Director Sofia Coppola also co-produced and wrote this expansion of Nancy Jo Sales' 2010 Vanity Fair article "The Suspect Wore Louboutins", based on real events, about a circle of trendy, well-to-do southern California teenagers, reckless and celebrity-obsessed, who see themselves as rock stars by virtue of their youth and position. A new addition to the group, an insecure kid eager to be with the in-crowd, is quickly swallowed up by the nighttime excitement, doing drugs and robbing celebrity houses in the Hollywood Hills without regard to the consequences. Though Coppola obviously did her homework, and her film looks and sounds authentic, one wonders what we're supposed to take away from the endless scenes of teenage hedonism and material worship, the camera caressing the contents of celebrity closets. It also isn't clear why this new student (Israel Broussard) is picked out from the high school pack to be a part of the Bling Ring, or why he's so readily accepted by female peers who, on the basis of looks and stature, would appear to operate in a different league. Coppola's uncanny ear for dialogue and rock and rap selections continues to impress, but it may be time for her to graduate from 'edgy' pop culture and return to more thought-provoking material. A 2011 cable-TV movie (using the same title!) covers the same territory, and is equally disheartening though on a much lower budget. *1/2 from ****

The Bling Ring follows a group of young women (and some random guy) as they realize how easy it is to sneak into celebrity's homes and steal stuff, so that's what they do. On occasion the movie managed to pull off some decent directing. There were a few takes that were of a decent length, and I think that somewhere in this mess of a film was a good director somehow held back. The rest of the movie is complete trash. I absolutely hated every minute of this film. By the 9-minute mark I was done. Yes, I even checked to see how quick it was. Thankfully, it was only 90 minutes long. My breaking point for this movie came as soon as I realized how bad of an actor that Israel Broussard is, which is, like I said, at the 9-minute mark. He was just awful, reading his lines with so little of anything that it just made it hard to watch. And even without him, the other acting was super mediocre. Most of these actresses seemed to have been hired for their looks and not their abilities, because most of them were made slightly more tolerable by how pretty they were. But even then, their characters were so unlikable that they kind of ceased to even be pretty and instead looked stuck-up and frustrating, thus creating a downward spiral for all of them. Bad characters. Moving on to the editing. Most of the time I don't even notice film editing, but here it's so blatantly bad. There's nothing special about it, so it only adds fuel to the garbage fire of a film that this already is. The writing is just awful. The dialogue is boring and uninteresting, but moreover the presentation of the story is so incredibly redundant. It's just a detailed montage of the same scenes over and over. They go to a house, steal stuff while complaining about clothes and saying 'oh my gosh, chill out' in the most frustratingly white girl-ish way possible, then get drunk and high and dance at parties to bad music, and occasionally go home. There's nothing interesting happening, there's no interesting characters or plot, and it just sucks. And it's not even like there's a level of suspense as to whether these characters are going to get caught. Of course they get caught, they're a bunch of idiot teens whom we've seen in security footage multiple times throughout it. There's another redundant bit, security footage shots. We see it over and over again. "We get it, the girls were caught on camera." Overall The Bling Ring is awful. I ended up taking a 20 minute break towards the end simply because of how boring and uninteresting it was, then later regretting that break as I realized that I could've been done the movie sooner than when I had actually finished it. It's just so poorly written, poorly acted, and repetitive. I actually like some of these actors, but these were roles made for nobody. Nobody should have played these characters, because that would've meant that this movie would've never been made. In the end I wouldn't hesitate to recommend that you burn this one, or at the very least spare yourself the trouble of seeing it.

This movie contains about one hour and fifteen minutes of repetitive burglaries and drug use plus fifteen minutes of aftermath. But the first part could have been boiled down to fifteen minutes without the loss of a shred of meaning. That would leave 30 minutes of footage, which could perhaps have been supplemented by some other footage about more interesting characters or more interesting issues. But that would have been a very different movie.I always check the spoiler box, but I swear there is nothing to spoil. After the first five minutes you know exactly how the whole thing is going to go: (0001) young women and a young man with no real plans in their heads break in to celebs' homes and paw through their stuff and steal bling and money and drugs, then they get high, then GO TO 0001. There is no character development and very little to differentiate the young women from each other, with the exception of the Emma Watson character and her family who have the makings among them of a satiric Netflix comedy.Also, even in the first few minutes there are flash-forwarded snippets of the rationalizations the burglars will use when they are telling their stories after they get caught. Even without those, you would know that they are going to get caught because have no sense and boast to all their friends what they are doing and leave clues all over the Internet. So there is not even fake suspense - you are just waiting for the police to show up.So, seriously, the whole burglary and drugs part is just boring. Now you could say that "these empty-headed people really were just like this", but that's not an excuse. You could say that it provokes thought about the ironies of it all: "they rob the homes of celebs, but then they become ephemeral D-list celebs themselves" or "but what did Paris Hilton do to earn all her money? Are they worse than she?" (Short answer - yes.) But then how about addressing the real social problems? How do people grow up with this little sense of how to live? What is it like to be their judge, their parole officers, or even the Vanity Fair writer whose article sparked this effort, who try to make sense of this? Nothing like that here, though.There are some good lines at the end, voiced by the Watson character, which are a genuinely skillful send-up of the whole concept of people who have become celebs for nothing and demand, with general success, that you take them at face value as planet-saving humanitarians while they run their con game on you. (Lines with real relevance in the wake of the 2016 election.) But frankly, if you can find them in a YouTube clip, you have gotten the best part of the movie.

This movie is really boring. Acting overall is real mediocre. 95% of the lines are said like they are reading them for the first time. Most of the shots feel like they're just trying to take up as much time as they can without having any relevancy. A lot of the scenes were probably supposed to be written like this, but it doesn't make a good movie in any way, shape, or form. I can really only watch a bunch of girls break into Paris Hilton's house so many times before I go insane. I'm pretty sure there was a 2 minute scene of the male lead just smoking weed and dancing in nightvision. Had nothing to do with anything. The whole movie also pivots on the plot line that A-list celebrities just leave their front doors unlocked and don't notice when a ton of their stuff goes missing. Pretty idiotic