DTF Disney girls love pianists.

I enjoyed Spring Breakers, but I wouldn’t necessarily argue strenuously with someone who thought it was just stupid (whether it being stupid on purpose invalidates that criticism is a discussion for another time). I think Harmony Korine is more like the weird kid we pay to eat bugs (and I will happily pay him to eat bugs) than some super genius holding a mirror up to society’s ills or whatever. But this new poster for Spring Breakers (courtesy of those nerds at Indiewire) does a great job highlighting the incontrovertible: compelling imagery. To paraphrase Alien, LOOK. AT THAT SHIT. It could be easily be argued that Spring Breakers is more about production design than plot, character development, story, parody, or cultural critique, but it’d be hard to argue that that’s not some good-ass production design. And even if it’s a dumb movie, I’d say an artistic medium is much healthier and more relevant when it still gives itself the freedom to be silly.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m looking forward to the deleted scene where they make fun of that fat guy with the huge penis until he gets a boner.

[Indiewire]

I’ve posted some of the videos here before (and they’re all below the cut if you want to check them out on your lunch break), but Spring Breakers director Harmony Korine used to be something of a regular on Dave Letterman’s show. Korine’s appearances were a perfect example of what made Letterman so relevant back then – that he’d interview cult personalities like Harmony Korine, and just revel in their weirdness. You rarely got Cameron Diaz holding forth on how she is or isn’t like her character in Knight and Day, for instance. Korine appeared three times between 1997-1998, but never since. Last night, James Franco was Letterman’s guest, and Franco pressed Letterman on why Korine had been banned from the show. Presumably just to get Dave to stop asking what Selena Gomez’s panties smell like.

Letterman played coy, pretending not to remember the three interviews, but then asked Franco to tell him what he had heard about the mysterious incident. Franco responded that Korine told him he was banned for pushing Meryl Streep backstage, but “he said he was a little out of it…Harmony is a very sane guy now, a great artist and great person to work with, but I think he had a period where he was going a little off the rails, so maybe he was on something that night.”

Now seems like as good a time as any to revisit the “unreleased projects” section of Harmony Korine’s Wikipedia page:

Fight Harm: Korine originally intended to follow up Gummo with a short-lived project known as Fight Harm, filmed by illusionist David Blaine. It comprised footage of Korine engaging random people in actual street fights. In these he followed rules of always provoking the fight and continuing until threat of death. Korine, who often said he would die for the cinema, hoped to make a cross between a Buster Keaton vehicle and a snuff film, but after only six fights, he was hospitalized and forced to abandon the project.

Jokes: Jokes is an unfinished three-part film written by Harmony Korine. The three chapters – Easter, Herpes and Slippers – were to be each directed by different directors, one of which was Gus Van Sant.

What Makes Pistachio Nuts? Prior to Mister Lonely Korine had written a story about a pig named Pistachio. The film was to take place during a race war in Florida and have a boy who would saddle the pig, put adhesive on its feet, climb up walls and throw molotov-cocktails. “It was going to be my masterpiece,” Korine comments. The script burnt in a fire and Korine spent $11,000 trying to recover it from his computer. He reportedly retrieved one sentence: “The speech is pointless; the finger is speechless.”

Point being, if Harmony Korine was entirely sane, he wouldn’t have a career.

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Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s 90-minute Girls Gone Wild music video, is currently tearing up the specialty box office in advance of its wider release, earning $90,000 per theater in New York and LA over the weekend. While it’s pretty obvious why Harmony Korine would want wholesome-famous Disney babes to star in his extended riff on naughty coed psuedo-porn, it’s little less obvious why those Disney babes would agree. In Selena Gomez’s case, she tells E! News, her mom urged her to do it. And if you’re a young actress coming up in Hollywood, you should definitely listen to your crazy stage mom. I let my mom determine all my career decisions too, but only because I live in her basement.

“I wasn’t scared. I definitely wanted to do this,” Gomez told reporters of deciding to shed her wholesome Disney image. “I thought it would be a great opportunity for me, and Harmony [Korine, the director] explained the movie perfectly and that’s the reason why [I chose to do the film].”

