‘The Attack,’ reviewed by Marshall Fine

Marshall Fine — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:20:30 +0000

No one, it is said, knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage. Even more to the point, no one can know what’s going on in another person’s head.

Those notions are among many at the crux of Ziad Doueiri’s haunting, provocative “The Attack,” based on the novel by Yasmina Khadra, opening in limited release Friday (6/21/13). The husband at the center of the story thinks he knows everything about his wife – until he realizes he knows almost nothing.

This gripping tale makes political questions personal, taking a sprawling divide between cultures and showing it through the eyes of one unfortunate man. He’s a doctor – a healer – who learns there is no healing a rift as jagged and provocative as the one this film portrays.

His realization about his wife comes about midway through the film. Until that point, Dr. Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman) believes that he’s got just about the perfect life. First seen collecting an award as the top surgeon in Israel – the first time the award has gone to an Arab – he has a gorgeous home, a thriving career and a beautiful wife, Siham (Reymond Amsalem).

But the day after he receives the award, he’s on duty when the hospital emergency room is flooded with victims, people who have been wounded or killed in a suicide-bomb attack in a Tel Aviv restaurant. It is only hours later, after he has saved who he can and gone home to an empty house, that he gets the real news.

This review continues on my website.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

Armond White — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:57:58 +0000

By Armond White
The Cinemascope frame stretches just wide enough to contain Alain Resnais’s abundant ideas about memory, imagination, love, art, death and life in You Ain‘t Seen Nothin’ Yet. Taking full measure of that vaudeville phrase (also the title of Andrew Sarris’ essay collection containing his superb monograph on Joseph von Sternberg), Resnais fulfills its promise in a high art exercise sumptuous enough for Sternberg. Resnais not only pokes fun at high art pretenses, part of the point of You Ain‘t Seen Nothin’ Yet is to explore them: When the associates of a theater director/playwright are summoned to attend his memorial, they are treated to his video-taped will which includes a new video performance by a troupe of younger actors performing his play Eurydice.
The mourners are an august bunch–eccentric, elegant artistes (Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditti, Anny Duperay, Lambert Wilson. Anne Consigny, Mathieu Almaric among them, all introduced in a clever credit/curtain call sequence). They’re already familiar with Eurydice, having performed it themselves over the years. But watching the video production sends each of them into personal reveries about the Orpheus myth and their own histories with each other and the commands of their god-like director/playwright. Resnais ingeniously captures the many layers of their memory, fantasy, desire and dread. Contrasting the richness of these intertwined personal projections and the spare video are just the beginning of Resnais’ caprice.
You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet moves into greatness when the mourners become fully engaged, both speaking and acting-out their pasts. We see their immediate feelings, as when Azema and Arditti, unable to face each other, reenact Orpheus and Eurydice’s underworld embrace. Azema has become Resnais’ loony redhead muse and Arditti represents his soulfulness. It’s a highpoint; going to the core of their experience, the myth is made urgent and intense. The palatial estate setting gives way to dreamy, stage-like spaces, even split-screen montages, across the screen’s expanse and the narrative goes inward–deeper into their spiritual and romantic consciousness.
This stuff is certainly avant-garde (if that term can still be used for an artistic project that has always interested Resnais and already transformed cinema culture more than 50 years ago) but as the Orpheus reference suggests, it is also classical. The film’s basic strategies are fundamental to the way and the reason humans make art against time and how they respond to it. So it’s also show business which Jean Cocteau understood when he modernized myth in Orphee (1950). Resnais, as always, shows our cognitive processes only now, in his 90s, he’s sophisticated enough to play with his conceit’s cinematic theatricality.
That oxymoron is as fascinating as it is confounding. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet exposes how banal most other pop narratives lose the mythological significance that has sustained human culture. Resnais highlights that significance, using the wide screen as the mind’s playhouse. His always sumptuous visual style takes on new luster with Eric Gautier, the great cinematographer who lights with pastel softness yet also uses the drama of deep chiaroscuro. Gautier and Resnais take thinking (and looking) outside the box to breathtaking levels of perception–luxurious perception. Colleague Stuart Lee of WNYN Channel 39 gave a definitive response to You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet: “It’s like a chinchilla coat–heavy to wear but beautiful.”
Resnais’s style used to be held against him but it’s part of what makes his cinematic project undeniable: His great themes Time and Thought receive their most esthetic treatment as in the graceful rhythms of Last Year at Marienbad, the speed of the edits in Muriel and the sheer gorgeousness of his recent renaissance (Private Fears in Public Places, Wild Grass and You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet). His intellectual and esthetic inquiries can seem remote, yet they’re also lavish. This film contemplates experience and oblivion, the artistic mythologizing of life and death, the ineffable and the sublime.
If you can take the cast of mourners’ grief and passion as a surreal demonstration of art imitating life, Resnais meets both Luis Bunuel and Jacques Rivette at their own games. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet ends with a Frank Sinatra recording as if to demonstrate that the richest art should also be the most accessible. No less playful than Resnais’ other jests here, it’s perfectly elegant and profound.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Hollywood and the death of originality

