At this point it?s hard to remember a time when Matthew McConaughey wasn?t a good actor. The McConaissance is now so strong and enduring that travesties like Failure to Launch and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past seem more like bad dreams than things that actually happened. Where do you go after Oscar and Emmy award-nominated turns in Dallas Buyers Club and True Detective? You star in the new Harmony Korine film of course. McConaughey is set to star in Korine?s The Beach Bum, and it already sounds like the movie of the century.
In The Beach Bum McConaughey stars as a funny, larger-than-life stoner named Moondog. That doesn?t sound like too much of a stretch for the dude from Dazed and Confused. We don?t know any other details besides producers and other behind-the-scenes talent. We don?t even know when the film is coming out. So why are we so excited? Well like we said earlier McConaughey is a great actor now. But more importantly, famous maniac Harmony Korine is directing this movie.
If you?re unfamiliar with Harmony Korine?s work that?s understandable. For years his excellent but utterly unwatchable movies have been lurid exercises in bad taste only fit for students of exploitation film. Go try and watch Gummo or Trash Humpers and tell me I?m wrong. He wrote Kids for crying out loud.
But in 2013 an interesting shift happened. Korine took all of his fascination with gutter societies and young people and the shiny, loud emptiness of modern life and actually turned it into a film a person could sit through. Spring Breakers is real movie with real stars and everything, but it?s also undoubtedly a Harmony Korine joint.
I love Spring Breakers. I love its subtle but sharp Gucci Mane racial politics, its accurate depiction of uncomfortable but alluring substance-fueled college party chaos, its violent subversion of its cast of Disney ingénues like Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens (and Korine?s wife), its unbelievable use of neon music video colors and Britney Spears songs and Skrillex remixes, and how it gives James Franco the role of a lifetime as delusional white Florida rapper Alien (aka Riff-Raff). If Moondog is even half as good as Alien cinema will never be the same.
Spring Breakers is the wonderful, terrifying, uplifting, upsetting, beautiful, deeply ugly, profound, and hilarious movie that summarizes a generation?s culture by simultaneously chastising and getting off to it. It proves that moving a tiny bit toward the mainstream can actually improve the work of an underground filmmaker by forcing them to open up their themes to a larger, more impressionable new audience.
So of course I?m excited for The Beach Bum, Korine?s first film since Spring Breakers, unless one of his other gestating projects takes shape before then. Matthew McConaughey is just a bonus.
