Review of The Bling Ring (2013) by Adam P — 14 Nov 2013

This is a film that is far from perfect, but also is also weirdly enough essential film viewing. Its definitely interesting, but when the lights come up on this Millennial expose its hard to fill satisfied.

There is a lot missing in terms of structure and character development. The characters rob, rob and rob some more, they smoke some weed, bump some smack, drink a shit load of ice coffee and then get arrested.

I'm not totally buying into the shallow culture critique either. Coppola should have put more compelling material on the screen. She failed, largely due to the fact that this project was hurried along in an attempt to be timely, and actually the filmmaking itself and its use of a police detective as a consultant during what was still an on-going investigation allowed a few of the defendants to walk off scott free.

Perhaps Coppola should have given it a year, created some more rounded material and then shot the movie. There were certainly good elements to the movie though too. Its a indictment of our culture of excess, and our idolization of platonic and beatific ideals.

Its a critique of how commonly we caste aside deep human emotion in favor of surface level engagement and the shallowness which has impregnated our culture. Its about how delusional we've all become and squaring with the fact that even in an age of YouTube, most of us are not at the center of anything and most of us will never achieve the level of stardom we so cravenly desire.

Its about a generation of premadonnas who never got told no, who always saw themselves as special and different from everyone else and who are finally being brought to atone for the terrible parenting decisions of their mothers and fathers.