Marshall Fine — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:53:50 +0000

HollywoodandFine.com

This was originally going to be a piece about how wrong it was for Will Smith to remake “The Wild Bunch.” But that metastasized into an idea about remakes and reboots in general.

So I wound up simply writing an open letter to Smith about “The Wild Bunch” – which left out all of the other titles whose announcement I found so disheartening. Yet these headlines pop up breathlessly on the various movie websites, without any sort of critical filter.

Which is a whole other column: about how the media has, essentially, abdicated its responsibility to call “bullshit” on bad ideas – or at least point out how misguided they are. Instead – in entertainment reporting as in political coverage – all is simply headline fodder. Critical thinking? What’s that?

Every day, however, it seems that yet another genuinely bad idea surfaces and is greeted with the kind of excitement once reserved for, well, genuinely good ideas.

This commentary continues on my website.

Critic’s Pick: ‘The Bling Ring’

Thelma Adams — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:05:00 +0000

Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters

Love her or hate her, Sofia Coppola has cornered the market on the world of privilege and its discontents. And so it goes with the writer-director’s latest movie, “The Bling Ring,” based on a Vanity Fair true-crime-in-the-Hollywood-Hills article. The film, in limited release this weekend focuses on a celebrity-obsessed Bonnie and Bonnie and Bonnie and Bonnie and Clyde gang that robs from the rich – Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom – and lines their own Prada pockets.

Led by relative newcomers Katie Chung and lush-lipped Israel Broussard, the high school heist comedy benefits from low expectations. Think a dark teen comedy in the tradition of “Mean Girls” and “Heathers.” Both Broussard and Chung are delightfully decent as ringleaders Marc and Rebecca, but the film’s focus frequently shifts to supporting player Emma Watson. In micro-minis, her head bobbling on her slender neck, Watson plays La-La lost girl Nicki, a child of divorce incompletely healed by the New Age platitudes of her mother (Leslie Mann).

Watson follows up on her turn as a drug-popping, alcohol-fueled, abuse survivor in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” with another edgy role where once again she’s trying to distance herself from her good-girl Harry Potter sidekick Hermione. Still, Potterheads will rejoice that their lady has charisma to burn – even when dancing drugged at a disco reveals the layers of neediness that underlies the larceny of all involved. Life isn’t fair. Celebrity is fickle. No one loves us. We deserve all that stuff we can’t afford. Insert foot stamp here.

For Coppola fans this accessible movie lives between the pole-dancing pretentions of “Somewhere” and the high-glass losers’s love affair of “Lost in Translation.” Neither her worst, nor her best. And, yet, to its credit, this movie foregrounds the young women who read Us Weekly and the fashion glossies religiously. To criticize the fact that the script doesn’t go deep enough is to get the point: that with all that swag out there for repeat-offenders like Hilton or Lohan, why shouldn’t a girl with gumption simply walk right up to an empty house and liberate its contents for the sheer joy of material possession and to see her reflection in the mirror of a selfie on Facebook?

Bottom Line: Emma Watson has legs in a shiny bit of bling.

Vehicle 19 reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

Armond White — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:45:29 +0000

By Armond White

When Jean-Luc Godard showcased his great, long lateral-pan supermarket sequence in 1970’s Tout Va Bien, the metaphor provided an undeniable satire of the consumerist habit that typifies modern middle-class life even though no previous filmmaker had perceived the depth of such banality. Who could imagine that Godard’s memorable movable metaphor would reappear more than 40 years later as a nifty action movie sequence?

In Vehicle 19 a supermarket becomes a climactic setting for a combination shoot-out and car chase, featuring another Godard totem, the automobile (that ultimate symbol of bourgeois materialism in Weekend). Godard would like this outlandish B-movie conceit that condenses the absurdity of common life for Vehicle 19 ’s harried Everyman hero.

As American tourist Michael Woods, the great Paul Walker plays a man who picks up the wrong rental car at a Johannesburg airport and gets enmeshed in political corruption. Woods befriends a local prosecutor (Naima McLean) who has been kidnapped by a politician running a sex-trafficking ring. Reminiscent of the plot turns in Transporter 3, this isn’t nearly so good. Director Mukunda Michael Dewil isn’t a masterly stylist like Olivier Megaton but he starts the film by abstracting Woods’ blue eyes in a blur of speed that’s worthy of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. Walker’s steely-eyed determination conveys a real sense of chivalry that gives Vehicle 19 some torque.

Ex-con Woods wants to reform and reunite with his estranged wife but just like the luckless hero of Edgar Ulmer’s Detour, fake sticks out its foot. Woods stumbles upon South Africa’s downtrodden and his empathy momentarily lifts Vehicle 19 out of the ordinary. As in Fast & Furious 6, Walker (who co-produced this film) finds multiculti consciousness and camaraderie through the action movie genre. The Johanessburg terrain is a moral testing ground and Woods’ desire for redemption parallels the Third World commonwealth.

Just before the supermarket spectacle, Woods escapes the police by driving into a car wash–a succinct baptismal symbol for his reborn resolve. When he confronts a worker and requests a new paint job, the worker’s surly dissatisfaction (played by a magnetic South African actor Welile Nzuza) transmits a more intense connection than Walker’s bonhomie with Vin Diesel.

Years ago, a film like Vehicle 19 would play on a double-bill with Fast & Furious 6 in neighborhood theaters to the delight of Walker’s silent majority fan base. He’s a genuine American icon, more a good will ambassador than the dubious sort Godard cast Jane Fonda to represent in Tout Va Bien. It’s believable that Woods’ wife tells the media “When it really mattered, he pulled through and I will always love him for that.” There isn’t a recent movie that would not be improved with Paul Walker in it.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Pre-Code Classics on DVD and Blu-ray with Boris Karloff, Bette Davis, Warren William and Gloria Swanson

Lou Lumenick — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:46:30 +0000

Boris Karloff had appeared in something like 60 movies over 11 years before his first important part in Howard Hawks’ “The Criminal Code,” the first of his 13 film appearances in 1931, the year that ended with his breakthrough in “Frankenstein.” The Hawks film — his first release that year — is the centerpiece of “Karloff: The Criminal Kind,” a trio of pre-code crime dramas from the TCM Vault Collection featuring Karloff at his most malevolent.Karloff reprises his stage role as a violent killer who becomes the cellmate and mentor of a young lawyer (Phillip Holmes) who ends up in the Big House after killing somebody during a drunken brawl. Top-billed Walter Huston plays the warden, who as a by-the-book district attorney sent Holmes up four years earlier, but decies to give the young man a chance at reformation as his chauffeur. Hawks is in his element with his archetypical prison movie, which includes a romance between Holmes and the warden’s daughter (Constance Cummings in her screen debut). Karlofff makes the most of his limited screen time, and benefits from Hawks’ decision to have the ending of Martin Flavin’s original play rewritten.
Karloff is more prominently featured in “The Guilty Generation,” another 1931 release, as an English-accented Mafioso whose son (Robert Young with moustache) is so ashamed of dad that he’s changed his name. The “Romeo and Juliet” twist is that in Florida, Young falls in love with Constance Cummings (again), who just happens to be the daughter of Karloff’s most bitter gangland rival (top-billed Leo Carrillo). Director Rowland V. Lee (a silent who would later direct Karloff in “Son of Frankenstein” and “Tower of London”) has limited success with the talky script by western specialist Jack Cunningham, but there are moments of interest here and there. Top-billed Carrillo, whose character was clearly inspired by Al Capone, has a publicist (Ruth Warren) who also appears to be his mistress. There’s also a WTF ending centering around Emma Dunn, cast wildly against type as Carrillo’s long-suffering wife.
“Behind the Mask,” made before “Frankenstein” but released in early 1932 after the later film’s tremendous success, played up Karloff’s limited participation in its advertising campaign. He’s back in prison (with stock footage from “The Criminal Code”) in the opening scenes, sharing a cell with an FBI undercover agent (top-billed Jack Holt) who’s been assigned to infilitrate a narcotics ring. Karloff is a soldier in the employ of the mysterious Mr. X, whose identity will probably easily be guessed by any 21st-century viewer. This is much closer to a horror film than the other two films in the collection, including a creepy scene where a body is exhumed in the middle of the night and delivered to a doctor’s home for an impromptu autopsy. The doctor is played with lip-smacking glee by genre great Edward Van Sloan, who appeared with Karloff in “Frankenstein” and “The Mummy,” as well as portraying Van Helsing in Lugosi’s “Dracula.” Snappily directed by John Francis Dillon (who would helm the jaw-dropping Clara Bow pre-code vehicle “Call Her Savage” that same year), it’s great fun. Holt’s romantic interest is the busy Constance Cummings, who despite appearing in several high-profile films (“Movie Crazy” with Harold Lloyd, Capra’s “American Madness” and Whale’s “Remember Last Night?”) never achieved Hollywood stardom. She moved to England the mid-1930s to England, where she returned to the stage and occasionally appeared in movies, most notably David Lean’s adapation of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/movies/davis_extra_gloria_codes_swanson_gzJQ3Re31QS1Gfxmv4M4rI#ixzz2WJsIgzUt

Movie of the Year?: Man of Steel reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

Armond White — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:11:36 +0000

By Armond White
Man of Steel is the first superhero movie to be directed by a real filmmaker since Tim Burton took on Batman in 1989. Director Zack Snyder does more than reboot the past Superman franchises; he immediately gives the subject his signature–something Burton could not do until his second Batman movie, the comic/macabre Batman Returns (1992). Snyder has a grave sense of movement and excitement that is distinctly cinematic which cannot be said of the other directors who essayed previous Superman movies including the tongue-in-cheek Christopher Reeve films, as well as the various Batman flicks, X-Men, Star Wars, Star Trek, Iron Man, Punisher, Electra, Spiderman, Hellboy and Fantastic Four—the entire unsatisfying lot.
Unlike Burton, Snyder’s sensibility derives from comic books and graphic novels yet his visual extravagance also contains the palpably erotic core of comic book fantasy. Snyder immediately invests the Superman story with this tactile realism, a feel for ancient legend: Opening scenes on the dying planet Krypton recall the stylization of 300 but with a slightly futuristic edge that never lapses into conventional superhero movie fantasy. (Snyder got that out of his system with Watchmen.) The arch otherworldliness of Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and his wife Lara Lor-Van (Ayelet Zurer) sending their newborn infant into outer space to survive Krypton’s destruction and preserve their heritage from the tyrannical threat of General Zod (Michael Shannon) also evokes a kind of classicism. It doesn’t play like sci-fi and when the story shifts to planet Earth where the alien boy Kal-El is raised as Clark Kent, Snyder effectively creates a contrasting, charged-up realism.
In Man of Steel, Snyder’s ingenuity–his realistic panache–prevents the Superman story from mainly appealing to either adolescent whimsy or adult camp. He makes a radical break from past Superman movies and the entire recent movement of comic-book/graphic-novel-based films. That genre, where commercialism overwhelms imagination and hack directors (Jon Favreau, Shane Black, Tim Story) are undifferentiated from minor auteurs (Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, J.J. Abrams) and distinguished directors (Irvin Kershner, Richard Lester), has accustomed audiences to a type of artificiality and silliness. They accept cliché narratives, routine violence and a basic lack of seriousness as standard. Man of Steel is marvelous, serious fun which changes all that.
Kal-El/Clark Kent (played by Henry Cavill) isn’t called “Superman” until late in the story; his history and identity are the film’s real subject. First seen bursting through flames as a Herculean physical specimen, his alien adjustment to Earth and humanity is a personal trial neatly conveyed through screenwriter David S. Goyer’s multiple flashbacks. While Snyder gives the alien’s feats a quality of wonder, Cavil conveys surprise, urgency and torment. Snyder is good at the physics of stress (The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is a masterpiece, I promise you) which separates Man of Steel from The Dark Knight trilogy.
Christopher Nolan (producer on Man of Steel) had a flat, cold directorial style only useful for his trilogy’s cynicism. Snyder’s kinetic pictorialism provides a humane essence (that’s why 300 looked like a comic book and went beyond one) perfectly attuned to make a story about alienation, regret and the struggle to survive a changed environment; it’s moving rather than trendily “dark.” When Kal-El learns his of background, Snyder visualizes the lesson as a bas relief of Krypton’s history: figures emerge like engravings on coins burnished by memory; it’s as amazing as the hieroglyphics sequence in The Prince of Egypt.
Snyder’s consistent intermix of realism and legend upgrades the superhero genre. Cavill’s dramatic handsomeness recalls young Sean Connery’s exotic virility; his simultaneously otherworldly and legendary aspects suit Snyder’s sensuous action style–textured close-ups of skin and capillaries, jet trails in the sky as he flies, his red cape’s heavy swoosh. No previous Superman achieved Cavill’s perfected gesture of drawing back his right hand when flying to exert physical and spiritual will. Converting iconography from District 9, the Transformer films and Independence Day, Snyder improves on the imagery, giving it a speedy, thrilling roughness, preferable to the usual unimaginatively slick CGI.
What’s terrific here is that Snyder expresses Kal-El’s force, his will. The yearning to understand himself and his human-likeness gives the film depth. When Kal-El meets the earnest newspaper reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) their immediate attraction is so well acted it’s deeper than romance. Their passions meet and that’s Snyder and Nolan’s breakthrough. This is the most stirring, impassioned superhero movie I’ve ever seen.
By emphasizing Kal-El’s conflict with his abilities, desires and his yet uncontrollable circumstances, Snyder discovers his meager genre’s richest potential. (One scene offers a beautifully concise Christ-parallel.) Lessons from Kal-El’s two fathers are sturdily presented by both Crowe and Kevin Costner (as Jonathan Kent) so that tests of his ideals and his strength against Shannon’s Zod (that Frankenstein brow suggesting political warp yet oddly touching like Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty) offer a continuum of masculine being. Eat that Luke Skywalker.
Snyder doesn’t cheapen the “S” emblazoned on Superman’s chest. “In my world it means ‘Hope’” Kal-El says. That’s a significant difference from The Dark Knight trilogy’s nihilism. The fight against Zod is primarily ethical (“You have developed a sense of morality and we have not–which gives us an evolutionary advantage. If history has taught us anything, it’s that evolution always wins.”) Yet as Snyder envisions this battle, realism stays in scale with awe—something science can’t measure.
As the Supeman-Zod fight escalates so does its 9/11 evocation and Snyder’s vision of urban destruction attains the poetry Michael Bay did not, alas, achieve in Transformers III: Dark of the Moon. That evolution comment evokes The Godfather; its implicit “you can kill anybody” suggests 9/11 annihilation which has fed the juvenile thrall of too many comic book movies, Snyder’s Superman–symbolizing hope–counters all that. Man of Steel allows sci-fi blockbuster audiences to finally emerge from post-9/11 darkness. Thanks to Zack Snyder’s artistry, Man of Steel is The Godfather of superhero movies.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

‘Man of Steel,’ reviewed by Marshall Fine

Marshall Fine — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:56:49 +0000

HollywoodandFine.com

Zack Snyder widens his view as a director with “Man of Steel,” taking a proclivity for creating startling images in the service of storytelling and using it to enlarge and expand the action.

As a result, “Man of Steel” works as a compelling big-screen blockbuster because Snyder doesn’t treat it as a comic-book movie. Instead, he brings a sense of realism – veined with the speculative ideas of science fiction – to this story of a man from another planet and his impact on Earth when it discovers his presence.

Working from a script by David Goyer, Snyder refuses to be encumbered by the linear story-telling of the origin story we all know. Instead of taking it for granted that everyone knows where Superman came from and simply glossing over it – if not making sport of it – he starts his story in the middle, then teases back to fill in the missing pieces.

The prologue, set on the planet Krypton, sticks to the facts but gives them a new spin. Instead of just being a planet that blew up – and which happened to be home to a scientist, Jor-El (Russell Crowe), who predicted the planet’s destruction – Krypton is now a planet that has, in essence, destroyed itself by mining its own core for energy.

But even as the planet’s high council rejects Jor-El’s pleas to evacuate Krypton, the planet’s military leader, General Zod (Michael Shannon), swoops in to kill the head of the council and proclaim his own leadership. Jor-El escapes and launches his own baby, Kal-El, toward a planet where he should be able to survive – indeed, one whose sun and gravity should give Kal-El super-powers. Zod, meanwhile, is captured, charged with treason and sent into the Phantom Zone.

