Review 578: The Bling Ring

 

The Bling Ring features plenty of eye candy and a compeling central performance from Emma Watson, but hardly stands out among Sofia Coppola's best work.

Based on the 2010 article The Suspects Wore Louboutins by Nancy Jo Sales, a group of fame-obsessed teenagers who use the internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to burglarize their homes.

The Bling Ring has a very interesting real life story at its centre. Sofia Coppola wisely tells the story from the teenagers perspective. To them, they were just having fun. They wanted a taste of the rich life. What teens would have the balls to rob Paris Hilton? Coppola structures this film like a documentry

With a runtime of 90 minutes, The Bling Ring goes by at a relatively brisk pace

the locations are stunning and showcase so many different sides of LA. The soundtrack is excellent the production design is fantastic; the valley where Nicki and the ohers live is depicted as washed out, overly lit sundrenched place which contrasts beautifully with the celebrities houes which are rich and idyllic, full of fancy and luxuary clothes. The costumes are fabulous, colourful 

Emma Watson is easily a standout here playing Nicki Moore. The role is the furthest thing from Hermione as she could get. She plays a vapid, ditzy, fame-obsessed teenager who robs celebrity houses, smokes weed and gets shamelessly drunk. I read somewhere that Emma Watson prepared for this role by "watching a ton of reality TV" including The Hills, Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Pretty Wild to study their body language and how they acted around people. She also listened to Britney Spears' Femme Fatal to get into the mindframe of the character. I'm happy to say that all of that definately payed off as she expertly captures Nicki's shallow, narcissistic valley girl persona. What's interesting about Nicki as a person is that she has all of these different faces and she puts on lots of different fronts for lots of different people. There's the drug fueled, crazy Nicki who is really up for stealing things and acting really sexy and crazy, but at the same time there's this side of her where she plays the perfect daughter, this good girl and this very spiritual human being who cares about the community and is very aware of people's karma. So there's very strange dichotomy to her.

Taissa Farmiga,

Katie Chang doesn't lag far behind in the role of Rebecca Ahn. She is the ring leader and the one that instigates robberies and leads the kids down that path. She's very obsessed with fashion and celebrity culture almost to the point where she uses things to feel better about herself.

Isreal Broussard When Mark is introduced, he's the new, lonely kid at school who knows nobody; he's lost. Then he meets Rebecca and they become friends and the more time they spend together, the more he grows attached to her and that's what he needed. He turned to Rebecca and she betrayed him

Leslie Mann