The Open Universe (Das Offene Universum) (Wyborny, 1990)|||||5.5
Spring Breakers (Korine, 2013)|||||5.5
Much more so than Django Unchained, certainly, this is an art bomb exploded on general audiences. This is an artwork and work of vision, and I'd say more so than Gummo and Trash Humpers, since it is hellbent on mining themes from the inside out of an ostensible (to a classical extent) narrative, rather than placing bets on a milieu and anti-narrative patchworking. There's a structural story here, with allegorical dimensions, and I admire it most for that. Korine, of course, then implodes his classical narrative to an alienating extent in his wild aesthetic of home video cameras and soulful/grotesque/unflinching documentary-ism, which is what makes it audacious and explosive.
Selena Gomez's dimwit Faith is the butt of the film (Gomez is surprisingly quite good despite her Disney Channel show being possibly the worst thing I have ever seen), coldly and uncompromisingly ejected out of the film by the halfway point; and Korine, per usual, extols the voice of the unspoken for (for better or worse): here, inchoate spring break girls who genuinely want to assert themselves in the world and experience what others like them value - power and self-importance found in the nihilist American dream - but then, in doing so, also transcend it. It's an undeniably effective and distinguished work - but despite it being preetty bad a lot of the time.
The Red and the White (Jansco, 1967)|||||7
Enlightened (TV Show) (Seasons 1 & 2, 2012-13)|||||++
Anatomy of a Relationship (Moullet, 1976)|||||7
Origins of a Meal (Moullet, 1979)|||||7.5
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1979)|||||8.5
Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, 2012)|||||7
L'intrus (Denis, 2004)|||||6.5
Pit Stop (aka The Winner) (Hill, 1967)|||||5.5