Instead of giving us the Clark Kent story (found as a baby by Ma and Pa Kent, raised in Smallville, etc.), we find the now-grown Clark (square-jawed Henry Cavill) working on fishing boat in the North Atlantic – until he hears a radio distress call from an oil-drilling platform that’s going up in flames several miles away.

This review continues on my website.

‘The Bling Ring,’ reviewed by Marshall Fine

Marshall Fine — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:57:41 +0000

HollywoodandFine.com

Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery. But what if you want to imitate someone so badly that you’re willing to steal from them? Where does that fall on the sincerity meter?

That’s just one of the issues raised in Sofia Coppola’s drily witty and up-to-the-minute film, “The Bling Ring.” Based on the Vanity Fair account of a group of teen burglars who robbed the homes of stars in the Hollywood Hills, Coppola’s film not only tells their story but burrows deep into a social strata that seems to float just below the surface of everyday consciousness.

Those of us in the reality-based world are aware that social media on the Internet have created an alternate universe, one that exists whether you’re plugged into it or not. Millenials live in worlds of texts, tweets and other postings that their parents have no clue about; even careful, tuned-in parents are not nearly wired enough to keep up.

The parents of the characters in “The Bling Ring” checked out long ago. They’re absentee or they’re simply so self-absorbed that they can’t see their own kids for what they are. That’s true, for example, of the family unit headed by Leslie Mann, who home-schools her daughter Nicki (Emma Watson) and Nicki’s friend Sam (Taissa Farmiga), who she’s sort-of adopted – but Mom’s main textbook is Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret.”

Nicki and Sam are among the queen bees of a small party-hard clique of friends at a Calabasas high school for underachievers or behavioral problems. The real leader seems to be Rebecca (Katie Chang), a child of divorce who befriends new kid Marc (Israel Broussard) on his first day at the high school.

Rebecca tantalizes Marc with her bad behavior, even as she offers him a friend in a new school who won’t judge him for being gay but not quite out. She, in turn, provides a corrupting influence: When they leave a party together one night, she gets him to join her in checking the doors on parked cars. When they find one unlocked, she quickly searches it for valuables, then moves on. Before long, he’s joined the game. Anyone dumb enough to leave a key in the car will find it missing when they return.

Before long, Rebecca is telling Marc stories of her adventures sneaking into the homes of friends she knows aren’t home.

This review continues on my website.

Dud of the Week: The Bling Ring reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

Armond White — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:19:54 +0000

By Armond White

Sofia Coppola has finally made an interesting movie. The Bling Ring circles around Sofia’s typical poor-little-rich-girl subject by dramatizing that infamous group of Southern California high-school housebreakers who were fixated on such tabloid celebrities as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan whom they idolize, envy and then burglarize. It’s a phenomenon of sorts (based on the 2010 Vanity Fair article “The Suspect Wore Louboutins” by Nancy Jo Sales) but although Sofia is not a socially-minded filmmaker, The Bling Ring is also–luckily and entertainingly–about the unignorable crisis of young people who lack social principles and private morality.

This gets closer to the bone of Sofia’s previous “creations”: The pampered daughter of the “Life Without Zoe” segment in New York Stories; the solipsistic siblings of The Virgin Suicides; the brooding, abandoned girl-wife in Lost in Translation; the misunderstood monarch of Marie Antoinette; the movie star’s lonely daughter in Somewhere. It is the most completely self-involved oeuvre in cinema history but now she’s finally found an approach that can allow non-princessy viewers to relate to her indulged petulance and just maybe understand a little bit about their own cultural circumstances.

The teenage criminals of The Bling Ring recall the same dumfounding generation of youth as in 1950s juvenile delinquent movies except that here they are the socially advantaged whites of the Hollywood suburbs: Rebecca (Katie Chang), Nicki (Emma Watson) and Chloe (Claire Julian), Sam (Taissa Farmiga). Not smart enough to see through media’s collusion with the rich and powerful, they accept privilege as the right of their class, race and culture. This is what makes them matter-of-factly turn predators of their idols. Stealing from celebrities is part of their culture–and sense of entitlement. Besotted with media, they proudly post images of their ill-gotten booty on Facebook. Some of the funniest lines in Sofia’s script (written with brother Roman Coppola) are the teen thieves talking about celebrity homes the way regular people talk about stores: “I want to go to Paris” they say about breaking into Paris Hilton‘s estate. “Rachel Bilson’s” is spoken in the same way a Long Island princess plans a shopping spree at Henri Bendel’s.

