I saw Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s perverse exploitation art film, with five bears and a couple hundred teen-agers who thought they were seeing a Tarentino-fied Where the Boys Are. That said, I doubt any of those kids have ever heard of Where the Boys Are, the 1960 film starring George Hamilton and Yvette Mimieux, but they definitely know the genre: college girls go to Florida on spring break and hilarity ensues. It’s not the kids’ fault they were wrong. The trailer for Spring Breakers makes it seem to exist in that somewhat beloved genre, just with added guns and a sleazy white rapper played by James Franco. The gays I went to see Spring Breakers with knew that they were going to see something else; we knew that Harmony Korine wrote Kids and wrote and directed Gummo, two of the most perversely exploitative art films of the 1990s. We were actually hoping to be horrified by the wrongness of the movie, and the kids in theater were simply surprised by how horrifying, pornographic, disturbing, and weirdly funny Spring Breakers is. To say that the movie is bad is true, but that’s too straightforward. It’s too effective – too deliberately funny, titillating, and discomfiting – to be just be bad. It’s also a little bit brilliant. Continue…