Movie Review: Spring Breakers

Spring Breakers will owe its box office success to its continual shots of bosoms and bottoms, not always covered by bikinis.

I'm not sure I ever saw the personal parts of Disney stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, but it looked as if writer-director Harmony Korine exhausted the studio warehouse of flashes of teenage bodies bouncing around, in film stock ranging from standard to super-grainy amateur, imitating what we used to call cinema verite and are now expected to accept as reality.
The whole thing looks like amateur exploitation until, suddenly, James Franco, of all people, shows up and things start to get sporadically grim and grimmer.

Franco is surprisingly convincing as a gang leader with gold-plated front teeth and a big, wide, phony-looking smile that served him poorly in Oz the Great and Powerful, but suits him perfectly here. Both he and the movie as a whole are conspicuously delicate about the prostitution that seems almost inevitable, but the gang world is appropriately sleazy and ugly. And if Gomez, Hudgens and company aren't repelled by it, they were not exactly innocent doves to start with, having financed their spring adventure with armed robbery.

These characters are so shallow that not much acting is called for, even by Franco. About the only "reality" we experience is in the deliberate crudeness of the camera and editing techniques, and even this is undercut by obvious use of flashy-then-subdued color, not to mention contrast cuts between practically satanic orgy shots and stone-cold police stations or dark, wet streets inhabited only by people in serious trouble.

There is a surprise in the very last spoken lines, but otherwise Spring Breakers is pretty predictable from the moment Franco makes clear that this is not a comedy.

News Source: www.kmuw.org

Selena Gomez Got 'Uncomfortable' With 'Wizards Of Waverly Place' Costume

If you needed a Selena Gomez double dose this weekend, the starlet served it up Friday night.

The "Spring Breakers" star went back to her roots, playing Disney wizard Alex Russo in "The Wizards Return: Alex vs. Alex,". Coincidentally it aired on the Mouse House the same day her Harmony Korine flick hit theaters in limited release. And while the "Wizards of Waverly Place" special certainly was family-friendly, it still showed off her naughty side thanks to an appearance from Alex's evil twin.
"Awkward." star Beau Mirchoff got the chance to play off Gomez's Disney bad girl, sharing that he enjoyed being on set with that version of her. "I think bad Selena was pretty fun. She's very sassy. That tight leather outfit was pretty funny as well. It looked very uncomfortable. Her doing flips and being in this tight harness, I can't imagine that was too comfortable," he told MTV News.

So did Mirchoff get a chance to don the full-leather look too?

"I didn't want to upstage her; it's her show," he joked. "I didn't want to be rude. But I did get to wear that cool punk rocker jacket thing as the evil wizard, which was pretty cool."

With bad Alex and Mirchoff's Dominic working side-by-side to cast evil spells, he shared that it felt reminiscent of another famous TV duo. "It kind of reminded me of, I was a big 'Pinky and the Brain' fan when I was younger, so I thought it was kind of funny, kind of like that. But the whole episode was kind of out there. It's really creative," he said.

He added, "It was amazing. It's kind of similar to theater in a way; the multi-cam, the long takes and it's all staged, and in that aspect you can really get into every take and really kind of get the tone of it and the feeling of it. That really helped for this specific character."

When it was all wrapped, Beau took some very important advice with him. And, it was the kind that only Selena Gomez could give. He shared, "She gave some advice on how to wield a wand. Actually I really didn't know how. That was one of my biggest questions, is how to work the wand properly. I didn't want to look like a fake wizard. So she taught me. It's all in the wrists basically."

News Source: www.mtv.com