A matter of oppressive style

Rating: Null/10 (22 January 2014)

I'm into and follow these films, not necessarily for what they are as cinema, but as an arena where youthful imagination is being shaped.
I wrote extensively on the first, most things also pertain here. The main thing to note, from which everything else flows, is that this is once more the 'sponsored' version by Hollywood adults. I celebrate Spring Breakers as one of the most important films we've had recently, because it presents a youthful life of excess now, not after the fact, and goes on to find conflicting urges, not all of them destructive and empty, some of them transcendent, underscored by a beautiful curiosity to open up.
Here a film event that used every channel of that whole instagram/MTV visual culture to reach out to an audience, and is made to cater to it by grooming young stars for talk shows and celebrity interviews, turns around and simply says that is all a grating lie foisted on us to hide the real world. This is not altogether false, Spring Breakers similarly shows a reckless partying. But it's a shallow irony masqueraded as intelligent commentary.
Second, they try to remind the young audience that out there in the world persist hunger, poverty and oppression, and that we should be wary and charged to actually do something about it. But it posits that suffering as unlike something that could be now understood around us in a subtle way, as actual slavery and the most obvious oppression; indeed everything around this part, including Mockingjay's family as safe haven, has the visual air of something from the 1800s.
The same fault binds these things. I do not suppose it is by deliberate construction, that would prop up in theory the same cruel autocracy. It is merely a matter of poor imagination by the 'Gamemakers', one of lecturing than allowing us room to embody. You'll see this again in the actual Games, the concept is a bit more intricate than last time but still relies on the same unimaginative hijinks: a killing fog, killing baboons, lightning on a tree.
What about a film like this that creates a more tangible future instead of that juvenile dystopia, and tries to find our modern suffering in it? What about showing the young stars at least in part genuinely swept in the lifestyle? And what about her drawn to love the one she's with, being unsure if it's love?
We could still have more or less the same insights about the world, but now really begin to examine self.