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By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, May 17th, 2013 - 1 Comment »
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Cannes Day 2: Girls Just Wanna Have… (Part 2 of 2)

The second half of the Girls In Trouble Cannes combo (though there was a rancid Gondry cherry on top) was Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring. And this is what I saw…

A combination of Somewhere (but without the sliver of light that Elle Fanning brought to it) and Marie Antoinette’s happy vulgarity. The combination is odd, as even the pop music party that Coppola is known for is actually off the beat here. I would go so far as to suggest that Ms. Coppola may well have cut off the natural rhythms of the music with the intent of hitting a discordant note.

In fact, I think Bling was shot and cut to avoid the clean, easier to swallow, MTV aesthetic in which the girls think they live.

To make The Bling Ring more “fun” would be, I think, to buy into what Coppola is clearly sick of being sold. I’m not sure the strategy always works, but I can’t imagine a better choice. This is a film about imitated success and deluded images of achievement.

It is—Word of the Day—banality cloaked in champagne and expensive shoes. The fact that Paris Hilton doesn’t realize that the joke is, well, her, is the perfect measure of Coppola’s success. There is no “there” there because, in fact, there is no “there” there. How entertaining is that meant to be?

I love the unspoken hierarchy that the group starts to place on the expanding number of celebrity homes. Paris is always The Best Place To Be. By the time they get to Megan Fox’s nice, but average house, it’s downright boring.

Another interesting part of the film is just how minor the ambitions of the group are, aside from doing as they please. I don’t approve, but I am pretty sure that Coppola found just the right note of vacuousness in this film.

There is also a fascinating absence of sex in a film loaded with drugs and money and good-looking young people. A couple of the six or so blingers seem to have a sex life… but most seem to be a false in that as in their image polishing.

The truth is, I need to see it again to really get a handle in it. I am pretty sure Coppola was working in negative entertainment space. As the ring heads into their fifth or sixth robbery, shot only from a distance like rats in a maze, I was convinced that there was more than the surface of the surface on this film.

For the record, Emma Watson is pretty much perfect the whine of Alexis Neiers. You will love to hate it. And the star of the film really is the group’s ringleader, played by Katie Chang, who is a real find. But this is a director’s film, love it or hate it. Good performances all around, but it is Sofia’s show, first and last.

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1 Comment »

One Response to “Cannes Day 2: Girls Just Wanna Have… (Part 2 of 2)”

  1. KrazyEyes says:
    May 17, 2013 at 9:46 am

    I’m more interested in reading your Mood Indigo review now.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon