Twitch Film, Culture Blues and FilmBalaya have each posted up reviews for the new collaboration film, which features a piece by Harmony Korine, “The Fourth Dimension”. The film premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. You can read extracts below:

Overall, THE FOURTH DIMENSION makes for an interesting little shorts program. I dig the variety of the segments and their tenuous connection. I wouldn’t call it mainstream, but none of the films are so weird/boring/pretentious as to be off-putting to the general movie-going public. That being said, it isn’t summer tent pole fare, either. What it is is a great little festival film that deserves an audience beyond the localized festival environment. (TwitchFilm)

Kilmer’s spewing of ridiculous and meaningless slogans is funny, but it feels like an audition for a bit part in a Will Ferrell movie. There’s just no meat there. The roller skating rink does prove to be a visually interesting setting, and the scenes with his girlfriend effectively capture the feeling of a lazy post-work wind down. Overall, it’s inessential but enjoyable. (CultureBlues)

Dazed Digital recently caught up with Harmony Korine over the phone to talk about The Fourth Dimension which recently had it’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. Korine speaks on his inspiration for his contribution to the film “Lotus Community Workshop” and he also speaks very briefly on next year’s film Spring Breakers. You can read the interview below the picture of Korine and Val Kilmer on the set of the film.

Val Kilmer has never looked worse. Overweight, long straggly hair peeking out underneath a baseball cap, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt tucked into baggy shorts, he’s a far cry from the devilish heartthrob whom women swooned over in ‘Heat’ and ‘Batman’. With a daring lack of vanity, he plays a motivational speaker (also named Val Kilmer) doling out advice in a Nashville skating rink in the new short film from the idiosyncratic indie-film director, Harmony Korine. The film forms part of a collaboration with two other directors, Alexey Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski made under the brief of ‘The 4th Dimension’. Dazed got on the phone with Korine to find out what it was all about.

Dazed Digital: How did you get involved with Grolsch Films and Vice?
Harmony Korine: I’ve known Vice for a long time. Eddie Moretti (producer) is a friend of mine. We’ve always talked about doing a project together. Then he came to me and said he had this thing with Vice where they were going to finance this film and there were going to be these rules. It sounded like fun and that you could play around and experiment with it and it was a chance to work with these guys.

You previously made Julien Donkey Boy under the structure of Dogme95 – did you find it liberating to work under strict rules again?
This is a different thing. Dogme95 is more like church. There was a big difference but I always enjoy rules.

What was the starting point for this film?
Well for me, a 30 minute piece is an awkward amount of time – it’s too long to be a short film and too short to be a regular movie so I started to conceptualise something that worked to its own logic in length which is when I came up with a monologue piece. And then I thought who would I want to be speaking the piece and I thought of Val Kilmer…

What was the thinking behind casting him as a motivational speaker called Val Kilmer?
I dunno, because he always seemed like a motivational speaker! I think he’s a great actor and a misunderstood character. I think he’s a real talent and eccentric. I’d seen pictures of him wearing a beret and a ponytail with a safari shirt and I started imagining him giving advice to hard luck cases and that’s how it happened.

And was he a composite of people you knew or did it come out of your imagination?
Yeah most of it came out of my imagination. I had a librarian who died in a sky diving accident whom a lot of it is based on. He was a bastard – he used to censor the books we read at school.

He seems like a trickster…but the scenes with him riding around with his girlfriend seem to show a softer, more genuine side to him. What draws you to create these characters?
I thought it would be funny seeing him ride this BMX around town, playing violent video games and giving terrible advice. I don’t know where these characters come from – I just invent them because I want to see them.

You’ve talked in the past about how your films are like mistakist art – accidents fill in the form. Were there any such accidents making this film?
Lots of it. I always said mistakism is like throwing a bomb and then documenting the explosion. It felt like that a lot of times. Having Val’s character just ride around and meet these people. The scene where he sees these guys on the side of the road – one of them had just escaped from robbing a bank on a BMX and the other is a murderer. The older guy had 17 kids and Val took a liking to him and helped reunite this guy with his kids.

Your next film ‘Spring Breakers’ casts these Disney actresses like Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens alongside James Franco in cornrows. What can you tell us about it?
I can’t say too much – I’m still making it. This one is very special though. It’s going to surprise a lot of people. This is going to blow some people’s minds.

