SB was relating with the characters. As we know, Ol' QT loves to get us all buddy buddy with his extraordinary characters by giving them commonplace discourse in between their frightening exploits that makes us feel like "hey, I could be these guys", and he does it masterfully. That being said, I don't think that a character has to be directly relatable to be enjoyable. I like to find a relation, a distant one even, and get inside that character as much as I can, but at the end of the day I don't relate to MOST people so why would I need to relate to the colorful characters that entertain me? All that matters to me is "do I enjoy watching this person".

 Getting back to Spring Breakers and the characters it portrays, Hell YEA I enjoy watching these people. They're fucking entertaining. Some might think they are a bit far fetched, but you would be surprised. I don't think anyone in this film is a far cry from our real life inhabitants. I've known some that were pretty close. And James Franco's character.. my lord. While I was pretty sure he would not be nominated for a Golden Globe or an Oscar, I was prepared to be upset when he wasn't. This is as masterful a performance from Franco that we've probably ever seen. He is great at immersing himself into his characters and that was undeniable here. I would put this role on par with Gary Oldman's "Drexl" in True Romance, which was penned by Tarantino. Franco nailed it and he basically carried the movie in a supporting role. The "Look at my shit" scene was tip top. It's funny as hell, but it's also kind of tragic and frightening. That's basically the whole movie. It's dark as midnight yet glowing neon bright, it's sordid but celebratory. It makes you laugh one moment and shake your head in disgust another. And I really enjoyed Korine's "fluid narrative" as he calls it, which allows for constant jumps in time, replaying scenes and dialogue, layering scenes and shots, giving us extremely stylized and haunting sequences.

 So I guess it's not for everyone, I can certainly understand that. But what I was shocked by was the initial view of this film, which was that it was just a big joke that was nothing more than a hack filmmaker duping some young disney girls into wearing bikinis and talking about dicks.

No comments: