Movie Nation

It’s an embarrassment of riches this weekend as Hollywood hurls a ton of titles at us to lure us away from March Madness on the TV.

“The Croods” is a pleasant animated surprise, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

“Spring Breakers” will surprise only those showing up who think this “Girls Gone Wild” meets “Set It Off” is a raunchy spring break comedy. Raunchy, yes. All those child starlets (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson) in bikinis, behaving badly, talking dirty. James Franco stirring the pot with them (my interview with him is here).

Not a great script, but artfully made and cleverly dark. Decent reviews for this one.

“Olympus Has Fallen” isn’t the worst Gerard Butler movie of the past five years. A Die Hard in the White House, he gets to spit a couple of pithy one liners and shoot and stab and strangle a lot of terrorists. A Chuck Norris Movie with Gerry in it. Weak reviews for this one.

“Admission” suggests that maybe Tina Fey’s winning streak — honors, hits, Golden Globes hosting glory, Mark Twain prize, success at every turn — is over.

Love that Tina. Just love her. But this is one lovelorn Liz Lemonish turn too many. Mixed to poor reviews or this rom-com about seeing students in a different light when you’re an Ivy League admissions officer and one of the little mediocrities trying to get into your college may be the one you gave up for adoption 18 years before. Will it do any business? I am guessing no.

“The Sapphires” opens in some cities. Adorable, a little cloying, but good enough. Will it catch on? Good reviews across the board on that on.

“Leonie,” about the mother of a famous Japanese American sculptor/landscape artist, hits a couple of cities. New piece of history (for me, anyway), nice sense of place and time and nice Emily Mortimer performance. Not great, but “intriguing.”

“Stoker” opens in Orlando, and somewhat wider nationally — Friday. Edgy, dark, well-acted. Good reviews for that one.

“Murph: The Protector” is a moving documentary about the sort of upstanding, team-oriented young man drawn to the Navy SEALs, and what one has to do to win the Medal of Honor.

“John Dies at the End” finally opens here, at the Enzian. Surreal, silly, very dark horror comedy with Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown in chewy supporting roles.  Not bad at all.

For those who thought the last Bruce Willis movie was a little light on the casualty list, “Olympus Has Fallen” arrives toting the biggest body count since “Die Hard II.”

Bystanders and tourists, soldiers, cops and Secret Service agents fall by the score in a movie about the Unthinkable – a terrorist ground assault on Washington, D.C. Hollywood is providing two such “unthinkable” assaults this year, with “White House Down” due out this summer.

This is “Die Hard in the White House,” with Gerard Butler manfully manning up as Mike Banning, the lone Secret Service Agent survivor after terrorists take over the White House and seize the president and most of the cabinet.

Not without a fight, of course. This president (Aaron Eckhart) boxes. And wait’ll you see the presidential head-butt.

Butler is a former White House detail member, on the outs because of a life-or-death decision he made months ago. When the gunship sweeps over D.C., when ordinary Asian tourists turn out to be terrorists, when innocent garbage trucks turn into tanks, Mike’s the man of the moment – dashing back inside his old stomping grounds, where a mastermind (Rick Yune of “Die Another Day” and “The Man with the Iron Fists”) tells the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (Robert Forster) and Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman), “I am the man in control of your White House.”

Banning is the last agent inside the White House, the only guy who can get to the fortified presidential bunker where the hostages are. He proceeds to stab, shoot and strangle his way through legions of terrorists, quipping in his updates as he shows off his trophies, by phone, to the rest of the government, which can only ask “Is he alive?” about Mike’s latest catch.

“Ask me a serious question.”

Butler is fine in this part, which demands little more of him than an ability to change magazines like he’s done it before. Many times. Mike has skills, which works against this “Die Hard.” This isn’t John McClane, ordinary cop in over his head. Mike Banning has “special forces” on his resume, which robs the picture of some of its suspense.

But there’s pathos here, amid the carnage. A good cast (Melissa Leo is a feisty Secretary of State) does what it can with a tin-eared script, making us care who lives and who dies. An interesting side story – Mike’s wife is a nurse (Radha Mitchell) who deals with the carnage of America’s darkest day in an overwhelmed hospital emergency room.

