The newest development in Selena Gomez’s career is by far the most insane. According to MTV, she’s going to be working with director Harmony Korine on his next film Spring Breakers. If you don’t know who Gomez is, she’s the sugary sweet teen idol best known either for coming out of the Disney factory of loud-talking and sassy tween actors or for dating a twelve-year-old kid named Justin Bieber. If you don’t know who Harmony Korine is, he’s the certifiable weirdo who’s responsible for directing movies like Gummo and Julian Donkey Boy, films that could be described as shock fodder at best, and pure exploitation at worst. Korine is always digging into the darkest facets of the human psyche and them gleefully shining a spotlight on the sick behavior that he finds. So, you know, this is pretty much a match made in heaven. Spring Breakers is about a group of college kids who rob a restaurant to get money to go on spring break, but eventually wind up jailed and at the mercy of a skeezy drug dealer. According to Gomez, “It’s a different character than I have ever played before. It’s a different kind of vibe I think than people are used to seeing me in. What you’re going to see is more raw, I think. It’s going to be raw and more about acting.” Of course, to Gomez’s young eyes this looks like a chance at credibility, but for us more seasoned film aficionados it looks more [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

You might know Harmony Korine as the writer of Kids, which was a disturbingly frank and exploitive look at urban adolescence. Maybe you know him from his direction of Gummo, a disturbingly frank and exploitive look at poor, white culture in Middle America. Maybe you remember his Julien Donkey Boy, which had Werner Herzog spraying a kid with a hose for five minutes and doing Tai Chi while wearing a gas mask. Or maybe you would even recognize him as the weird little guy who asks Matt Damon if he wants any of his ass in Good Will Hunting. Regardless, Harmony Korine is someone who is constantly exploring the weird, always living on the edge of what society will accept; and now he’s hanging out with James Franco. Uh-oh. So what have these two been coming up with while spending time together? They’ve decided they want to make an art film about street fights that will include a real gang brawl. A New York Post source was quoted as saying, “They are looking to film two actual street gangs doing a fight scene. The twist is they want the two gangs to fight, using real knives. The production team is panicked that they’ll end up with blood, injuries and potentially dead bodies on set.” Somebody should probably separate these two before something bad happens. Or go the other way and have them work on something with Charlie Sheen and Nic Cage that will blow all of our minds.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is a truly unique film by several definitions. Japanese master filmmaker Nagisa Oshima’s first English-language film (and it is worth noting here that much of it is in Japanese) embodies some dense discourses about Japanese identity, yet in many respects this is a film without a nation. But that’s exactly the point, for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence embodies a host of contradictions in terms of how we’re used to experiencing films of its relative ilk: it is a film about war, yet it is never about patriotism or combat; it is a film about an intersection of cultures, yet it never seeks to deliver a message of sameness of common ground; and it is a film about sexual tensions between males, yet homosexuality is never explicitly addressed in a way that would place it fittingly in the canon of “queer cinema.”

Like his films, Harmony Korine himself possesses a spontaneous, incomparable personality. I sat down for a phone interview with the filmmaker last week to talk Trash Humpers, ‘mistakist’ filmmaking, Ricky Martin, Jonas guts film distribution, and the nice rack on the state of Tennessee.

It’s difficult to know exactly what to do with Trash Humpers. It seems irrelevant and futile to take out my critical toolbox and attempt an assessment of character development, story, and visual style for a film that so clearly intends to pursue none of these things.

I’ve always known that there’s something wrong with filmmaker Harmony Korine. If you’ve seen either Mister Lonely or Gummo, you have an idea of what I’m talking about. The talent is certainly there — and so is the weird. Both seem to be coming out in the film he’s brought to SXSW 2010, Trash Humpers.