The Beach Bum

I wish this movie was an hour shorter. The pastel and neon dizzying hedonism is artfully directed. However, when the film's pace begins to slow, it's like the lights coming on in a club. The characters then become annoying and boring, the plot holes more obvious, and the movie excruciatingly boring. The end is an interesting homage to KLF.

How much you like or dislike this movie depends on how much you're into Matthew McConaughey and Harmony Korine making their Cheech and Chong/Hunter S Thompson flick (well, Thompson but as a poet and more The Dude than Raoul Duke). This is funky, loose, crazy, and dumb, but often wildly funny. I dont know if Korine is going for a terribly deep message, and thats ok! It veers into mania and real darkness and terror, and it is legitimately shocking because he's got his chops as a provocateur (in part because Debie, for all his filters, has a sense of naturalism alongside his director), but the whole experience is riveting. It's his most "conventional" movie in that it isn't aggressively full of oddities, but that doesn't mean it doesn't dance enough there to be what it is. I knew at times I shouldn't be laughing, or at least questioned it, and I think I can see someone coming to it and not having any of it. I wouldn't be mad if someone told me this got on their nerves - like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it'll either hit you or it won't. For me, I dug McConaughey (how much this is how he is deep down and how method or who knows what for it, don't care, I was equally charmed and repulsed and couldn't look away) and I dig seeing Martin Lawrence, as the world's greatest dolphin tour guide, make a quasi comeback in one of the more insane comic set pieces I've ever seen. It keeps you on your toes and doesn't let you know how to feel about the shenanigans go down. Soundtrack is an all-timer (give or tair a Creed song).

This movie is just a whole new level of failure, no story, no script, nothing funny at all and it's utterly boring, I had to live the movie theater after 30 mins after trying to convince myslef that I drove all the way there and paid the money ! I could've filmed a way better movie with my iPhone and a $10 bill ! P.S. I was the last one to leave the movie theater & it wasn't even halfway through !

This movie is beautifully broken. It is strange, disjointed and like trying to recollect the events after a 10 day binged on the beach. It's wild, weird and very pretty in its own way. A complete mess that somehow makes sense. I definitely recommend sticking through it at least once.

Not sure why or how Matthew McConaughey thought it's a good idea to star in this movie. Well maybe his acting was decent even for such worse than mediocre film, but he could find better roles to show off his talents. The movie was boring, without any meaningful plot or idea, I am liberal person but this was too much and the way of life that was depicted in the movie should not be encouraged and idealized. Do not waste your time on this film!

Another post-irony prank. Remember in Spring Breakers how there was this trace of conscience behind it? Just enough to see it at social critique as the girls gradually drop out and return back to humanity or face the consequences of their actions, bringing forth some accountable artist at work behind it. Beach Bum hints at avenues where it might go there with the daughters tiredness and stoicism, the ex-wife's fate, and his legal repercussions; but any traces of lessons, growth or consequences are stomped to pieces moments later. Korine's artist commentary is strangely hidden in its excess. Every one of my audience walked out. It's so gleefully immoral that in this universe he's rewarded with the highest accolades society can offer because nothing matters. "He just makes me so crazy." Constantly it makes fun of any kind of real authenticity people can have between each other. It's sarcastic Terrence Malick. It don't care about nothing. A canary in the cold mine in late stage capitalism where one has these infinite resources and distribution, to make fun of god. The court jester throws out his inhibition to mock the king, laughing while getting hanged for it. Problem with both this and Spring Breakers is they become the real deal, actual culture in the process of their critique. While works like this you can only see the meaning in the opposite. So the film's function seems to be mocking its own audience and their motives to see it in the first place. Think of the performance art as the juggle of financing, banking, courting the industry to make this at all, reflecting the machine's decay against itself. You could hate getting dragged through the mud but it's pretty much the definition of iconoclast. Korine said, "These films mean nothing to me and everything." As in it's his way of chipping away and bringing down the structure from within. Its existence is an act in radical accelerationism. The end of the empire. collapse, civil war, the global digital juggernaut paradise-hell. The ones not concerned with the world around them move the same direction except within delight. Then the moral frame missing unlocks its true motive in reflecting the surrounding culture at war. Individual to a satiric extreme; laissez-fair 'life is fun, have a laugh, there's Moondog in all of us', while really believing the opposite. Bum is a pejorative. The film's conscience is not missing but inherent, and all the 'endearing' and 'feel good,' despite its endless evils and debauchery, are maybe being fooled by Moondog's charm, which might have been its actual prank.

There is literally no plot to this movie and I cant believe Matthew took on a role like this. Zac Efron also comes out for .5 seconds and is never to be seen or talked about again? I'm mad I wasted time watching this 💀