Better thrillers make more of the whole shaky state of command in such calamities, wavering over terrorist demands, stringing out the suspense and playing up the clock ticking down toward whatever nuclear doomsday awaits should our hero fail. Director Antoine Fuqua (“Shooter”) is plainly dealing with a script that shortchanges all that, and he’s not good enough to overcome that.

For all the bursts of blood, the gunplay and execution-style head-shots that punctuate scores of deaths, it’s hard to see “Olympus Has Fallen” (Secret Service code) as much more than another movie manifestation of a first-person shooter video game. We’ve become a head-shot nation, and our thrillers are the poorer for it.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout

Cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Angela Bassett, Melissa Leo, Rick Yune, Morgan Freeman

Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Creighton Rothenberger and Kartin Benedikt.  A  FilmDistrict release.

Running time: 1:53

All those odd music cues that punctuate the action in Quentin Tarantino movies are catnip to his fans.

But to some of us, an “Ironside Theme” in “Kill Bill” or Jim Croce in “Django Unchained” is just a jarring, take-me-out-of-the-movie in-joke.

And apparently, legendary Italian film score composer Ennio Morricone is one of “us.” He’s called the guy’s use of music incoherent, among other choice damnations, and says he’ll never work with QT again.

Lynne Ramsay was going to follow up her grim, acclaimed “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by teaming with Natalie Portman for the indie drama “Jane Got a Gun.”

Funny thing about that, though. Ramsay didn’t show up. On the first day of shooting.

No word on creative differences or what have you. It just didn’t happen.

So the producers, with cast and crew and locations ready and the meter running, went director shopping. FAST.

Gavin O’Connor, who did “Warrior” and “Miracle” (mixed martial arts, hockey), “rode to the rescue,” according to Deadline.com.

Cold feet, personal issues, creative differences, what have you. It happens. Usually not on the first day of shooting, but it happens.

And as a result, co-star Jude Law has bailed out of the picture. This one is falling apart.

 A movie with the killer title “Rockabilly Zombie Weekend” is making a set of promises to an audience.

It’s going to be a zombie picture, tapping in to horror’s favorite subgenre of the moment.

It’s going to take place over a weekend.

And it’s going to be have a rockabilly twang with a hint of redneck about it.

The Orlando-made “Rockabilly Zombie Weekend” keeps a couple of those promises. But it’s the one it all but ignores, the killer rockabilly hook (Think “Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil”) that could have lifted it above generic.

The premise is solid, Florida’s mania for spraying its citizens for Mediterranean Fruit Flies and West Nile Virus spreading mosquitoes — spraying the citizens get no say about — leads to tragedy.

That’s how the zombie virus gets out, when two Men in Black show up at a cropduster’s business with jugs of mosquito-killing poison. Is this stuff safe, the pilot wants to know? Have they done animal testing and research?

“This IS the research,” a Man in Black (Steven Shea, a producer on the film) blurts out, the best line in the movie.

The spraying starts, and a short time later — ok a LONG time later –ordinary folk start spitting up bile and craving human flesh and brains.

The anchor story is about a rockabilly wedding between Becky (Christina Bach) and Grant (Daniel Baldock). The movie burns a good half hour on the wedding stresses (biker bar mother of the bride, drunken lout stepdad, judgmentally trashy mother of the groom) between these two tattooed and tarted up 20something twangers.

The wedding itself — where the band is Killer Moonshine — is a tepid affair. Until the flesh eating starts. Even that never quite builds to anything terrifying, titillating or fun.

What they rounded up here is a collection of zombie movie conventions. Oh no, the zombies have trashed the hospital! Let’s meet the cynical survivalist biker (J. LaRose, amusing) in the abandoned convenience store, where we go for “supplies.” Who might have the biggest gun collection in town?

But it’s not enough to re-state those conventions with a certain competence.  Director Jaime Velez Soto (“The Whisper Home”) and screenwriter Tammy Bennett have to figure out that “ambition” for a film doesn’t stop at renting a crop duster and a helicopter, and buying every blood-squib in the Southeast. Tone and atmosphere require more than a novel “woozy cam” effect, to show the effects of zombification on the zombiefied.

And you need more out of your cast than good looks, exotic piercings, tattoos and haircuts (Check out the “minister” marrying Grant and Becky, dude must use Miracle Grow on that goatee).

Everybody with a filmmaking Jones figures the best way to do break in is through horror. Get a concept, a title and a script, execute it well enough to look like a movie (production values are VERY good on this one), and maybe it’ll get noticed and sell.

