The Beach Bum. (15.)
Directed by Harmony Korine.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Stefania LaVie Owen, Jonah Hill, Martin Lawrence, Zac Efron and Jimmy Buffet. 94 mins.
Korine's follow up to Spring Breakers is another ode to American excess. It's more boobs and bums and beer and bongs and weed and luxury homes and panoramic Florida seascapes. Previously there has been no inbetween for characters in a Harmony Korine films: they are either low lives or high rollers. In this one McConaughey is both.
The role of Moondog is one where Mumbles McConaughey doesn't have to worry about people not understanding what he's saying, the incoherent slur is built it. The part is basically a self portrait: Moondog is a fun loving, bongo playing, free agent much like McConaughey. The bonus is playing himself but as a genius; a great poet and writer who is part Bukowski, part Hunter S and part Lebowski, who spends his time ambling around Miami and the Florida Keys entertaining and antagonising everybody he meets. He is peeing, shagging and puffing away his gifts. Pick a vice and he'll gerund away his talent on it. Luckily he's also obscenely rich, married to a writer (Fisher) who is worth a fortune and loves the old lush dearly, even though she is putting out for Snoop Dogg while he is away cavorting with ladies on the beach front.
The Beach Bum is a ramshackle good time, full of sex and excess and humour and sunny dispositions. Moondog says he is a reverse paranoiac, he believes the world is conspiring to make him happy. He is an accident waiting, surprisingly patiently, to happen but when it does even this doesn't lower his high too much. The film's great virtue is its refusal to be pushed into anything too dramatic. It doesn't seem to have much of a purpose other than to propose the radical proposition that great art doesn't have to be made out of great suffering, which is a point worth making. Mostly though it just breezes along feeling good about the world.
Directed by Harmony Korine.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Stefania LaVie Owen, Jonah Hill, Martin Lawrence, Zac Efron and Jimmy Buffet. 94 mins.
Korine's follow up to Spring Breakers is another ode to American excess. It's more boobs and bums and beer and bongs and weed and luxury homes and panoramic Florida seascapes. Previously there has been no inbetween for characters in a Harmony Korine films: they are either low lives or high rollers. In this one McConaughey is both.
The role of Moondog is one where Mumbles McConaughey doesn't have to worry about people not understanding what he's saying, the incoherent slur is built it. The part is basically a self portrait: Moondog is a fun loving, bongo playing, free agent much like McConaughey. The bonus is playing himself but as a genius; a great poet and writer who is part Bukowski, part Hunter S and part Lebowski, who spends his time ambling around Miami and the Florida Keys entertaining and antagonising everybody he meets. He is peeing, shagging and puffing away his gifts. Pick a vice and he'll gerund away his talent on it. Luckily he's also obscenely rich, married to a writer (Fisher) who is worth a fortune and loves the old lush dearly, even though she is putting out for Snoop Dogg while he is away cavorting with ladies on the beach front.
The Beach Bum is a ramshackle good time, full of sex and excess and humour and sunny dispositions. Moondog says he is a reverse paranoiac, he believes the world is conspiring to make him happy. He is an accident waiting, surprisingly patiently, to happen but when it does even this doesn't lower his high too much. The film's great virtue is its refusal to be pushed into anything too dramatic. It doesn't seem to have much of a purpose other than to propose the radical proposition that great art doesn't have to be made out of great suffering, which is a point worth making. Mostly though it just breezes along feeling good about the world.
