The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Brothers Ethan (left) and Joel Coen

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS                B                    

USA  (132 mi)  2018  d: Joel and Ethan Coen

Things have a way of escalating out here in the West.

―Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson)

Demonstrating more theatricality than usual, exhibiting a flair for the stage, the Coens have immersed themselves into a traveling Broadway theater troupe, making a series of illustrated short stories come alive onscreen.  Borrowing exclusively from a storybook entitled The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier, the camera scrutinizes a hard-covered picture book while a hand turns the pages to reveal six stories and illustrations contained within.  While it’s a literary gesture, all the stories take place in a budding frontier of the American West, still grappling with its identity, as we examine singing gunslingers, an inept bank robber facing the end of a rope, twice, a lone gold prospector seeking his fortune in a lush and beautiful valley, an exploited thespian of the oddest sort (a damning assessment of the entertainment business), and even a wagon train romance that goes awry, ending with a grim stagecoach ride with passengers who don’t seem particularly thrilled with their destination.  Each exceedingly different in tone, with death a common denominator in all of the stories, the project was begun as a collection of stories for Netflix to be shown in a six-part television series, the first of their films to be shot digitally, but once completed, edited with such economy, it’s been pared down to the size of a typical feature-length movie, so why not enjoy viewing it in a theater?  While the first three are more bizarre, the final three carry more dramatic weight and are easily enjoyable.  While it’s not particularly earth-shaking in terms of Coen’s originality, watching a film in this format feels similar to Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016), which was itself adapted from a collection of short stories, largely character-driven, each its own version of a morality play.  Reminiscent of the musical numbers from their earlier film, Hail, Caesar! (2016), there’s a healthy dose of singing throughout, some staged intentionally in comic renditions for the viewers, like a kind of surreal musical theater, while others simply appear spontaneously in keeping with the character, all contributing to the overall frontier spirit that feels more than anything like bedtime stories.  

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Tim Blake Nelson, the “dumb as rocks” country boy in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), returns as the irrepressibly cheerful singing cowboy, a man in white, overly polite and seemingly harmless, perhaps modeled after Roy Rogers, the good guy who always wins in a fair fight, taking on a host of unscrupulous characters that he dispatches with ease, though he introduces himself singing ballads, like the old Marty Robbins favorite, Marty Robbins - Cool Water - YouTube (3:10), strumming a guitar while saddled on a horse, riding through the essence of Monument Valley, like a walk down memory lane.  Narrating the saga of his own life through song, while always seen facing the camera, there’s little doubt that we are in a movie, where fables have a larger-than-life impact, spreading the word whether it holds true or not, where every event is an exaggerated adventure story about valor and heroism that ultimately prevails in this lawless outback of derelicts and outlaws, where seemingly one man is responsible for cleaning up these towns.  With malice and a hint of violence creeping out of every dark corner, Buster blithely fends off all contenders with a smile, set in a cartoonish universe of prevailing good fortune, where he always gets his man, even when outnumbered.  This kind of buffoonish novelty wears off, however, when a man in black known only as “The Kid” rides into town, playing a tune on his harmonica.  Dazed by the dulcet tones and overconfident from his earlier encounters, Buster never knew what hit him, where his soul rising from a dead body lying on the ground tells us all we need to know, as Buster slowly rises up to heaven on angel’s wings, harmonizing in a duet with his living rival, still cheerfully singing about heading for a better place where hopefully peace prevails. 

