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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Exploiting Oneself

From John Podhoretz’s exhilarating flaying of Spring Breakers, the new sexploitation movie by the talentless Harmony Korine. Warning: the review contains spoilers. Here’s a key point: Spring Breakers is soft-core porn without a core, a look into the dark heart of shiftless American youth that primarily reveals its own dark heart; it is a portrait of white-trash […]

From John Podhoretz’s exhilarating flaying of Spring Breakers, the new sexploitation movie by the talentless Harmony Korine. Warning: the review contains spoilers. Here’s a key point:

Spring Breakers is soft-core porn without a core, a look into the dark heart of shiftless American youth that primarily reveals its own dark heart; it is a portrait of white-trash racists that proves to be more racist than most white trash. Most interesting, perhaps, is how it has positioned itself in the motion-picture marketplace. Spring Breakers is a story of corruption whose marketing strategy depended on seducing squeaky-clean Disney Channel and ABC Family starlets (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson) with the promise of big-screen stardom into ludicrous amounts of wildly gratuitous nudity and on-screen drug use.

Rather than using their nubility as a lever to lift them into A-list pictures, as Anne Hathaway did when she went from the inanities of The Princess Diaries to a nude scene in the Oscar-bait Brokeback Mountain, the girls of Spring Breakers have earned themselves a ticket to midnight-movie notoriety—just as Elizabeth Berkley did when she segued from the brain-dead kid sitcom Saved by the Bell to the brain-melting fiasco called Showgirls. Elizabeth who? you ask. To which I reply: Exactly.

Ay yi yi, what a great couple of lines.

The worst movie I ever saw — and for a guy who spent seven years as a professional film critic, that’s saying a lot — was Korine’s Gummowhich was like dropping acid during a hangover and eating mucilage until you puke.

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