“I didn’t want to be susceptible to something happening again and losing two years,” Korine said. Four weeks before production, the financiers pulled out. Complications with Foxx arose early on after Idris Elba replaced him, Del Toro landed a role in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” that threw off the shooting schedule. Korine imagined it as his version of “Oldboy,” and with Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures behind it, he rounded up a cast of A-listers headed by Jamie Foxx and Benicio del Toro. When the former friend breaks loose, he goes on a revenge-fueled rampage. That was going to be “The Trap,” an action-packed epic about a pair of robbers who part ways when one is arrested and the other becomes a famous hip-hop artist by stealing his incarcerated pal’s style. After “Spring Breakers” rejuvenated Korine’s auteur status, grossing more than three times its $5 million budget and winning him new fans, he pounced on the opportunity to bring Florida’s underbelly to a larger audience. Moondog represents the first Korine protagonist completely at peace with his surroundings, no matter how much they threaten to collapse on top of him. He roams from sexual trysts to gate-crash his daughter’s wedding, and perpetually smokes up with his supportive rapper buddy Lingerie (Snoop Dogg, essentially playing himself). “The Beach Bum” digs deeper into that candy-colored milieu: While “Spring Breakers” centered on teenage girls liberated by a ludicrous outlaw (James Franco), McConaughey’s Moondog is the outlaw who liberated himself. “Spring Breakers” clarified Korine’s attraction to the fantasy of living on the edge, with his winding portrait of a Disneyfied cast discovering a new side of themselves in a deranged spring break that turns criminal. With the 2009 eerie vaudevillian found-footage experiment “Trash Humpers,” Korine took his first stab at ludicrous characters energized by insane antics. In 2007, he sobered up and made “Mister Lonely,” about a commune of celebrity impersonators struggling to confront their true selves. “Gummo” and “Julien-Donkey Boy” brought a melancholic lyricism to his angry, disturbed Tennessee loners. As a filmmaker, Korine turned that persona inside out across an expansive canvas of empty parking lots and grimy living rooms, merging a Southern Gothic aesthetic with surreal flourishes. In the wake of “Kids,” the media turned Korine into a rebel caricature, a rambunctious 19-year-old punk who gave cryptic interviews to David Letterman and traipsed about with troublemakers like David Blaine and Chloe Sevigny, Korine’s girlfriend at the time. This is a throughline in Korine’s career: Ostracized by society and indifferent to its broader concerns, riotous jokers invent their own rules. The character’s wild, and it’s kind of a cosmic vision of America, more of a celebration than an indictment.” “Maybe some people will see it that way, because of all the debauchery, but it’s really joyous. “This movie’s not really super dark,” Korine said, as McConaughey and Efron marched to another setup. He said the exuberant backdrop opened up new artistic possibilities. Eventually, he rebooted his lifestyle in Miami, where he has settled down with his wife, two children, and a community of creatives hip to Florida’s relaxed vibe. It doesn’t take much to connect the dots with Korine’s own messy trajectory, which found him recovering from a drug-fueled meltdown in the late ’90s by careening from New York to Europe and then back to hometown of Nashville. ![]() As Moondog, McConaughey is a gleeful, vulgar hedonist who roams Miami and Key West with a typewriter, delivering romantic poems at grimy bars while coasting on the support of his wealthy wife (Isla Fischer), who delights in his carefree existence. “Spring Breakers” was the gateway drug “The Beach Bum” is the first full-fledged Harmony Korine movie for the masses. The movie’s arrival at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival, where it will have its world premiere ahead of a March 29 release from Neon and Vice Studios, marks the end of a very long journey. With “The Beach Bum,” the 46-year-old filmmaker continues to advance a nearly 30-year trajectory that finds his loopy, prankish storytelling expanding its reach into popular culture. Ever since he transitioned from child-prodigy status with his screenplay for “Kids” to his freewheeling directorial debut “Gummo” in 1996, Korine has followed the dictum of what he calls “mistakist art,” capturing the strange alchemy of eccentric outsiders.
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