Movie 43 (2013)

Comedy can't get any worse? Think again 
Movie 43 (2013)

"Why am i here?"

Movie 43 begins with, at least in the UK, a prank gone horribly wrong. You’d kind of hope that’s why the film primarily exists: a sort of malicious attack on a producer or film company for not allowing the creators to green light the actual film or maybe on the audiences of Western civilization. “Movie 43”, which began life as passion project by Peter Farrelly nearly four years ago, also ends with the end of civilization as we know it. Is it a critique on Mass consumerist culture: a type of Marxist declaration that we have become over run with technology and lost in touch with the world around us? By the time first act appears-in which three teenage boys try to find the banned film “Movie 43”- if that’s your thought then your giving the film more effort than it deserves.

A collection of 11 shorts strung along to a shoe string plot, the film begins with two friends creating a Youtube video in which the teens try to throw a dart board onto a dart while the dart is lodged in the others mouth. Youtube is the films greatest influence-comedy made on tight budget, usually shot in one location. It’s adherence to this makes it seem more suited to subject in question, either by being broadcast as a event on Youtube or creating a site in same vein as Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die. Even the main audience it aims to attract solely seem to spend all their time on the internet.

As they continue through cracking firewalls and government encryptions, they find what are intended to be a deadly and life changing array of films. Kate Winslet ends up on a date with a disfigured Hugh Jackman, who has testicles attached to his chin. Halle Berry makes Guacamole with her inflated breasts, while Stephen merchant has an ejaculating Penis tattooed to his cheek. An array of stars including Elizabeth Banks, Richard Gere, Emma Stone, Terrance Howard, Chloe Moretz, Jonny Knoxville and Sean William Scott embarrass, humiliate and befoul themselves and, in part, there careers. It all adds up to 11 shorts with no punch line, a series of shorts that embarrassingly try to show what they believe to be edgy, shocking or even funny.

First off Movie 43 lies straight into the eyes of its audience. It barely even can be considered a film with it’s thin, on the surface plot; it’s more a matter of convenience that it is allowed into cinemas. It more honestly resembles 11 bad ideas that didn’t make it onto Saturday Night Live for that simple reason: they’re bad. Then why, if even the brainless duo behind Meet the Spartans and Vampire Sucks could work out how bad the script was, did so many decide to star in 11 debased, career damaging shorts? To blow of some steam? To exercise their funny bone?

Supposedly the reason lies with Farrlley and his partner Charlie Wessler. Jackman (who recorded his segment nearly four years ago) signed onto the project after he and Wessler met at a wedding. Studios became interested and so did other stars before you knew it Movie 43 didn’t seem like such a bad project to be apart of. Some had more sense, such as George Clooney telling the duo “No fucking way” and from the start Richard Gere tried to escape, but the production just moved to fit his schedule. Peter Farrely has even elaborated on this stating that "They clearly wanted out! But we wouldn’t let them”. A passion project turned passionless by the stars who, all the time, knew better.

The only plus side is that audiences have seemed to feel the same, with the film disappointing at the box office. However, none of this matters to studios when your film only cost around $6 million. It’s a safe investment for studios and within a few months will easily make its money back. So far audiences have clearly stayed away, with the film making a meager $4 million dollars at opening weekend in America. It’s a sign that maybe the creators, some of whom we have to thank for minor comedy classics, will take note that we have simply moved on.

The last thing to note is that there is one amusing story that looked like it had some thought put into it. A short called Machine Kids played out as a faux commercial for the prevention of cruelty against children who live in Machines. Lasting at only 1 minute in length, it’s the only highlight in a film that still finds the idea of defecation funny. It is also the only part that resembles a conventional narrative, meaning that it has a beginning, middle and end. It’s even able to squeeze in a punch line by the end.  No one said comedy was easy but no one said you should forget every rule in which your genre was built on.  So here’s a film which understands little of the principles of what makes it genre work, a film inhabited by actors who knew better from the very beginning and, thankfully, not being seen by audiences who have already taken the hint.

Spring Breakers (2013)

Talking about my Generation, for better or for worse

Spring Breakers (2013)

The cast of Spring Breakers 

Spring Break has become synonymous in American pop culture, where college “kids” are let lose with no responsibility. Their week is filled with the taste of liquor and each other, a time in which they can escape reality and forget that real life is just around the corner. Harmony Korines “Spring Breakers” wants to escape reality not just temporarily but forever. Nothing about the film seems like it could be real, often simulating an extravagant lifestyle promoted by MTV in the 90’s.

Beginning promptly where most Spring Breaks do, Korine exaggerates a lavish celebration of excess, with men pouring whatever they can find onto whatever t-shirt or naked body they come across. Aptly the film continues by showing two students Candy and Brit (played with reckless relish by Vanessa Hudgen’s and Ashley Benson) in a lecture, bored and insinuating a sex act on a sheet of paper with a penis drawn on it. With its willingness to delve deep into the party, these scenes perfectly introduce us to what Korine has in store, with Cotty (Rachel Korine) and Faith (Selena Gomez) joining in the tale, which eventually leads them to James Franco’s Gangster rapper Alien, and hoping that the party will last “forever”.  Spring Breakers has been described as being about living in the moment, a physical impossibility, but Korine takes every opportunity to make this nightmarish vision of the American Dream seem just that.

At its best, Spring Breakers works when it flows with the rhythm of the music and care-free lifestyle of drugs, sex and booze, with Korine never grounding the film with a “moral point” and single handedly conforming and breaking the ideas of Laura Mulvey: of women being erotic objects for the characters and audience and having secondary, less interesting roles. In one scene, two of the characters take it in turns to humiliate Alien by making him perform an oral sex act on a gun, showing that in Spring Breaker’s it is the women who have control.  In fact, with Korine being able to delve into the exploitative edge of his subjects (including the audience to an extent), along with actively being able to critique them as well, he has created a nightmarish journey into the down fall of the American dream-a theme not uncommon to American cinema- but a vision that is shown to be as romantic as the tales of Jay Gatsby and as hollow as the dreams of Tony Montana, where the characters begin to believe in their own delusional fantasy of Spring Break “being the most spiritual place in the world”

Like any good night, the ending is never as good as the beginning. Scenes seemingly drag on repeat in an attempt to re-create the styling’s of a generic pop video, but little of it grabs your attention longer than a three minute music video. For fans of the director’s earlier work, most notably Gummo (1999) and Trash Humper’s (2009),will see this has disconcertingly conventional. However, with the use of talented cast, including an unexpectedly confident performance from Selena Gomez, and a soundtrack helmed by Skrillex, “Spring Breakers” is Korine’s most fully realized and most satisfying film, actively critiquing the culture which it is also conforming to.