7 May 16-22, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | H armony Korine is out of his element. He’s in London for the opening of his new art show at Hauser & Wirth, and he seems a bit lost. “What is this park? I dunno what the fuck this is, it’s just green, it’s got grass.” The leafy expanses of London — Grosvenor Square, to be precise — are just about as far from the sweltering Miami climes of Miami as one can get, vibes-wise at least. Korine has made his home in Florida since 2015, moving between Palm Beach and Mi- ami, where he now lives and keeps a studio in the Design District. “It’s probably the only place that I could imagine living,” the director says. “I moved here with my family a decade ago, I didn’t re- ally know anybody at the time. But I just loved the way it looks; I loved the way it felt — the sky, the sunsets, the ocean, the geography. The fact that it was, in some ways, so inscru- table. And the clash of cultures; the mix of high and low. I always just felt like Florida, but Miami in particular was, I guess it’s part of America, but it feels like its own world.” Korine has truly become a creature of the Sunshine State, and his recent trilogy of Flor- ida-set films could form a kind of conceptual saga about the three ages of Florida Man. Spring Breakers, released in 2012, reflects reckless adolescence, depicting the Tampa coastline as a debauched paradise of eternal youth and shameless criminality. He crested into adulthood with 2019’s The Beach Bum, following a scumbag troubadour (Matthew McConaughey) who should’ve left the Par- rothead party boat a while ago as he gallivants around the Florida Keys. Now, we come to old age in the strangest episode yet in Korine’s Florida saga, his new film Aggro Dr1ft. Except, it isn’t exactly a film, and it’s not exactly in Florida. Soaked in lurid colors thanks to a couple of sophisticated in- frared cameras, Miami — its skyscrapers and causeways, its boats and bayside mansions and slums, even one of the Stiltsville houses — becomes the Broken City, a “tropical dysto- pia” where gangs and assassins (one played by Travis Scott) do battle with demon lords and guns are as plentiful as big-booty bitches. Except one assassin, BO (Jordi Mollá), is bet- ter than the rest, and he lets you know it through incessant, glowering narration about his skills, the family that he protects, and other thuggishly masculine ramblings. Fans of director and screenwriter John Milius (“a real hero of mine,” acknowledges the direc- tor) will note how closely the world of the Broken City hews to the brutal, lawless realms he conjured in Conan the Barbarian and Apocalypse Now. In fact, the film almost feels like a futuristic Conan, full of brutish warriors and lascivious wenches, of bloodlust and, well, regular lust. Aggro Dr1ft is less of a narrative film than it is a visual experience, a collection of scripted events not unlike cutscenes in video games. Characters move and speak in repetitive ways as if they’re going through idle animations. The infrared cinematography gives the actors and props, like BO’s Corvette, an artificial quality that makes them resemble computer- generated models. All this is intentional. Korine and his team at the creative studio EDGLRD, which produced the film, were interested in exploring the aesthetics of gaming and how they might be applied to a non-interactive medium like film. The result is something that fuses aspects of both mediums and arguably creates something apart from either. Photo by O$ REEL GENIUS by Douglas Markowitz >> p8 Harmony Korine talks about his latest film and life in Miami’s Design District.