But the vast majority of these — and I see a lot of them — are let down by the script. The plot here isn’t the problem. It’s the duller than “Living Dead” dialogue.

Maybe the inspiration filmmakers take from the George A. Romero example — he made “Night of the Living Dead” on a shoestring — is misplaced. Look to Judd Apatow instead.

On Apatow’s sets, improvisational comics have  a place. And there are improv comics in every town. Apatow’s rule, start with a script, but “the funniest line/best gag gets in” once you’re on the set.  The plot doesn’t change, but the dialogue improves, with the help of the actors.

If you’re calling your movie “Rockabilly Zombie Weekend” you ought to deliver more rockabilly, more rednecks and more fun than this.

MPAA Rating:  Unrated,with graphic zombie violence and suggested sexuality

Cast: Christina Bach, Daniel Baldock, Randy Molnar, J. LaRose, Michelle Elise

Credits: Directed by Jaime Velez Soto, written by Tammy Bennett.

Running time: 1:39

If you want to make a film about a not-so-modern “Stone Age Family,” it helps to start out with a wish list.

“If I was going to see a caveman film, what would I want to see?” asks Kirk Di Micco, co-director of “The Croods.”

“We’ve never seen computer generated cavemen,” says Chris Sanders, the other co-director. “You’ve seen ‘Quest for Fire.’ You’ve seen ‘The Flintstones.’ But this is entirely different. We wanted to do for cavemen what ’28 Days Later’ did for zombies. Our cavemen are very gifted, physically. They can run 40-60 miles per hour, throw rocks huge distances, and hit their targets. But mentally, they have beginner’s minds.

“Tar is way up that list,” says his co-director, Kirk DiMicco. “But nobody had ever animated it. We had to manage a tar pit, and the animation that we used was a simulating of flowing cloth. You see tar, but the movement was mimicking cloth.”

They wanted their Stone Age to have a volcano.

“We have a pyroclastic flow in the film that I’ve never seen the like of before,” Sanders says. “A titanic volcanic collapse that is the final curtain on this world as they knew it. Do I think we outdid Walt (Disney, director of an epic eruption in “Fantasia”)? I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that. You be the judge.”

Di Micco adds that “there are no manmade things in the movie. It’s all nature, all exteriors, and that’s a HUGE undertaking. Just caves and cavemen and forests.”

They based the human characters, voiced by the likes of Oscar winners Nicolas Cage and Cloris Leachman, as well as Emma Stone and Ryan Reynolds, on assorted members of the animal kingdom. It’s a trick Sanders learned from his animators on “Lilo & Stitch,” where the hyperactive alien had the movements of a Florida gecko.

Eep, the Emma Stone cave-teenager, “Her movements are based on a cat’s,” Sanders says. “Grug (her dad, Nicolas Cage) has movements based on a gorilla. Gran’s (Leachman) movements are based on a crocodile, the way they walk. Fanny, the youngest, has movements based on a terrier.”

Yeah, they knew their Dreamworks movie would be compared to Fox’s lucrative “Ice Age” series. The Hollywood Reporter says “The Croods” is too uneven to help it approach that series’ mammoth market share. But its mostly fast-moving roller coaster of kinetic action and its menagerie of fantastic creatures – from cute to menacing – should keep kids entertained.”

And, as critic David Rooney notes, kids will have “no trouble grasping the simple message to face your fears and embrace change.”

That’s what the filmmakers were aiming for, “that take away every modern reference, from society to police, and human nature is still basically the same,” Sanders says. Some, especially the young, embrace change. And some, like the parents and grandparents, resist it.

“It’s a great metaphor, having a guy confronting change when his world is literally changing under his feet,” says De Micco.

That, he adds, went on their “What do we want in our caveman movie?” list. “And it went at the very top.”

When you strip everything away from the story, the modern conveniences, the police, society, the structures that we’re used to, you come down to simple human nature. What are we like, at our most human? What are our relationships and what do they mean?

“We didn’t want the audience to be missing anything, to be disappointed.”

If you want to make a film about a not-so-modern “Stone Age Family,” it helps to start out with a wish list.

“If I was going to see a caveman film, what would I want to see?” asks Kirk Di Micco, co-director of “The Croods.”

