Review of The Bling Ring

Several years ago, a group of Los Angeles teenagers learned that they could easily break into the homes of celebrities, keeping tabs on their comings and goings online. This is their story, as told by Sofia Coppola. Coppola is one of my favorite modern directors. Her previous four films are generally about ennui-filled lives, and I can see what attracted her to this story about these vapid social media- and celebrity-obsessed kids feeding off the even more vapid celebrities (they even pick the most awful celebrities imaginable to victimize, like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox), but, in all honesty, this story just has no conflict whatsoever, and the little jackass teenagers who are at its center are so painfully uninteresting that, after spending half an hour with them, I really wanted to walk out of the theater. To boot, the plot is repetitive as Hell - teenagers break into house, teenagers steal baubles, teenagers drive away like idiots singing along with rap songs, teenagers do drugs, teenagers go out dancing. The film goes through this cycle like six times before the cops finally arrest them. The film is sometimes well shot (it was the last film shot by master cinematographer Henry Savides), and there's at least one killer sequence where the two main teens (Katie Chang and Israel Broussard) rob a glass house where it's shot from quite a distance (it's perhaps reminiscent of the glass apartments from Tati's Playtime - I don't know if Coppola had that in mind). The most recognizable stars in it are Harry Potter's Emma Watson and Leslie Mann, who plays her mom. I'd actually call this the worst film I've seen so far from 2013.