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.”

Terry Richardson is a world-famous, 47-year old fashion photographer and he probably has the best job in the world for a guy. Sure, he’s been accused of sexually exploiting young models in the past, but those models and the equally famous fashion designers have almost always come to his defense. Andif he was, in fact, a creepy ol’ pervert, models and actresses would probably stop agreeing to put on his trademark eyeglasses and give him the thumbs up after each shoot.

His latest subject is 20-year old Spring Breakers star Selena Gomez, whom Richardson shot for the April issue of Harper’s Bazaar. I really only know three things about Gomez:

1. She’s the star of Spring Breakers, in theaters now.
2. She sang that “Love you like a love song” song and the lyrics kill my brain cells at a terrifying pace every time I even think about them.
3. She used to date Justin Bieber, who currently seems to be teetering on meltdown, while Gomez appears poised to break out as a big(ger) star.

It certainly can’t hurt her chances that people go nuts over Richardson’s photo shoots, and these trademark shots of flannel and nerd glasses – previously seen on our dear friend Kate Upton – are probably about to be posted everywhere. So it’s safe to say that this is going to be a pretty good weekend for Gomez.

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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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Kool Aid & Nunchuks

Spring Breakers may suffer from the high-expectations problem. I tried to temper my excitement going in, but with new pictures of nubile girls in bikinis and slow-motion trailer footage of James Franco with an AK going around the internet every day, it was hard. I so much love the idea that the guy from Kids partnered up with Dicknose Franco to film an over-the-top teeny-bopper panty party of exploited former Mouseketeers that I don’t know that the actual movie could ever hope to live up to it.

The first thing you should know going in is that Spring Breakers is not a movie that progresses much past the initial idea. You know how they repeat “Spring Breeeak” about 15 times in the trailer? The movie is exactly like that, just… more. I didn’t count, but I’d estimate they repeat “Spring Break” about 250 times. To be fair, it sounds really cool the way James Franco says it. Spriiiiing breaaaaak. Spring breeeak, y’all. Spring break fa evaaa. Point being, it’s not a movie you should go into looking for character development. It’s an extended visual joke, a partly satirical celebration of shallowness, materialism, and decadence. It feels more like a visual art installation adapted to a feature rather than a feature in its own right. It can feel like Harmony Korine stuffing newspapers into a feature hat so it’ll fit on Spring Breakers‘ little head, and at times you really notice the newspaper. The characters repeat the same things over and over. The editor must have worn the plastic shell off the button for “gun cocking sound effect.” And I’m pretty sure Spring Breakers breaks the South Park movie’s record for most uses of the word “f*ck.” As I heard someone say on the way out of the theater, “I felt like I was trapped in a music video I didn’t want to be in.”

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If I’ve learned anything in all of these years on this crazy spinning rock, it’s that the Internet is a place of many, many, many, many (a million times more) different tastes, and rather than try to understand them all, I should just accept most of them. That’s why when I fell into a Deviant ART wormhole the other day and ended up browsing through something called “morphs” before taking a strange turn into Fat Hollywood, I just said, “F*ck it” and rolled with it. Pun sort of intended.

I don’t really know how to describe this strange exercise in photoshop other than by pointing at the banner pic of an obese Megan Fox and saying, “That.” Basically, from what I can tell, there are a lot of people out there who appreciate the true beauty of some of Hollywood’s most famous and talented actresses, but they’d prefer them to have a little more meat on their bones.

To each his own is what I say, because life is short and we should enjoy whatever makes us happiest. At least that’s a new philosophy I’m trying to embrace these days. So I gathered some of the morphs and FAToshops (trademark pending) of my favorite gorgeous actresses so that we could all see their beauty from a new, well-rounded perspective.

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