It is Sofia’s casual familiarity with this warped sense of dispensation that makes The Bling Ring watchable and fascinating. She’s right at home with a group of girls who only care about how they look, what they wear, and where someone else’s money (or car) can take them. There is a hilarious sense that their missing moral faculty (Pity? Obligation? Respect? Fairness?) is a result of their cultural cosseting. Media worship from MTV to TMZ frames their goals and principles: Rebecca wants to attend the Fashion Institute of Design because “that’s where the girls on The Hills went.”

These slim, sybaritic hot-house flowers live for pleasure. They’re not intellectually curious altruists like the girls in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. Sofia specializes in brats yet sees them as martyrs of a failed social system. The Bling Ring entraps viewers in a society that values materialism above all else as a sign of taste, worth, distinction; it views these teens as vacantly as Gus Van Sant did the school-shooting victims in Elephant (the late Harris Savides served as cinematographer on both). Unlike 1950s j.d. cautionary tales, The Bling Ring doesn’t inquire into the cause of maladjusted youth; it simply accepts the fact of their existence: a consequence of Gen X folly–TV-bred, post-hip-hop, red carpet desperation. Short of ideals, each of Sofia’s girls is a wannabe model, owner of her own designer line or signature fragrance; Marc (Israel Broussard), the ring’s one male, is an insecure, pudgy, fashion-obsessed boy who is sexually ambiguous only because (to his own chagrin) he doesn’t fit a cultural stereotype. In a better movie these kids would represent a genuine social type but due to Sofia’s oddness, they emblematize a particular species of amoral idiots who think they can get closer to their idols by violating their privacy. Theft makes them equal, if not BFF. One of the film’s weakest, most clichéd moments is when a stolen gun is brandished as if threatening violence. Nothing so definitive would occur with these wastrels; it’s Sofia flirting with greater meaning because she doesn’t perceive the depth of this horror.

Tbe Bling Ring lacks the moral scrutiny of Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain which satirized moronic materialism. Sofia sympathizes with trespass and burglary (the gang netted over $3 million of high-end goods) out of some berserk quasi-feminist sentiment. As always, she refuses narrative development, proceeding vacantly. As the police dragnet closes in, Sofia’s peculiar distance feigns detachment. Note her Doll House scene: a wide, night shot of The Hills’ celebutante Audrina Patridge’s mountain-top home being robbed by Rebecca and Marc going from room to room as the camera observes them from a distant Kubrickian slow dolly-in. It also echoes Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies’ Man as well as the estate robbery in Godard’s Band of Outsiders. In this, the film’s most cinematically adroit moment, Sofia pilfers from her betters, disregarding their insight into human conscience; she’s no less than a thief than her beloved protagonists.

It’s a strange, neo-indie perspective, making Sofia perhaps the oddest of the American Eccentrics. She implies some social awareness in the hip-hop manqué desperation of these white slackers–girls who greet each other “Hi, Bitches!” Sofia’s own hipster taste shows in the soundtrack featuring M.I.A., Kanye West (“Power“), Frank Ocean (“Super Rich Kids”) and Chris Brown (“Drop it Low”). The music is hot but it’s not always instructive. The opening track prepares one for social and psychological dislocation. It is “Crown on the Ground” by Sleigh Bells but this jangling disruption is not music of these disco-loving girls; it merely brandishes Sofia’s hipness, attempting to indict the culture at large. Think Larry Clark without sleaze.

If Sofia Coppola ever challenged herself to scrutinize the folly of girlhood entitlement, rather than concentrating on that petulant hauteur of slim pretty young things (Rebecca’s runway strut), indulging the materialist thrill of shopping and closets (Marc prancing in his bedroom wearing pink high heels), treasure chests and easy boredom (Nicki impatiently seeking fame), The Bling Ring might have been a companion piece to the moral insight of Pain & Gain. It might even have done honor to her father’s ethnic self-examination in The Godfather and her brother Roman’s introspection in CQ and A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. Flitting between social commentary and celebrity critique (including a meaningless slo-mo shot of Rececca’s idol Lindsay Lohan striding into court wearing a grown-up’s white suit) Sofia remains as shallow as ever. Lost without translation.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair