Excitement is at an all-time high.
#41 The Bling Ring
As a director, Sofia Coppola's schtick has always been to pull captivating moments and performances out of isolation and ennui. Sometimes, it works; Lost in Translation is one of my favorite movies of the aughts. Marie Antoinette, which at times felt like one long music video, failed to really hit the mark, and Somewhere finds Stephen Dorff, via sometimes painfully long takes, attempting to connect with his daughter in the once-glamorous-now-desolate landscape of movie stardom. Coppola's latest, The Bling Ring, is probably her weakest effort. Not that it was bad--it was only okay.
The Bling Ring, based entirely on a true to life Vanity Fair article called "The Suspect Wore Louboutins" is about a group of teenage fame obsessives who determine where celebrities live so that they can case their houses to break in and steal shit. Rebecca (Katie Chang) and Marc (Israel Broussard) start small, jacking credit cards and cash from parked cars before they graduate to full on burglaries. Along the way, they rope in Nicki (Emma Watson), Sam (Taissa Farmiga) and Chloe (Claire Julien). Soon it becomes a game of thrills.
The movie is set in 2009, which makes sense because the supposed A-listers that they target are far from relevant: Audrina Partridge, Rachel Bilson, Lindsay Lohan. The holy grail, though, is Paris Hilton (also now lacking relevance). The fact that a group of teenagers manage to crack the security systems of a hotel heiress three different times is simultaneously funny and depressing. Chang does a nice job of pushing her cronies along despite the consequences, and it is fun to see Watson distance herself further and further from Hermione Granger with vapid cursing and getting bombed. The main problem here is that the rise and fall of the bling ring was extremely anti-climactic, and this time when nothing happens, there's not much to fall back on--just rich kids trying on even richer people's clothes.
#40 We're the Millers
Jason Sudekis is a weed dealer named David who finds himself jacked by street toughs and coming to his boss, Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms, looking/acting/sounding like Jason Sudekis), with hat in hand, trying to fix his situation. Well, Gurdlinger says, just so happens I have giant shipment of weed I have to get across the Mexican border. Get it for me and you're off the hook. So what does David do? He recruits angry stripper Rose (Jennifer Aniston), awkward wallflower Kenny (Will Poulter) from his apartment building and homeless 'hood rat Casey (Emma Roberts) to be his family on an RV trip down Mexico way by offering to pay them handsomely. The logic here being, of course, that no border patrol is going to pop a wholesome looking family.
As they work toward completing the mission, they become somewhat of a family unit (the promise of money certainly helps) and encounter strangers both menacing (fully-strapped Mexican drug dealers) and creepy (a family of swingers, played by Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn). The jokes are effective when they hit, but it's only sometimes. When it attempts to go over the top, Millers often falls flat. Otherwise we have exactly what you expect: Sudekis being smarmy, Aniston using her girl next door sex appeal to get them out of tight situations, the kids trying to find themselves, Ed Helms being smarmy. Rental territory, folks.
Til next time, Amigos-
Mulhern
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