The Bling Ring (2013) – Blu-ray Disc

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***/****
Image A
Sound A
Extras D+

starring
Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann

screenplay
by Sofia Coppola, based on the VANITY FAIR article by Nancy Jo Sales

directed
by Sofia Coppola

by
Walter Chaw
Doomed to be compared–unfavorably, I
think–to Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, Sofia
Coppola's The Bling
Ring
is better seen as another document of ennui and
privilege and the
different ways the same old dissatisfaction and yearning manifest in
endlessly
evolving, endlessly confounding ways, generation by generation.
Appearing as
they both do in the middle of a ceaseless recession with our leaders
arguing,
as they did in the late-1930s, about social programs that one side
believed
indispensable and the other recklessly overpriced, neither film is
terribly
different in structure and execution from The Wizard of Oz.
Coppola,
upon reflection, is the perfect artist for an updating of Dorothy's
trip to the
Emerald City–she is, after all, Dorothy. If you were to freeze-frame
the film
during its opening titles (scored brilliantly, discordantly, by the Sleigh
Bells
' "Crown on the Ground"), you'd note, as my editor
Bill did on Twitter,
that Coppola's own credit reads "Written and Directed by Rich Bitch
Sofia
Coppola." Self-awareness, self-deprecation, it's all of those things,
but
what it is most, I think, is a kind of acceptance: her own peace with
her
relationship with the two "acts" of her public life, the first
indicated perhaps by her father not protecting her well enough as an
actress,
the second by her move to behind the camera as a director of quiet,
trance-like pictures about little girls
lost. If The Bling Ring is ultimately the least
of Coppola's films, it
gathers weight, develops context, taken as a whole with the others. Say
what
you will and count me deep in her camp, Coppola is every bit the auteur
her
father is–and it's his fault.

RUNNING TIME
90 minutes
MPAA
PG-13
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

1.85:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
LANGUAGES
English 5.1 DTS-HD MA
SUBTITLES 
English SDH
French
REGION
A
DISC
TYPE

BD-25
STUDIO
eOne

Based on actual events and hewing fairly close to the broader points of history, The
Bling Ring

can even be taken as a sequel in intent to Ms. Coppola's Marie
Antoinette
in its
conversation with the cult of celebrity and the devastation it wreaks upon
self-worth. A group of Hollywood teens, voraciously following gossip
sites, learns when
their style heroes (Paris Hilton chief among them, but also poor
Lindsay Lohan)
are going out of town or attending an event and take that as an
opportunity to
break into their houses. Theft is one goal, but what's really driving these kids is some irrepressible
urge to temporarily assume the mantle of entitlement
that comes with fame. A moment when one invites another to "go
to Paris" holds a delicate, lovely resonance, and the whole operation
becomes club patter, the
braggadocio establishing social rank and power at a certain age among people taught status through the misadventures of others, rewarded each for
their
bad judgment and privilege. Take note of the banks of mirrors and other
reflective surfaces in the film: they speak of not just the essential
emptiness
of the heroes and victims (separated only by the number of
paparazzi
attending their vacuity), but also the echo chamber, where the only
desire is
to see the self reflected back into eternity. Given that Watson has
shown herself to be a limited, self-conscious performer post-Potter,
there is some irony in her playing one of these misguided,
self-deluded criminals. She had the dubious fortune to be cast in an
iconic role as a child; as she graduates into the rest of her career,
she may find herself judged as cruelly as Coppola was in her brief
flicker on the stage. That she gives a strange, self-conscious
performance only lends
credence to the idea that The Bling Ring is about being lied to
about your worth and discovering too late that the things
everyone
else values in you have nothing to do with the things that make you
valuable.

What The Bling Ring does best is
function as an access point and Rosetta Stone for Coppola's work. It
offers a
précis, a link between The Virgin Suicides and Somewhere
(and Marie
Antoinette
and Lost in Translation),
and in essaying these teenagers who want so desperately to become what they behold, Coppola
expresses her
empathy with their longing while offering up a couple of scenes that
illustrate
their essential loneliness. The final film shot by the wonderful Harris
Savides
(Meek's Cutoff DP Christopher Blauvelt took over
when Savides died
during production), The Bling Ring would've been
another masterpiece had
it relied more on the visual and less on dialogue that lands as
unusually
spot-on–especially for Coppola, who, lately, had developed a comfort
with
silence. I'm thinking of a moment in which two of our beautiful little
criminals
rob a glass house and Coppola pulls back, way back, to see
them
running silent from room to room like rats in a see-through habitat, framed
against
the Los Angeles panorama. Maybe Coppola feels beholden to the True
Story, a
responsibility to provide a narrative context, complete with cutaways to
shrink-sessions
and a moralizing epilogue. Whatever compelled it, it's a shame there's
nothing in the film the equivalent of the circling, circling, circling
opening
of Somewhere. It tells of the same sickness as
the rest of her work, in
other words, but it aims for accessibility instead of sublimity. That's
the
irony of an egalitarian film about the landed gentry and its
sycophants, and if
harmless, even useful, ultimately The Bling Ring
is the lesser for it.

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THE
BLU-RAY DISC

eOne's Canadian Blu-ray release of The Bling Ring boasts
a 1.85:1, 1080p transfer showcasing a visual ethic that
highlights the ephemeral nature of
these slight creatures and the obscure objects of their desires. The Red Epic-generated image is pinkish and diffuse, which does nothing to decrease detail yet gives
everything the hard-to-define quality of a photo after-image.
By
itself, the way the movie looks is a more savage commentary than
anything in the narrative body proper; Savides will be missed. The 5.1
DTS-HD
MA track is conservative but dynamic, with powerful bass when called
upon; I would love to see an entire film shot
inside nightclubs up and down the script, wordless, engulfing.
Complaints that The
Bling Ring
wasn't didactic enough are countered by the
desire of consumers
of the true fana that it actually be less coherent. Spring
Breakers
, in
other words–the best Sofia Coppola film of the year and the picture I'm
surprised The Bling Ring was not.

The only supplement on this disc is "The Making of The Bling
Ring
" (23 mins., HD), a cast-and-crew chit-chat wherein Coppola's collaborators try their best
to describe her and then executive producer Fred Roos, Francis
Coppola's longtime
collaborator, mentions the difficulties of casting a "17-year-old
Asian
dragon lady" in the role eventually filled by Katie Chang, at which point I told the image of Fred Roos on my
television to go fuck himself. Hardly revelatory, it's typical
EPK stuff sprinkled with B-roll, though Coppola seems more alert than usual. I was interested to learn that Paris Hilton allowed her
actual home
to be used in the film, suggesting to me that of all the fucked-up shit
going
on here, the fact that Hilton has validated it in this way is telling.
It's like that Charlie Murphy sketch on "Chappelle's
Show" where Rick James essentially confirms everything that's just been
skewered. HiDef trailers for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,
The Kings of Summer, The Lords of Salem, and You're
Next
cue up on spinup.

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