Things brighten up this first weekend of spring, with the arrival of former enfant terrible Harmony Korine’s most accessible movie to date, the cheeky Spring Breakers, in which four co-eds — including a couple of former Disney girls (Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgen) — get their bad on and fall in with what our critic Piers Marchant calls “a pimp-swagging, platinum grilled, fully cornrowed gangsta thug named Alien (James Franco), who sees in this ragged-but-gorgeous rebel foursome, the answer to his most fevered erotic dreams.”
“They crash at his crib a bit, a simple ranch-style house near the water loaded with packets of cash, baggies full of drugs and enough automatic weaponry to make his own armory,” Marchant writes. “Under his careful tutelage, the girls move on from opportunist criminal dabbling to a full-on crime wave, helping spread the word of Alien’s new-found posse with violence and intimidation.”
In other words, its a blast of sunshine announcing the end of a long and dreary winter.
Or maybe not. Our Dan Lybarger definitely got the short straw this week, as he had to sit through the Gerard Butler actioner Olympus Has Fallen — about the best he could say for it is that for a film made in Shreveport and Bossier City it managed to look a lot like Washington, D.C.— and the slight better but still disappointing computer animated film The Croods. (Which might be the best thing Nicolas Cage has done in a while.)
Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full more reviews.