“We’ve never seen computer generated cavemen,” says Chris Sanders, the other co-director. “You’ve seen ‘Quest for Fire.’ You’ve seen ‘The Flintstones.’ But this is entirely different. We wanted to do for cavemen what ’28 Days Later’ did for zombies. Our cavemen are very gifted, physically. They can run 40-60 miles per hour, throw rocks huge distances, and hit their targets. But mentally, they have beginner’s minds.

“Tar is way up that list,” says his co-director, Kirk DiMicco. “But nobody had ever animated it. We had to manage a tar pit, and the animation that we used was a simulating of flowing cloth. You see tar, but the movement was mimicking cloth.”

They wanted their Stone Age to have a volcano.

“We have a pyroclastic flow in the film that I’ve never seen the like of before,” Sanders says. “A titanic volcanic collapse that is the final curtain on this world as they knew it. Do I think we outdid Walt (Disney, director of an epic eruption in “Fantasia”)? I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that. You be the judge.”

Di Micco adds that “there are no manmade things in the movie. It’s all nature, all exteriors, and that’s a HUGE undertaking. Just caves and cavemen and forests.”

They based the human characters, voiced by the likes of Oscar winners Nicolas Cage and Cloris Leachman, as well as Emma Stone and Ryan Reynolds, on assorted members of the animal kingdom. It’s a trick Sanders learned from his animators on “Lilo & Stitch,” where the hyperactive alien had the movements of a Florida gecko.

Eep, the Emma Stone cave-teenager, “Her movements are based on a cat’s,” Sanders says. “Grug (her dad, Nicolas Cage) has movements based on a gorilla. Gran’s (Leachman) movements are based on a crocodile, the way they walk. Fanny, the youngest, has movements based on a terrier.”

Yeah, they knew their Dreamworks movie would be compared to Fox’s lucrative “Ice Age” series. The Hollywood Reporter says “The Croods” is too uneven to help it approach that series’ mammoth market share. But its mostly fast-moving roller coaster of kinetic action and its menagerie of fantastic creatures – from cute to menacing – should keep kids entertained.”

And, as critic David Rooney notes, kids will have “no trouble grasping the simple message to face your fears and embrace change.”

That’s what the filmmakers were aiming for, “that take away every modern reference, from society to police, and human nature is still basically the same,” Sanders says. Some, especially the young, embrace change. And some, like the parents and grandparents, resist it.

“It’s a great metaphor, having a guy confronting change when his world is literally changing under his feet,” says De Micco.

That, he adds, went on their “What do we want in our caveman movie?” list. “And it went at the very top.”

 “When you strip everything away from the story, the modern conveniences, the police, society, the structures that we’re used to, you come down to simple human nature. What are we like, at our most human? What are our relationships and what do they mean?

 “We didn’t want the audience to be missing anything, to be disappointed.”

Skip past the lame title and weary Stone Age premise. “The Croods” is the first pleasant surprise of spring, a gorgeous kids’ cartoon with heart and wit, if not exactly a firm grasp of paleontology.

It’s about a family of cave men and women who have survived, unlike their neighbors, by minimizing risk. But risk is how we grow, how we better our lives and achieve great things. That’s just one of the things The Croods learn as their world turns upside down – literally. Earthquakes and volcanoes do tend to upend a neighborhood.

Daddy Grug, hilariously and empathetically voiced by Nicolas Cage, has just one motto, one he reinforces in their cave as he tells stories and animates his lessons on the cave wall.

“Never be NOT afraid. “

His athletic daughter Eep (an energetic Emma Stone) may bristle at that as she invents rock climbing, parkour and assorted other dangerous sports while exploring their limited world. But fear has kept them all – Grug, Eep, mother Ugga (Catherine Keener), lunky brother Thunk (Clark Duke), Gran (Cloris Leachman) and feral baby Sandy (Randy Thom) – alive.

They hide in their cave at night, huddled in a dogpile. They only go out to feed. An epic egg hunt (the creatures in their world have more to do with Dr. Seuss than Darwin) that opens the film shows what they have to go through just to eat. They basically invent football (and the way Fox Sports covers it) with this gonzo chase through the high desert.

But Eep has slipped out at night, lured by a strange light. Let’s call it “Fire.” She’s also lured by the handsome lad who has fire. Let’s call him “Guy,” given a typical wry and sarcastic turn by Ryan Reynolds.