Near Algodones

In the stark emptiness of an open plain, the use of digital cameras is never more apparent than this segment, where a lone bank sits in the middle of nowhere, seemingly the only building constructed for miles in any direction, while next to it is a well with a sign attached saying “Bad Water.”  A rider on a horse (James Franco) approaches and configures the lay of the land, with he and the horse standing silently like silhouettes for a good long while, the quiet before the storm, before he decides to enter.  A lone bank teller sits inside, setting the stage for extreme comic absurdity, as it’s hard to imagine any place like this ever existed except in fairy tales, as banks tend to be closer to populated areas.  The thought of a teller dutifully sitting at his post all day without a single customer shoots into the mind with a smile, but here, once a cowboy steps inside, the teller can’t stop yakking, telling tall stories about how he proudly thwarted prior robbery attempts.  As if he needed to be reminded of his purpose, the cowboy pulls out a gun and stages a robbery.  The quick-thinking teller initiates a diversion that would stop many, but not this cowboy, who sneaks outside with a bag of money prior to being fired on before he can get to his horse, holed up under cover of the water hole as much of the money flies off in the breeze.  The teller, dressed in a suit of iron pots, charges the outlaw, with bullets clanking off the iron, knocking the criminal out with a single blow to the head.  When he awakes, he’s strung up to a tree atop a horse (the only tree seen for miles), hands tied behind his back with a noose around his neck, with a sheriff asking if he has any last words he’d like to say, with the cowboy incredulously unaware of how he arrived in this predicament.  Like something out of a Sergio Leone flick, all hell breaks loose when they are attacked by a band of Comanches, killing the entire posse, but leaving him in the same predicament.  A roving cattleman eventually sets him free, offering a renewed chance at life, but they’re quickly apprehended by the law where he’s charged with cattle rustling, soon finding himself with another noose around his neck.  Sizing up the man next to him breaking down in uncontrollable tears, the cowboy doesn’t mince words.  “First time?”  The irony, of course, is that he’s sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t actually commit, as it was a stroke of good luck that he escaped from his real crime.  The moral:  crime doesn’t pay. 

Meal Ticket

Eerily strange and grim, this features a traveling one-man road show, like something seen out of PINOCCHIO (1940), where the performer (Harry Melling, aka Dudley Dursley from the Harry Potter series) is little more than a caged prisoner, an actor with no arms or legs, yet whose stage presence is amazingly complex and sophisticated, doing Shakespeare readings, Bible and poetry selections, while reciting the popular Gettysburg Address.  The unscrupulous man behind the scenes is the despicable owner, Liam Neeson, who dresses and feeds his artist, but they never say a solitary word to each other.  Instead they are simply passengers drifting in the night, each using the other.  Moving from town to town across the West, people show up mostly out of curiosity, not knowing what to expect, setting up in the middle of town, but the curiously gifted performer has the power to bring audiences to tears, with the owner passing a cup through the audience afterwards for payment.  But as time goes on audiences dwindle and grow smaller, leaving the owner bitterly annoyed.  Noticing a bigger crowd across the street, he discovers a trained chicken that can apparently defy the odds, with the owner deciding to invest instead in the chicken.  After watching the owner practice dropping a big stone off a cliff into the river below, we have every reason to believe that is the fate of his cruelly exploited performer, brutally dispatched, upstaged by a chicken.  The moral:  There is simply no accounting for taste. 

All Gold Canyon   

Adapted from a Jack London story, this one features the most beautiful scenery, with a shaggy white-haired prospector (Tom Waits) coming across a mountainous pass with his mule, discovering a luscious green valley below with a river snaking through it, an alluring sight to behold.  Freely singing “Mother Machree” to the winds, he rambles through the forest muttering to himself throughout the sequence in a way only Tom Waits can do, exhibiting signs of an isolationist, a mountain man in his element seeking his fortune, but also capturing that frontier spirit of independence and entrepreneurship, finding early signs of gold, digging multiple holes searching for that larger pocket that he believes is in the vicinity.  After spending plenty of backbreaking work looking to strike it rich, he finally celebrates his find, only to be shot in the back by a man shadowing his actions, cleverly disguising the seriousness of the wound and surprising his attacker, catching him unawares.  Not only is he furious that the man would shoot him in the back, but how cowardly can one man be for stealing another man’s work, while doing nothing to earn or deserve it.  His cagy actions pay dividends in the end, where his hard work and perseverance pay off, extremely fortunate that the bullet passed right through without causing any internal damage, burying his attacker in the hole he dug after extracting bags of gold, showing rare optimism from the Coens, becoming one of the few to ultimately achieve the American Dream. 

