Harmony Korine Has Turned "Florida Man Fantasy" Into Future Filmmaking with ‘Aggro Dr1ft'
Like a bullet to the face, cinema has found a new opening.
Dear Moviegoers,
It may be impossible for me to rate Aggro Dr1ft on my standard zero to five scale, or any traditional scale for that matter. Harmony Korine’s third trek (after Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum) into the soulful depths of the ever-memed “Florida Man” label - reserved for males who do wild & crazy things in the Southern state - is a one-of-a-kind movie for modern times, and perhaps a teaser for what’s to come for cinema sooner than later. Simply put, I’m just not ready to accept that Aggro Dr1ft exists, and I’m not prepared to fully comprehend what that means.
But…I’ll try.
The film is, from what I can gather, a battle of two demon-willed killers on the extreme ends of the “badass” spectrum. One is a grizzled middle-aged Miami hitman who spends his time inner monologuing and directly spouting pseudo-philosophical statements about life, love, and death, in between murdering wealthy gangsters and hugging his wife and children. The other is a masked body-builder type who kidnaps women, hangs around with a group of machete-holding little people, and air-humps a katana across his mansion. He too talks a lot, mostly to himself, and with semi-intellectual thought but vulgar vernacular expression.
It’s “An assassin’s work is never done.” “I came for my money. For my money. I came for my money.” “Love. Love. Love. Love.” vs. “Dance, dance, bitch!” “I smell you!” “Why can’t you kill me? You are a coward!”
Yes, these are indeed “Florida Men.”
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More than them, feels like a “Gamer-Gate” to hell. Director Harmony Korine, always the provocative amateur auteur, shot Aggro Dr1ft with thermal camera lenses, bringing uncontrollable temperatures of colors and various kinds of compositions to the screen. There might be intended meaning or meanings to these images beyond their vibrancy, but more or less it’s at least or at most a serendipitous gimmick. Animations and digital face filters are added on top of everything to fully realize this vision, which I at first speculated was a test run at bringing Harmony’s concept of video gaming to what we currently call cinema. This makes sense, as the film does act like the great N64 game Goldeneye, with characters that behave like empty avatars who merely exist for the protagonist’s arc to complete. Of course, that game is light-years behind what games are now, so whatever Harmony Korine is thinking of implementing, is already a generation or so old - as he is too.
Or…does he have his finger on the pulse of video app user interests and attention spans? If so, this movie could be a brilliant exercise in a new kind of filmmaking. What would it be called? How would it be formatted? Given how movies are viewed in clips and remixed into memes over the course of minutes or even seconds, on phones, Aggro Dr1ft (aggressive drifting to a new cinema?) may have opened a window that can never be closed. Or…did it merely climb through an already opened one? As a “movie,” Aggro Dr1ft is almost egregious. With video game logic that’s made for vertical viewing, clip cutting, and social sharing, Aggro Dr1ft could be either prophetic or historical in some fashion. Or a time capsule. OR a nightmare.
Is Aggro Dr1ft a headache or is it hypnotic to watch? And does the story matter when your own eyes are rolled back into your head? I’m flabbergasted by everything in this movie but also impressed by its aggression to the positive sensibilities of visual aesthetics and general expectations of what movies are and can be. An ugly affair. 3/5 (rating updated from n/a)
Aggro Dr1ft is now available for digital purchase exclusively on edglrd.com.