I mostly disagree about the lack of subversiveness. It starts playing out as an "earnest trippy oddball comedy" as you say, but it becomes quite obvious by about the halfway point that it is satirizing these types of redemption stories, rather than trying to be a genuine one.

There are multiple key moments where we are trained to think "ah ha, here is the moment where things turn around for the main character - he will realize his wrongdoing and start to clean himself up". He sees his wife cheating, and there is the moment.

But it passes quickly and nobody is the worse for wear.

There is a serious drunk driving accident and a hyper-exaggerated "tender" moment with the dying wife.

It passes.

A fancy lawyer tells the Beach Bum that he will get no money from the wife's death unless he finishes his novel; she designed her will that way in order to provide for his redemption.

This is such a hackneyed plot point that it has to be obvious now that we're in satire land (if it wasn't already).

Then the rehab, and the escape, and the relapses, and again no consequences.

The whole thing reminded me somewhat of Burn After Reading in a different genre, in that it's shot, scored, and written as a straight-up fun stoner redemption movie of this type (and I guess it's the same with Spring Breakers). Trailers could easily be cut from this material to make it look like typical Oscar bait (and they were).

Now, all this being said - I saw it with a streamed Q&A with Korine, McConaughey, and the two female leads. They spoke of it much more as a straight-up stoner comedy, and the "lessons" they said should be taken from it is some nonsense about how you've just gotta chill man, bad things happen but be like the Beach Bum. I don't *think* Korine is actually this dumb, I *think* he understands he's made a parody of Oscar bait redemption movies, and that the Beach Bum character is toxic scum. But the Q&A left me with doubt.

It doesn't matter though. Death of the artist.

Man, I don't know. Even if you understand that it's "satire" doesn't a movie have to, on some level, be good/entertaining/watchable? What I saw today was a bunch of clips of an unlikeable, self destructive, scumbag, navigating his way from one place to the next without a care whose life he ruins. He *says* he loves his daughter, but his actions don't remotely represent that sentiment. Yet in the end he's a Pulitzer Prize winning multi-millionaire burning boats and getting his "wish" of his daughter leaving her husband because he didn't live life the way he does.

This story can really only exist on two levels- 1) exactly what it's presented as and what, apparently, some of the cast members believed it to be- i.e we should all try to find our inner-Moondog and live life the way he does. 2) the satirical level you seem sure it is trying to portray. But it just being satire isn't good enough to make it good on its own. So much was missing. It really was almost like Korine followed around MM with a camera and threw it together. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. I don't even know if it can be classified as a movie. I understand the idea that not every movie has to follow the same sequence of events/themes (fall, rise, redemption, etc), but there has to be something right? He broke like 79 different laws, he witnessed Efron break a glass bottle over some old guys head and rob him. And in the end he was standing on a stage winning a ****ing Pulitzer with his daughter telling him how brilliant he is.

**** I don't know what I just watched. And if you're gonna make a 90 minute cluster****, shouldn't characters be likeable? Or funny? I just don't get what anyone was supposed to appreciate or take away from it. It wasn't anything.