The Gal Who Got Rattled

The most developed sequence of the bunch, not really typical of the Coen brothers style, inspired by a Western tale from Stewart Edward White, a contemporary of Jack London’s, slowly developing, not very flashy, but using very precise language, this actually becomes the most surprising segment, especially the way the story twists at the end, which could never have been anticipated, as little dark turns occur throughout that add immense pleasure to the overall experience, where it’s nice to be able to expect the unexpected.  Starting off in an ungodly boring dinner conversation, a brother and sister team of the overly twitchy Gilbert (Jefferson Mays) and the more stable and levelheaded Alice (Zoe Kazan) head out of the city to Oregon to seek their fortune, and a prospective arranged husband for Alice with a business partner (potentially, as it hasn’t really been arranged), traveling by wagon train, bringing with them their pesky dog named President Pierce, whose constant yapping is getting on the nerves of their fellow travelers.  When Gilbert dies on the trail to a sudden bout of cholera, Alice has nowhere else to go, sticking with the wagon train, though she has no conceivable means of paying the boy her brother hired to help them on the journey.  Bringing this problem to the two men in charge, cowpoke Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) and the grizzly old veteran wagonmaster Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines), riding partners for 15 years, they believe the agreed upon wage is basically a swindle, far more than what others receive.  It turns out Gilbert never had any business sense, but Alice is still perplexed by what to do.  Knapp makes her an offer that includes a marriage proposal, which will settle her debts but also provide for the future, leaving Arthur speechless, seen muttering to himself.  This romance back doors into the most understated of melodramatic soap operas, with few seeing it coming.  Knapp however fails in his attempt to rid the train of her dog, as it ran away before he could shoot him, thinking they will never see him again.  But when Alice wanders away from the train, Mr. Arthur sets out to find her and bring her back, but is surprised at how far she wandered, finally seen hypnotically transfixed in pleasure at the dog barking at the erratic behavior of prairie dogs, popping their heads in and out of their holes.  But before they can return, trouble lurks in the distance, as they are attacked by a patrol of Comanches, with Arthur handing her a gun with two bullets, with instructions to use it in the event of a dire emergency should he become incapacitated or shot dead.  Heroically, Arthur proves himself a worthy adversary, fending off waves of attacks singlehanded, offering an amusing monologue while doing it, seemingly satisfied with himself, as if he’s seen it all.  But he’s surprised by a rogue warrior who disguises himself, remaining hidden until the last minute, then smacking Arthur in the head with a tomahawk, lying helplessly on the ground.  In the Indian’s excitement to take a scalp, he falls for a trick of his own, playing dead, with Arthur putting a bullet through his head.  Retreating back to Alice, she was unaware of these surprise tactics, having taken her own life when she thought Arthur was dead.  Who would have thought President Pierce would outlive both of his masters?  The real dilemma, however, is Arthur didn’t know what he would say when explaining to Knapp what happened.        

The Mortal Remains

Easily the most macabre of the group, the only segment not to feature a death, though the entire sequence may itself be a strange stagecoach journey into hell and eternal damnation.  The first clue is that the coachman can’t stop, even when asked, riding continuously until they reach their destination.  The second clue is that they are transporting a corpse on the roof of the stagecoach.  But it’s the nature of the conversation that leaves this one in a state of ambiguity afterwards, with viewers wondering just what this is all about.  Inside the coach are an Englishman (Jojo O’Neill) and an Irishman (Brendan Gleeson), both claiming to be bounty hunters responsible for carrying the loaded corpse up above, but what’s implied is the three passengers sitting across from them may already be dead, where they are instead harvesting dead souls, transporting them to their next destination along the way.  Across from them are a lady (Tyne Daly) squeezed between two men, a Frenchman (Saul Rubenik) and a frontier trapper (Chelcie Ross).  Perhaps most illuminating is the choice of songs sung by the Irishman, entitled “The Unfortunate Lad,” The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs Soundtrack - "The Unfortunate Lad ...  YouTube (2:21), featuring a character cut down in his prime, similarly themed and sung to the same melody as “The Streets of Laredo,” Marty Robbins - The Streets Of Laredo - YouTube (2:50), where a dying cowboy sings his lament to another cowboy, which hardly seems fitting for the occasion.  The ghastly choice of color on the passenger’s faces, however, resembles that of a morgue, where they may be sent on the route of the damned, driven into a mysterious underworld.  What stands out here are the clearly distinctive personalities of the three passengers literally crying out to be heard, yet their efforts seem to be in vain, as what they have to say, so valuable in determining their own view and opinion, seems to hold so little significance to the others, literally falling on deaf ears.  While they remain in a state of delusion about their plight, all thinking they are heading for a better place, delving into strains of comic absurdity arguing along the way about just what constitutes better, in the end it’s hard to argue against death.  Only when they arrive at the final station does the inevitable appear to sink in, as no one wishes to depart, leaving a hint of the supernatural to conclude this most unusual film.     