“I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into but while we were there, it was incredible to create and to play and it was liberating,” she continued at the Saturday, March 16 press junket.

But Gomez told E! News that despite any uncertainty she had initially, her mother was always one of her biggest supporters.

“She loves this kind of vibe,” she said. “She’s super into indie movies and indie directors … I think it was more of her pushing me and being like, you should go for it.” [USWeekly/ENews]

Whoa whoa whoa, slow down, you mean to tell me that a former child actress who started doing Disney Channel shows when she was 12 has a mom who pushes her into possibly-exploitive career decisions?? I can only express my reaction to this news .gifficly.

I just don’t know how to process this information. Selena Gomez’s mom’s name, incidentally, is “Mandy Teefey.”

Ta da, it’s your invisible ticket.

The box office chugged along unremarkably this weekend, with a series of films no one much cared about doing middling business. Hopefully I’ve already hooked you with this lede. Oz is doing okay business, but it’s not the kind of Alice in Wonderland-style success Disney was hoping for. Meanwhile, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone was either far from incredible or failed to make magic at the box office, depending on which hack headline you prefer. At $10.3 million, it opened half-again lower than even Semi Pro ($15.1 million), and made just a third of Blades of Glory’s opening ($33 million) on the same weekend in 2007 – thanks to BoxOfficeMojo for that thoroughly damning comparison. And that was all while side splitting and crowd pleasing its way to a rousing C+ Cinemascore. Jack Reacher, John Carter, Burt Wonderstone – hey, maybe stop naming movies after the lead character now.

I’m not sure studios are capable of making a decent comedy anymore. Every non-indie gets focused-grouped to hell, and running all your jokes by Joe Sixpack and Darla Diabetes first is a sure-fire way to ruin them. My favorite part of the Burt Wonderstone trailer was where they illustrated lackluster audience enthusiasm by using actual cricket sound effects. WE MADE A JOKE, DID YOU CATCH THAT, AMERICA? But for every Burt Wonderstone there’s an Identity Thief, 2013′s second-highest-grossing movie behind Oz, despite even worse reviews than Wonderstone. And if you’re only thinking short-term profit and not long-term health of the medium, that’s a win. It’s dumb. Come on, studio people, you’re going to be replaced in 18 months anyway, you might as well make movies you enjoy. It’s working for Megan Ellison.

1. Oz: The Great and Powerful (Disney) – $42 million ($144 mil. total)
2. The Call (Sony) – $17 million
3. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (Warner Bros.) – $10.3 million
4. Jack The Giant Slayer (Warner Bros.) – $6 million ($54 mil. total)
5. Identity Thief (Universal) – $4.6 million ($124 mil. total)
6. Snitch (Lionsgate/Summit) – $3.5 million ($37 mil. total)
7. 21 and Over (Relativity) – $2.7 million ($22 mil. total)
8. Silver Linings Playbook (The Weinstein Company) – $2.5 million ($125 mil. total)
9. Escape From Planet Earth (The Weinstein Company) – $2.4 million ($52 mil. total)
10. Safe Haven (Relativity) – $2.4 million ($67 mil. total) [Indiewire]

The one bright spot on the weekend was Spring Breakers, which opened in New York and LA, where it earned an impressive $90,000 per theater for Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures and distribution partner A24. That’s good enough per-screen average for 22nd all time. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that America loves art films. The people have spoken loud and clear, saying “we want a thought-provoking critique of crass commercialism!” Right? I mean that’s the only explanation. It could only be that or the underage tits.

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In the past I’ve done these photo diary posts for Comic-Con and Sundance, so I thought, why not do another one for SXSW? That’s way easier than coming up with something new! And for you, it’ll be just like you’re here, but without any of the good parts. So anyway, here goes. Above, you can see the placard for the Vimeo Theater panel entitled, “A Conversation with Matthew McConaughey,” which didn’t turn out quite as amazing as I’d hoped, mainly due to a distinct lack of shirtlessness or talk of borrowed hoodies. But it was still unmissable for obvious reasons. We’ll get to all that in a second, but in the meantime – is this not some of the most intriguing signage ever?! Controversial, but I say yes.

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