Guy has a sloth he’s tamed and uses as a belt, named “Belt.” “Pets. An animal you don’t eat!” He cooks. You know, because he has fire.

He’s got shoes. For your feet. Eep and Ugga go all Manolo Blahnik on those.

And Guy has a message, which everybody but Grug hears.

“Our world is ending.” The earthquakes and eruptions mean they have to migrate, to move on, because “Tomorrow is a place where things are better.”

The big lug Grug thinks “Ideas are for weaklings,” but he comes around, inventing the “long, slow trip across the country” that will “bring us together, as a family.” Right.

The animation is first rate, even if the cutesy critters bear the hallmarks of co-director Chris Sanders’ “Lilo & Stitch” and “How to Train Your Dragon” – wide, round faces, big cuddly eyes.

Another Sanders touch? Emotion. For all the (mostly weak) wisecracks about Grug wishing his mother-in-law dead, “The Croods” has a warm sense of family, responsibility and letting Dad save face.

And the actors are, to a one, dazzling – getting across emotions and delivering this very visual comedy’s verbal zingers with great timing. Cage, Stone and Keener are naturals at this sort of acting.

“The Croods” aren’t The Flintstones. But mercifully, they aren’t living in the Ice Age, either. That makes the movie about them a welcome 3D cartoon, the first decent kids’ movie of the year.

(Interview: Two “Crood” guys talk about animating the Stone Age)

MPAA Rating: PG for some scary action

Cast: The voices of Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Cloris Leachman, Catherine Keener

Credits: Written and directed by Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco.  A Fox/Dreamworks release.

Running time: 1:33

The most telling image about Navy SEAL Michael Murphy in the new documentary “Murph: The Protector,” is a snippet of video from a high school football game.

Murphy has just caught a pass near the other team’s goal line. He’s being tackled, but it’s not obvious that he’ll go down. But he has the presence of mind and the unselfishness to lateral the ball to a teammate, who then prances into the end zone.

That is very much the picture of Murphy that emerges in this documentary, which relies on the warm memories of family, friends and Navy colleagues to paint a portrait of a true American hero.

He was “the sweetest kid,” “a great swimmer,” always looking out for others, sticking up for the bullied, a team player in everything he ever attempted.

Filmmaker Scott Mactavish uses home movies, interviews, snippets of Navy SEAL training videos and news footage to paint a picture of a life cut short by a sense of duty. Murphy was one of those killed in Afghanistan during Operation Red Wings, a SEAL mission in Afghanistan that went wrong on the ground, and was compounded by the crash of a rescue mission helicopter, leading to the worst day in the history of this “elite of the elite” commando unit.

Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero of J.D. Salinger’s most famous novel, longed to be a “catcher the rye,” an everyday hero who saves children about to go over the cliff to their doom. Michael Murphy, from the way people describe him, actually did just that.

He went to Penn State and was headed toward a career in the law, like his father. But the SEALs held an allure he couldn’t resist. He embraced their fanatical training regimen as he prepared to join up and risked his Vietnam Vet father’s wrath by doing it. He passed muster, became an officer, and when the chips were down, the character that friends and family recognized at an early age came through.

He wore a red patch from his small town’s fire department on his camos, to remind him “where he was from and what he was fighting for.”

Mactavish spends much of the movie serving up saintly banalities about this flesh and blood man. He wasn’t famous, like Pat Tilman, who also earned a documentary about his life and death, so the portrait of his life is necessarily limited to those who loved him. Conspicuous by her absence is his fiancé. But mother Maureen and father Daniel paint a reasonably complete, polished and limited portrait.

Where the film is on surer footing is in recreating the last days of Murphy’s too-short life, the memories he left behind and the tributes that have poured in on him in the years since. It’s the emotional heart of the film and can be wrenching as we recall, with Maureen, a mother’s uncertainty when the phrase “Missing in Action” is given her.

But we remember, even if the film doesn’t revisit it, that early moment on the gridiron when “Murph: The Protector” showed his character, as a teenager. And we’re reminded not just of sacrifice, but of those to whom service is a genuine calling and what that bandied-about word “hero” really means.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material and some language

Cast:The friends, family and colleagues of Lt. Michael P. Murphy

Credits: Written and directed by Scott Mactavish. A Mactavish release.