Palo Alto

PALO ALTO               B                     

USA  (100 mi)  2013  d:  Gia Coppola 

Gia Coppola is the latest edition of the Coppola Film Factory, much like the exiled Makhmalbaf’s from Iran, currently living in Paris, or the infamous Barrymore family from the days of early Hollywood, all descended from cinema royalty.  Gia is the daughter of Gian-Carlo Coppola (who died in a speedboating accident at the age of 22), the oldest of Francis Ford Coppola’s three children, which makes Francis her grandfather, while Sofia Coppola is her aunt.  Stylewise, Gia graduated from Bard College with a fine arts degree in photography, where her moody visualization is much closer to Aunt Sofia, a mere 25-years old when it was shot, a year or two younger than Sofia when she shot her first feature, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999), painting her own impressionistic portrait of rich, overly indulgent high school kids by adapting James Franco’s Palo Alto:  Stories, a collection of 11 short stories taking place in his upscale Northern California hometown.  Like Robert Altman adapting nine Raymond Carver short stories (and a poem) into the ensemble piece SHORT CUTS (1993), Coppola also blends several of the stories into a composite whole, mostly centered on four main characters.  As Gia is herself a California child of privilege, it’s interesting to get her take on today’s youth, which is looking younger than ever, but still plagued by sex, social cliques, infatuations, getting stoned, drunken parties, and boredom.  Parents are largely absent or unseen, while kids have their own cars, and marijuana is the drug of choice for both teens and parents alike.  The casting is inspired, keeping it in an extended Hollywood movie family, where Emma Roberts (daughter of Eric, niece of Julia, and something of a stretch at age 23) plays April, a shy and sweet-natured girl caught up in the enveloping trouble surrounding her, reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis in HALLOWEEN (1978), though perhaps not as resilient, while Jack Kilmer, son of Val, who appears as April’s perpetually stoned stepfather in the film, is something of a revelation as Teddy, a stoner kid with artistic tendencies, looking very much the part of a River Phoenix reincarnation from a Gus van Sant film, like My Own Private Idaho (1991).  April and Teddy are drawn to one another, but they’re teenagers that don’t know how to express it, so instead we get a series of longing looks from afar, where they instantly cover up any hurt feelings by getting involved in some other mischief. 

The near plotless but largely entertaining film is a swirling choreography of kids making typical high school mistakes, where the most troubled kid is Teddy’s friend Fred (Natt Wolff), an obnoxious, overly aggressive jerk that spends most of his time putting everybody else down, making fun of the world around him, taking nothing seriously, getting high as often as he can, pretending he’s the life of the party, but in truth he’s the most hurt and alone.  Challenging him for low self-esteem is Emily, Zoe Levin from Beneath the Harvest Sky (2013), the girl who will have sex with anyone, thinking it will fill the emotional abyss she has to live with every day.  The delicacy she brings to the character is part of what makes this film matter, as we’ve seen all these kids before, perhaps in better movies, but their exquisite performances stand out in what is otherwise stereotypical territory.  It’s hard to care about rich kids that don’t care about themselves, who abuse their time on earth, economically privileged children who have it all, but despite their advantages, they’d rather toss their lives away, where we’ve already seen the spoiled and wasted kids in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) or Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012, which actually stars James Franco, by the way), where we can’t help but think—why should I care?  But then we get the painfully honest teen portrayals in The Spectacular Now (2013) or The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), where it’s hard not to share in the heartbreak of adolescent growing pains.  Coppola attempts to draw us into this disturbing teenage quagmire by reminding us how alienated kids are from themselves and one another, portraying them as collisions waiting to happen, where they have to continually pretend life doesn’t hurt, and nothing matters, while deep down they are wounded disaffected souls with no words to express their pain and anguish.  While we’ve all been there, hopefully most of us survived intact, but this film is a painful reminder of a time in our lives when we often could barely tell the difference between right and wrong, where often impaired judgment was held together by a slender thread of common sense and luck.  If one was not so fortunate, many adult lives have been ruined or destroyed by the regrettable actions of one’s youth.  While we’re watching the rebellious antics of so many needlessly discarded teenagers, who are treated like so many disposable parts, it’s hard not to think of how they might end up.

