What is worse than celebrities that are famous for being famous? The people that worship those celebrities. Sofia Coppola explores this phenomenon in her new film ripped from the headlines about a group of high school students so obsessed with celebrity culture that they break into their homes so they too can live the extremely shallow lifestyle of our new celebrity culture.

 

It used to be that you needed to do something special to be famous.  Be an actor or musician, writer or filmmaker, etc.  Now you just need to be rich and get fucked on camera.  OK, maybe I’m being unfair.  You can also get knocked up as a teenager and let cameras follow you around for MTV.  Or just be extremely shallow alcoholics with life philosophies empty enough to be fit into an acronym like GTL or DTF.  I get why people like to watch this shit.  Who doesn’t enjoy watching a train wreck every so often?  But a problem with today’s society is that there are a lot of people who are watching and idolizing, not laughing at these abominations.

 

The Bling Ring is a story of these pathetic sad sacks.  It starts with a mother (played to perfection by Leslie Mann) who homeschools her kids under the principles of The Secret and Adderall.  She puts together vision boards for success in place of math lessons and of course lets her daughters do whatever they want, because of course they are just perfect little angels.  Her kids Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga) obviously use this to their advantage to get whatever they want, and what they want is naturally to be fashion models.  We also have Marc (Israel Broussard), a pathetic loner who will do anything to get into the cool kids clique, Chloe (Claire Julien), a pothead who just wants to get her next high, and of course the leader of the pack Rebecca (Katie Chang), a sociopath who steals cars, jewelry, cash and anything else she can get her hands on.

 

None of these characters are the least bit likeable.  What’s worse is that you don’t feel much pity for the victims either.  Paris Hilton allowed Coppola to use her actual house for the scenes where the kids break in and rob her.  While she probably expected people envy her lush home, most viewers will just feel disgust.  This is a person so vain that even the throw pillows on her fucking couch are emblazened with her photograph.  Go up the stairs and you won’t see art adorning the walls, but 40 framed photographs of Paris.  She has so many shoes that she could wear 2 different pairs every day and she wouldn’t run out until the end of Hillary Clinton’s second term as president.  No wonder they robbed her 5 times and she didn’t even notice.

 

In some films you might then cheer along the Bling Ring. I mean who gives a shit about the people they are robbing? But no, these kids are even worse. Rebecca’s ambition is to go to the same Fashion Institute as the girls on The Hills and follow it up with an internship at Teen Vogue to be just like them. They use words like “totes” in all sincerity and take a selfie photograph chucking up deuces every opportunity they get. They even listen to music superficially, bumping Kanye West and singing along with only the flashy words that they feel they are living. An arrest for an extreme DUI? Dude, that was so awesome! They didn’t know how I was alive let alone standing!

 

There’s a scene in this movie where Sam is playing around with a loaded gun she stole from Orlando Bloom’s house with her boyfriend, pointing it at his head with a huge smile on her face.  A very uncomfortable scene, you almost want the gun to accidentally go off and wound herself.  But unfortunately that’s the drawback of this film being based on a true story.  Not only is there virtually no consequence for their actions, in some cases they are even rewarded.  One of the real life girls (played by Watson here) even got her own reality TV show out of the ordeal.

 

Despite the disappointment of where the story goes, I think Coppola did a great job here.  Yes, all of the characters are vile, but that is the point.  The acting, especially from Emma Watson and Katie Chang, is tremendous.  Emma Watson delivers the lines “I wanna rob” and “I wanna run a country some day for all I know” with perfectly equal conviction for a person who doesn’t understand both the naivete of her proclamation or the conflict between the two.  She has certainly come a long way from Hermione.  She had a very strong turn last year in Perks of Being a Wallflower, but here she shows that she can not be pigeon-holed into nice girl roles and that she is definitely going to be acting force in the future.

 

Conclusion [8 out of 10]

This is not an enjoyable movie.  You will hate everybody in it.  If you are looking for entertainment this probably isn’t the right film for you.  But great acting and an indictment of a culture that badly needs it and a powerful performance by Emma Watson makes a pretty strong outing for Sofia Coppola.