Are you comfortable with this enfant terrible status?
I honestly don’t even think about stuff like that. It’s all meant to be as it is. I just live it and I love it. I just light it up and suck it down. I live away from everything so I don’t really have a concept of self in that way. I just do what I do.

When you saw the finished film with the other short films, did you see how it all fit together?
It was weird – it was like putting on two pairs of mismatched socks but somehow it fit together. It felt good. It felt like old socks.

What’s your idea of the 4th dimension?
Val Kilmer! (laughs)

‘The 4th Dimension’ screens at Tribeca Film Festival this week.

Cinema Scope Magazine recently issued their 50th issue and to commemorate they’ve done a piece entitled “50 Best Filmmakers Under 50″. Harmony is one of the 50 and you can read what they had to say about the director below. To view the rest just click here.

Born in 1973 in California but raised in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives, Harmony Korine has made at least three indisputable masterpieces of modern American cinema. The precocious scriptwriter for Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids (with whom Korine worked again in 2002, scripting Ken Park), in 1997 Korine made a stunning directorial début with Gummo. In a world devastated by poverty and natural disasters, in a derelict small town in Ohio, a group of teenagers try to combat boredom by inventing their own rituals. Dereliction, survival, rituals are at the heart of Korine’s films, and two years later Julien Donkey-Boy established him as an artist whose sense of visual composition is on a par with the recent digital work of Godard and Sokurov. This portrait of a murderous young schizophrenic, who is in love with his sister, is one of the most overwhelming emotional and aesthetic experiences contemporary cinema has given us. The film has no more than a superficial marketing relationship with Lars von Trier’s Dogma, whose diktats Korine subverts, notably in his magnificent use of visual super-impositions to Italian opera. Korine continues to show his fascination with characters living on the edge and the disabled, and has Werner Herzog, an inspirational figure for the young filmmaker, play a demented patriarch, a role that is both hilarious and terrifying. Alongside is the magnificent Chloë Sevigny, who was Harmony Korine’s muse and girlfriend for a long time, and Ewen Bremner as Julien, a character based on Korine’s own schizophrenic uncle; his performance achieves a degree of realism rarely achieved on film. After a somewhat disenchanted interlude, comprised of a deafening silence and a film as unbalanced as it was unsatisfying (Mister Lonely, 2007), Korine returned—brilliantly—to form, and the film made a strong impression in 2009.

Trash Humpers, the final installment in a loose trilogy comprising Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, might be a film—although one could almost question this description, given the messiness of its visuals, deliberately and aggressively damaged VHS tapes—but it is above all a lifestyle, an artistic, liberating release, a communal and joyously punk experience. The brilliantly destructive undertaking that is Trash Humpers may be understood as an arty version of Jackass, in which cinema’s enfant terrible and his friends, dressed up as lecherous old men, run wild in Nashville. It is also the last major American film of the new century’s first decade, an arrogant and stimulating piece of trash, grounded in Erskine Caldwell’s stories, Tobacco Road, and the hillbilly culture of which Korine is the ultimate troubadour.

“The Fourth Dimension” is the new collaboration film directed by Harmony Korine, Alexey Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski. The film is produced by Grolsch Film Works (yes, the same company who produces beer) and they have taken the liberty to interview the three directors ahead of it’s premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival on April 20. Korine’s interview can be read below. You can view the other interviews and more including the trailer here at GrolschFilmWorks.com

Grolsch: Why did you decide to take part in the first film from Grolsch Film Works?
Korine: I was really excited to make a film with Grolsch Film Works. It was a great chance to experiment and make something amazing. The idea of these three films working together under one central idea is great. I think it’s turned out really nice.

What is your fourth dimension”?
A place where humans and dogs have children. Everyone just barks at each other and everyone has a leash around their necks with a telephone number to call in case they’re lost. In the fourth dimension everyone is man’s best friend.

Grolsch is a brand who is taking film seriously. What do you think about commercial companies taking the role of studios?
I think it’s a great. It’s a new world where beautiful images are constantly falling from the sky. Grolsch is doing a good thing with this. It’s great any time anyone helps make a movie. I see nothing but good in this. It’s my first experience and it’s been a great one so far.

What was your source of inspiration when writing the script for the U.S. chapter of this film?
A guy I knew who used to have arguments with his shoe. He was amazing. He was always trying to give his shoe good advice. Once he fell asleep on the train and someone stole his shoes off his feet. He was never the same after that.