Initially the focus is on April’s secret crush for Teddy, but Fred continually gets in the way with his annoying behavior, claiming Teddy as his best buddy, usually plying him with dope or alcohol or bad ideas, where the two are seen as drifting knuckleheads with an air of indifference about the consequences of having no boundaries to speak of.  While Teddy would walk away from trouble under normal circumstances, exhibiting better sense, in Fred’s company he acts just as screwed up.  One of the highlights of their young lives is attending raging, out of control parties with absent parents, where the kids are free to do anything they want with no restrictions.  Coppola has a knack for creating a naturalistic setting, allowing her hand-held camera to wander in and out of rooms, shot by Autumn Cheyenne Durald, where it’s not unusual for characters to be seen puking in the bushes.  Teddy draws April’s attention, eventually disappearing and wandering off with another girl, where he’s too blitzed to drive, but that doesn’t stop him from getting into a car accident, compounded by leaving the scene of the crime.  With the police waiting for him by the time he gets home, he avoids worse punishment by involuntary community service in a sentence handed down by the court, where amusingly the dispassionate offscreen voice of the judge is unmistakably that of Francis Ford Coppola in full lecture mode.  James Franco plays Mr. B, a high school soccer coach for a rather lackadaisical girl’s team, where instead of winning he keeps his eye on the young girls, veering into the uncomfortable territory where adults take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the young, where his persuasive charm couldn’t be more revolting as he clearly has a thing for teenage girls, yet April is the regular babysitter for his young son Michael (Micah Nelson), making her an easy target.  It’s quite a mood swing to go from showing the obviously excited young kid something he’s not allowed to watch on TV, the legendary Phoebe Cates bathing suit sequence baring it all in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982), to Mr. B seducing April on the same couch.  Her guilt afterwards is punishingly acute, as she has absolutely no one she can share her thoughts with, as her patronizing and overly complacent mother (played amusingly enough by the director’s own mother, Jacqui Getty) is too wrapped up in her own self-help mindset to know or care.  The depiction of aimless and often confused teenagers is not the lurid sensationalism one has come to expect, but is instead a tender and often poetic introspection of the moods and anxieties that thrive within the teenage community.  Consider this the director’s LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) as she makes her way through the emotional minefields and marijuana haze of high school.   

Spring Breakers

SPRING BREAKERS        B              

USA  (94 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Harmony Korine        Official site

Bikini's and big booties — that's what it's all about.     —Alien (James Franco)

I'm so tired of seeing the same things every single day. Everybody's miserable here because everybody sees the same things. They wake up in the same bed, the same houses, the same depressing street lights. One gas station. The grass, it's not even green— it's brown. Everything's the same and everyone's just sad. I don’t want to end up like them. I really want to get out of here. It’s more than just Spring Break.  It’s searching to see something different.

Why is this happening? This isn’t supposed to happen. I don’t understand. We were just having fun, we didn’t do anything wrong. This is where we’re supposed to find ourselves. This is where we’re supposed to find who we are. Why did this happen? This wasn’t the dream.  It’s not supposed to end this way. It can’t end this way.

 —Faith (Selena Gomez) 

Not since the feverish REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) have American audiences been subjected to such a narcotic induced dream landscape where all moral boundaries have been crossed and the pulsating techno score by Skrillex and Cliff Martinez balances the mood with a trance-like atmosphere.  A film that speaks the language of a youth culture already succumbed to Adderall and Attention Deficit Disorder, this is as much about fantasies as it is a fantasy, something of a mind-altered, subterranean hallucination about a wacked out drug and sex crazed American culture, seen through the candy-colored kaleidoscopic lens of a male adolescent sex fantasy where underage teenage girls publicly expose their breasts and consume huge amounts of drugs and alcohol while dancing around the pool and listening to large doses of pop music blaring.  This is an expression of liberation?  For some, that’s exactly what it is, a week where no one ever says no, where you’re free to indulge to your hearts content, where you lie to your parents back home about abstaining from drugs and alcohol, painting a virginesque picture of meeting nice friends while indulging in every known substance you can find.  The idea of getting wasted and wrecked is somehow appealing to young people who simply don’t know any better, who have continually been fed hypersexualized images from growing up with MTV music videos, and who never questioned the content of what they were spoonfed.  For generations spring break has always held some notion of horny teenage guys hooking up with equally available girls whose sole intention was getting laid, but in Korine’s hands it turns into a bizarre voyeuristic fairy tale of instant gratification given the exaggerated Vegas treatment, shot by Gaspar Noé’s cinematographer Benoît Debie, where it’s all glamorized and choreographed into a sprawling beach party that resembles a teenage boy’s wet dream, with naked girls awash in neon colors that swirl around into different drug-induced figures and shapes, weaving in and out of focus, becoming an intoxicated surreal tabloid fantasy.  Despite the obvious exploitation aspects, the film does have Harmony Korine’s artistic sensibility, though what story there is feels oversaturated in pop reference artificiality that simply engulfs the characters.      