Running time: 1:17

Get past discussions of artistic intent, of the potential career benefits that the cast and filmmakers might have seen in making “Spring Breakers.”

What it really boiled down to is this.

“None of us had ever experienced Spring Break,” says James Franco. “Really.”

That goes for him, and writer-director Harmony Korine, and former child-stars turned “Spring Breakers” wild girls Ashley Benson, Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens.

“Actors who start their careers early miss some key experiences in life,” Franco confesses. “I didn’t go to prom. Well, I was dating a theater nerd so we went to a theater festival back in Aspen, Oregon instead. I experienced prom, for the first time, on film. Same with spring break. This is my Spring Break. And I was over 30 when I got around to it.”

Franco, 34, is getting around to a lot these days. “Oz, the Great and Powerful” has turned into the year’s first blockbuster, even if his reviews in it aren’t gilding his resume (“unconvincing generally” – New York Magazine, “too callow, too feckless, too much the dude for this role” – Boston Globe). The always-busy Franco will have been in over half a dozen movies this calendar year by the time the champagne pops Dec. 31.

But the noise around “Spring Breakers” is almost deafening, and he is as stunned by that as anyone.

“I had no idea that he was thinking of hiring pop stars. I assumed he would cast some unknowns, maybe even people he found in Florida, once we settled on St. Petersburg as a location. But then, he told me who he was considering. That changed the movie.”

A dark riff on a spring break gone wrong took on added meaning having Disney Channel veterans go through it. Did Franco relish his role, as Alien, a successful gangster and would-be rapper, in “corrupting” the former stars of “Pretty Little Liars,” “High School Musical” and “The Wizards of Waverly Place”?

Oh, Franco chuckles, “They went into it with eyes wide open. They seemed to relish the experience…They bring something more, because of their history, a past. They have a myth about them. And they turned out to be great actresses, and they were so excited and gave so much extra effort because they recognized this as being a chance to be different and to be in something new.”

And for Franco, “Breakers” offered a chance to do much more than sample something he missed back when he was working on “Freak & Geeks,” that beachside bacchanal for college kids. Being the elder of the cast gives him a little perspective on the movie’s bigger themes.

“One review of ‘Kids’ (which Harmony Korine wrote) referred to it as a ‘wake up call to the world.’ To me, that’s a very literal reading of the movie, important because it adds an element of danger and connects to actual experiences people are having. Today. But that’s a very limited reading.

“We didn’t set out to make ‘a cautionary tale,’ or a critique of what spring break has become…Come on. It;s an EXTREME spring break. I highly doubt that any college kids’ spring break experience ended in a bloodbath with automatic weapons. But we do, in this movie, get at the idea that there is a darker side to this uninhibited behavior, this unrestrained event can lead.”

There’s been talk for the better part of a year, a little smack here and there that claims that James Franco based his drawling, hoodlum/rapper/pimped-out Camaro driver “Alien” in “Spring Breakers” on one guy — Houston-based rapper Riff Raff.

A lot of this trash talk has come from Riff Raff himself (pictured above).

I know Franco has answered this before, and he sounds a little annoyed when I ask him about the connection. But hey, it hasn’t gone away.

“I went to a lot of places for Alien. I like Riff Raff a lot. I think what he wants, though, is basically what you’re doing right now. Which is to start a discussion about him. That’s what all this is about, him grabbing attention.

“When we were researching the movie, Riff Raff I don’t think even had a record deal. But Harmony (Korine) sent me a couple of his videos. But he also sent me other peoples’ videos, HUNDREDS of things. Alien is an amalgamation of a lot of guys like that.

I don’t think Riff Raff has seen the film, so he’s basing his opinion that I’m playing him on the look. We’re both white guys with cornrows. It’s not a stretch.

So yeah, I was aware of him, but Harmony was showing me tons of things. And the look? The costume designer and hair people and Harmony were the ones who came up with that. I wouldn’t know where to start, building this guy’s look.

“And the character’s inner life I based on this guy named Dangeruss, and customized him with an accent and everything to make him local.

“I can’t blame Riff Raff. He wants attention. He wants a career. Alien would probably do the same thing.”

Either way, both of these guys were laboring in something close to obscurity before the film came along and stirred up interest in them. So everybody wins, right?

(Roger Moore’s review of “Spring Breakers” is here).