3. Spring Breakers
You have to love Spring Breakers if for no other reason than the fact that it got a bunch a shallow, vapid college-age kids to go see an art film. Written and directed by radical filmmaker/prankster Harmony Kornine, Spring Breakers was advertised as a "Fight For Your Right to Party", MTV-inundated, reality-television-obsessed youth culture celebration of getting blitzed, buzzed, and banged. In actuality, the film was a semi-experimental morality tale, edited together in the "montage as movie" style that Terrance Malick has been working in lately, about the depths of material sociopathy that is prevalent in the "spring break" culture. In a genius bit of casting, the film stars former tween idols Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, along with Ashley Benson and Rachel Kornine, as a group of girls so desperate to go through the collegiate rite of passage (something they obviously feel is an inalienable right), that they decide to rob a restaurant to procure the necessary funds for the trip. Once they get to their destination though, things hardly become more kosher. After landing in jail for being involved with a massive drug party, the girls are bailed out by the mysterious rapper/gangster Alien, played as simultaneously frightening and hilarious by James Franco. The quartet of girls end up fractured as Alien proves to elicit the true nature of each one's personality (which vary fairly wildly), and from there things go really nuts, as some of them end up making decisions they can never walk back. Spring Breakers balances the very fine line between celebrating and condemning the hedonistic nihilism on display throughout the film, avoiding the "old man yelling at kids to get of his long" syndrome, but never humanizing the deplorable and selfish acts committed by the film's characters. The result is a film that feels objective without being detached, authentic without being apologetic, and the film's extensive use of dubstep (courtesy of Skrillex) is some of the best mix of music and film in any movie this year. The standout feature of the film though, and the only real shot the divisive movie has at an Oscar nomination, is the performance from James Franco. Now, there seems to be a lot of Franco hate out there, which probably has something to do with the arrogant pseudo-intellectual aura he has cultivated around himself, but whether Franco is actually a jackass or not, if you're not open to the full-bodied nature of this performance, you're the jerk. Some may call it over the top, others may say it even smacks of racism, but Franco's performance
is Spring Breakers. The fairy tale-esque, hyper realism that characterizes Franco's performance holds together the film's final act, and it's just so damn enthralling, that to not even consider it for a Best Supporting Actor nomination would a sin almost on the level of some of the sins committed by the film's characters.