Told out of sequence, the story follows the self-absorbed exploits of four college girls, Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), Cotty (Rachel Korine, the director’s wife), and Faith (Selena Gomez, the only one that actually gives a performance), living together in the same college dorm, initially showcasing their shallowness by making ridiculously inappropriate sexual references during what appears to be a history class on civil rights before deciding they need to amp up their hedonistic impulses by taking a party and pleasure vacation to St. Petersburg, Florida during spring break, joining in on the excessive drinking rituals and brazenly crass sexual behavior, an exaggerated display of adolescent debauchery where women are dressed throughout in skimpy bikini’s (even in court!), often seen exposing their breasts which are showered in beer, snorting coke off of one another’s bodies, smoking bong pipes, guzzling liquor out of bottles, giving traffic passerby’s the finger, eventually becoming a comment on the vacuous culture of overprivileged white youth.  Disney girls Hudgens and Gomez only add to the portrayal of a materialistic American culture void of any real ideals, as this is a decisive break from their squeaky clean images, yet so many women in today’s youth culture feel it’s necessary to be seen in celebrity sex tape videos (Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian) on the Internet, as if this kind of exposure is the pathway to fame and fortune.  In many ways, the film bears a resemblance to Sofia Coppola’s equally bored rich kid flick The Bling Ring (2013), where kids feel right at home being part of a celebrity obsessed tabloid culture, where here they’re only following the Girls Gone Wild images that they see on TV.  Little thought is given to the exploitive nature of these images, or the troubling language associated with it, where women are derogatorily called bitches and ho’s, depicted in misogynistic music videos as little more than the exclusive property of male fantasies. 

The girls only exacerbate their inane behavior by robbing a local fast food restaurant for quick cash to pay for the trip, feeling exhilarated afterwards without a hint of remorse, where the only rule they live by is extreme narcissism, living in the moment, whatever feels good, and nothing else matters.  But in the flicker of an eye there’s an existential revelation that changes this perception, where the girls are arrested on drug charges and locked up in prison, where at least one of them, Faith, who comes from a strict religious background, begins to question this “anything goes” lifestyle as being miserable and sadly depressing, A First Look at Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers - YouTube  (33 seconds).  Faith, who is the only real character in the film, has several voiceover scenes where she narrates an overly idyllic world in a phone call to her grandmother, “I'm starting to think this is the most spiritual place I’ve ever been,” while a slo-mo shot captures out of control drinking and rampant drug use.  Faith’s dilemma of blurring the lines between what’s real and what’s imagined becomes a prominent theme, as if something has a hold on their reality.  After they’re released from jail, bailed out by a local white gangsta rapper named Alien (James Franco), the film descends into a hellish nightmare of wish fulfillment, where the girls become obsessed with black gangsta culture and the power it supposedly represents, where thug criminality is the new high, as there’s an adrenal rush identifying with the über macho actions of violent gang enforcement.  Dressed in neon pink ski masks and carrying automatic rifles, the girls gracefully dance around Alien playing Brittany Spears “Everytime” on a baby grand piano overlooking the ocean, Spring Breakers Best Scene - YouTube  (4:21), a beautifully captivating scene where pop music literally transcends the zeitgeist, becoming a poetically transfixing moment that defines the bewildering imagination of the director.  The nihilistic finale goes even further, using blatant absurdism to literally exploit exploitation cinema, turning the genre on its ear, becoming an expressionist statement of how deeply ingrained American youth have become with the excessive violence of video game imagery, where the seemingly make believe horrors depicted onscreen are contrasted by the girls calling home telling their Mom’s, “We’re heading back to school now, we’ll be good now,” becoming an oddly subversive take on the mainstream Hollywood culture that continually projects these soulless images.  Unfortunately, while mocking in tone, the film still feels too stylistically grounded in surface level artificialities, becoming something of a music video anthem for the vacuousness that it rails against.