Better, more eloquent writers than me have written plenty on the actual, true-life phenomenon of the Bling Ring and on Sophia Coppola's ephemeral, pretty, relatively straight-forward interpretation of those events. I will say that Emma Watson is excellent as a superficial LA girl with no actual ambitions beside being adored for her youth, beauty, and supposed "it" factor. Having unfortunately experienced the pilot of the E! channel's reality show, Pretty Wild, while immobilized by a hangover and held hostage by my Netflix queue one particularly unpleasant day during the summer, I can attest to the verisimilitude of Watson's Alexis Neiers (or whatever, do not care enough to double check her name's spelling). She's dead on. Leslie Mann is similarly accurate as Watson's wispy, self-centered, inept mother and sole educator. Upsettingly so, really; she completely nails the sad desperation for the love and approval of her daughters plus her desperate belief in self-help centered philosophy. Not to say that these factors, on their own, would necessarily be sad. But when a mother takes it upon herself to base her daughter's main education on said principles... see Ring, Bling.
The rest of the characters feel perfunctory at worst, and stereotypical or vacant (with barely any discernible inner life, anyway) at best. I'm torn if this movie made me feel more sad and empty and hollow because of how true to life it is, or how true to life it isn't. I'm leaning towards true, though. Teenagers can be the absolute fucking worst.
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