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May 05, 2015MICHAEL TAGGART MALONEY rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
In this film young women flee from their university education to the Florida coast in order to engage in the American ritual of the spring break bacchanal. This is a film devoted to booties and titties and Western culture's fascination with thug life. The female student protagonists are gangsta prodigies who end up forming a bond with a low-level dope dealer/rapper/stick-up man played with depth and nuance by James Franco. The whole picture is an obscene hallucination, which is Korine's specialty; but this is not to say that it is without merit. It is actually, in its own way, an understated and quiet movie; it reminds me, because of it's editing technique, of Steven Soderbergh's THE LIMEY (1999). Korine is making an important point about base materialism. Our liberal "democratic" consumer capitalist culture creates its own destabilizing Taliban ("students"), acolytes of excess who dream of violence.