Pretty bad, right? I saw the movie yesterday, Father’s Day, and there were at least three sets of daughters and fathers there to see it. Can you believe the RUDENESS of those daughters?! “Dad, I know it’s your day, but Sofia Coppola dir–” “Who?” “Directed this movie about The Bling Ring–” “The what?” “This group of teenagers who stole property from Paris Hilton’s house–” “Who’s house?” “And like Audrina Patridge’s house” “I actually don’t know who that–” “And Emma Watson is in it.” “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” Hahah. I could go on and on with this conversation about a dad who doesn’t know what The Bling Ring is, but I won’t, because we have to talk about how not good of a movie The Bling Ring was! WHAT A SNOOZEFEST! It’s as if Sofia Coppola read Nancy Jo Sales’ “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” and said, “The part of this story where they break into people’s houses is so great that we don’t even need to do anything to it in order to make it into a movie” and then never went back and reexamined that thought! Sitting back and letting the story tell itself is not a technique that could never work, I’m sure, and telling a story about awful people seemingly without judgement is interesting, but when the story is as one-note as this story is AND you seem to be burying parts that could possibly make it more dynamic, it’s a hard technique to swing.

The movie lacks any insight into the characters and their motivation more than a few clips from the Sales interviews that seemed to be chosen for humor but were displayed plainly and were not particularly funny. (I do understand that the point in doing this would be to show that they had no motivation in particular, but that is not a point that can carry a film when the subjects are teens. Teens are dumb. It isn’t interesting that they had no motivation to do the stupid shit they did, teens generally don’t.) There isn’t any examination of their relationship to each other or how that changed or how it anything-ed, or any examination of anything in general. The ending, where –SPOILER– the one kid rats out the other kids is so glossed over that you could miss it if you didn’t previously know the story. Why? DON’T YOU WANT THIS TO BE A MOVIE?! The most entertaining moments, if you ask me, are reenactments from EW’s Pretty Wild, and even then they are just less funny and less dynamic recreations of a thing that already exists and that you can stream on Netflix. The only thing The Bling Ring seems to have set out to say is, “This happened.” And then, “Let me show you how shiny it was when it happened.” The story isn’t interesting enough to hold 1.5 hours worth of cinematic attention on its own, and there isn’t an attempt to portray it in a way that fools you into believing it is. Basically, YOU NEED TO ADD SOME SALT 2 THIS MOVIE DISH. Yuck. Very bland. (Also: Hi, Gavin Rossdale!)