Spring Breakers was everything it promised to be from its trailers, for better and worse. A sinister and pretentious reflection on the "Spring Break attitude" masquerading as monotonous debauchery, it lacks a certain amount of traditional entertainment value necessary to be a good film in its own right. The clear highlight of this meta-mess is James Franco's Alien, however, a white gangster/rapper who is unpleasant in almost every way, but fascinatingly so. Alien is one of the more well-constructed characters on this list - everything about him smacks of a blatant lack of self-awareness. His costume and makeup create such a perfectly ghoulish caricature of party animal culture you can almost smell the cheap cocaine on him through the screen. Franco disappears behind the grills and dreadlocks flawlessly as he struts out onto the stage to deliver some of the most fascinatingly self-deluded monologues this side of The Wolf of Wall Street. It's telling that his two big moments in the film (a hilariously desperate rendition of Britney Spears' Everytime, and his death scene) are darkly comic twists on what would be dramatically compelling material if Harmony Korine wasn't aware of how unpleasant and shallow this character appears to the audience. But in this case, it is all by design: Alien adds a jolt of energy into a film that otherwise would just be a slog of drunken party footage.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