This film has a long monologue. Why is that? Was it hard to write?
No, it was easy to write. He is a motivational speaker. I always thought that would be a great job. The advice given in the mono- logue is pure and wonderful. If you follow it, then many great things will happen. This was all advice my father had given me.

Are there any little hints and nuances in the background of the film we should look out for?
Cotton candy. Look out for the cotton candy. It’s very easy to get stuck in it.

What advice would you give budding independent filmmakers?
Love it all. Light it up. Never quit.

In addition to Ashley Benson posting a picture of herself with Gucci Mane online, Rachel Korine uploaded an image of her with the rap star to her Instagram @bellekorn taken from the set of the movie Spring Breakers.

No word yet on Gucci’s role in the movie.

Earlier today, Ashley Benson posted an image of her and Gucci Mane on the set of Spring Breakers. The image was posted to her Instagram account @itsashbenzo. As we reported previously, Harmony Korine originally wanted Mane to star in the movie and it looks like he’s going to get his wish.

Pictures emerged of James Franco on the set of Harmony Korine’s new film Spring Breakers and as the pictures show, the Oscar-nominated actor now has braids for his new role.

Fuse TV are reporting that they have spoken to rapper Riff Raff via his Twitter (@RiFFRaFF_SODMG). He claims that the character Franco is playing is based on him and that he and Gucci Mane were approached by Harmony Korine to star in the movie. (The Fader has also reported about this.)

“Harmony Korine [the writer of Kids and director of Gummo] called my phone to be in this new movie Spring Breakers. I was out of the country.”

According to Riff Raff, Korine called him and said, “‘Yeah, man, I want you to be in this movie, but we only got a certain timeframe’ or whatever. ‘I wanted you in this movie with James Franco and Selena Gomez and Gucci Mane… But we’re already behind!’” So Riff Raff couldn’t be in the movie.

“The role I would have played would be like a drug dealer, or the friend of a drug dealer, Gucci Mane,” said Riff Raff. I asked him if James Franco was originally supposed to be in the movie as a different character. “James Franco was in the movie, but I was supposed to be in there also. Now James Franco is playing me.”

“I sent him a few things. But all you gotta do [to see how I dress] is search through my videos. I got a pretty distinct style, with the braids, the jewellery.”

On the movie as a whole, Riff Raff said, “I feel really kind of privileged because I got this big actor playing the role of me but at the same time, like, damn, I wish I was there…

“Even though I couldn’t be a part of this project, I’m still glad that James Franco could play the role of me. That’s like if Denzel Washington was playing the role of O.J. Simpson. Even though it’s not O.J. Simpson, O.J. Simpson still gotta be like, ‘Denzel Washington is playing me.’”

Selena Gomez yesterday tweeted a picture of James Franco on the set of “Spring Breakers”. The tweet led to her Instagram page: http://instagr.am/p/IrzzRMxu-U/

Other pictures of Franco on the set have also emerged online. Mostly paparazzi shots.

As we previously reported, Harmony Korine’s new short film “Lotus Community Center” is to screen as part of a feature length project entitled “The Fourth Dimension” at this years Tribeca Film Festival. We have now also learned that it will be screening earlier at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 20, what will be the film’s world premiere. In addition to this, the film will have a second screening the following day. Ticketing information and other details for the film at SFIFF can be be found here. Three screenings will take place at Tribeca beginning April 24, details for which you can find on the festival’s website here

As well, the film now has a trailer which can be viewed here at Hollywood Reporter.

The international anthology feature The Fourth Dimension will screen in the Viewpoints program of the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival Tuesday, April 24. Jan Kwiecinski, Aleksey Fedorchenko and Harmony Korine directed the film’s three shorts, one of which stars Val Kilmer as a motivational speaker.

The trailer for the film, which will have its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival April 20, premiered Monday exclusively on THR.

Priya Swaminathan, Matt Elek, Michael Derkits, Charles-Marie Anthonioz and Michal Kwiecinski produced the Grolsch Film Works and Vice Films project.

Muse Productions have announced that the ATL Twins have signed on to Harmony Korine’s upcoming film “Spring Breakers”. The skate boarding duo from Atlanta are slated to be playing a pair of drug dealers in the movie. The production company for the film yesterday posted up images of them on the set. The twins also recently starred in  Korine’s as-of-yet unreleased music video to “Gold On The Ceiling” that he shot for The Black Keys. You can view one of the images below, or alternatively you go to the companies official Tumblr blog at http://museproductions.tumblr.com for all the latest news.