The Bling Ring + Friday Top Five

Ah, the disappointment! If I had made a list earlier this year of the top five movies I was most anticipating this year, The Bling Ring would have been on it (along with The Wolf of Wall Street, Fruitvale Station, The Spectacular Now and The Way Way Back). While the story seems very Lifetime movie worthy (based on the true story of a bunch of L.A. kids who decide to rob the houses of celebrities whose style they admire), with Sofia Coppola behind the camera, it had to be so much more than what it seemed. But I was wrong. The Bling Ring is exactly what it seems. There's no deeper meaning here. Sure, Coppola makes a few very interesting directing choices but for the most part, this is style over substance 101. Plus, for a Coppola movie, this has a very bad script. How many times can you watch a bunch of pretty teenagers break into a house (very easily, I might add) and say things like "Sick" "Hot" and "Oh My God!" The continuous montage of repeating images gets old very quickly. There is a saving grace here though. And that is the performances of Leslie Mann, and especially, ESPECIALLY, Emma Watson, who knocks it out of the damn park. I've never been impressed with her acting before (although I did manage to miss out on that whole Harry Potter craze), but she is so ridiculously good and, also, hilarious in this movie. She's not the star like the media will make you believe. She is supporting, but she steals the entire movie away from everyone else. The movie is almost worth seeing for her performance alone. But everything else is a disappiontment.

Grade: C+

The girls in The Bling Ring behave quite badly: breaking into celeb houses, stealing cars, money, shoes and clothes, snorting obsessive amounts of cocaine. However, if you want five better movies with bad girls, here they are, in this weeks Friday Top Five:

05. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
Quite possibly the epitome of mean girls, especially if you are a high school freshman, Parker Posey's Darla is a class A bitch. She gets her kick torturing younger girls and saying things like "Wipe that face off your head, bitch." Ah, high school!

04. Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004)
Led by a pre-fame Rachel McAdams, the girls in Mean Girls are the meanest of mean girls. They back stab, they gossip, they make burn books about your flaws, the even turn nice girl Cady (Lindsay Lohan before she went cray) into the queen B of mean girls. Plus, they have pretty terrible parent supervision (see: Amy Poehler).

03. Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)
Maybe Thelma and Louise were just misunderstood. They had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and you can argue that everything they did was out of love and female friendship and that they are strong, independent women and we should actually be looking up to them. I would agree. But, they sure do lead the police on a cross country crime spree that culminates with that pitch perfect ending.

02. Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003, 2004)
Uma Thurman's The Bride is just a all around general bad ass. However, she spends the first movie fighting off bad girls Lucy Lui (and, my personal fave Tarantino character, Go-Go), and then she spends the second movie having a knock down, drag out, trailer park brawl with Daryl Hannah, which is glorious and amazing in every sense of the word.

01. Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988)
The epitome of mean girl high school movies, the Heathers are the absolute worst of the worst when it comes to mean girls. But good girl turned homicical maniac (homicide, suicide, what's the difference??) Veronica (80s goddess Winona Ryder) doesn't get off the hook here either. Once she hooks up with J.D. (Christian Slater), her life gets terribly complicated.

Mini Reviews: The Hangover Part 2, The Dilemma, X-Men: First Class

The Hangover Part 2 - In the sequel to the super hilarious The Hangover, the wolf pack is back and this time in Thailand. It starts out much the same - a terrible phone call - and then flashes back to a few days earlier and shows you how things play out. This time around, Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Allen (Zach Galifianakis) attend Stu's (Ed Helms) wedding in Thailand. Stu is still a bit stunned from the events of the first film, so he doesn't want a bachelor party. Still, things get crazy and the three guys wake up in a dive motel one morning and can't find Stu's fiancee's little brother. Then they must retrace their steps and try to figure out what happens. Much like the first, they find the brother in the eleventh hour and relive their crazy night via pictures at the end. That's just the thing. It's sooo much like the original. And, I mean, to a certain extent that's great. Don't fix it, if it's not broken, right? But this is pretty much just a shot for shot remake in a different city with slightly different events. Is it funny? Sure. But it's nowhere near as laugh out loud crazy as the original. It's got it's moments but sequels can never really live up to their predecessors. They are inferior films by definition alone. The Hangover Part 2, unfortunately, is no different.
Grade: C+

The Dilemma - What the hell was Ron Howard thinking? He's made some pretty great films but this is sooo not one of them. Vince Vaughn and Kevin James star as besties. Vaughn is dating Jennifer Connelly and James has somehow manages to snag himself Winona Ryder. One day, Vaughn's Ronny discovers that Ryder's Geneva is cheating with a hottie named Zip (Channing Tatum). Hence, the dilemma. Should he tell his best friend? Should he wait a few days until the stress of a big work project passes? Who gives a crap? You don't care about these awful, hateful, unlikeable characters. They are all liars and cheaters. Plus, the movie is not funny at all. I didn't laugh once. And Vauhgn is someone I generally find funny. Also, I'm sorry, but if Kevin James manages to marry someone as hot and out of his league as Winona Ryder then I'm pretty sure he should allow her to cheat on him with Channing Tatum. (Just kidding!). Still, I don't have a single good thing to say about this movie and I clearly found my first possibility for Worst Movie of the Year.
Grade: F

X-Men: First Class - By no means am I a huge X-Men fan. I saw the previous trilogy. I guess I can say, overall, I enjoyed them. They had their positives and their negatives. Still, I wasn't hopping out of my seat to see this prequel. Let's just say - I was pleasantly surprised. X-Men: First Class is fun and exciting. It's got a ridiculously talented and hot young cast (James McAvoy as Xavier, Michael Fassbender as Magneto, Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, Zoe Kravitz as Angel). The story line was a bit confusing but interesting. It seems Erik / Magneto was raised and tested by a Nazi doctor and he's now all grown up and seeking revenge. Turns out the Nazi doctor is also a mutant named Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) who is hell bent on starting World War III. Erik teams up with Charles who is now helping out Rose Byrne and the CIA. They start finding a bunch of young mutants and train them to stop Shaw and the Bay of Pigs AND the potential World War III. The movie meanders a bit, and could have lost about 20 minutes or so on the editing floor, but overall I can't say too many bad things about it. It's fun and enjoyable and what else do you want out of a comic book summer movie? Fassbender is a total bad ass as Erik / Magneto. Remember his name because he is going to be HUGE. Bacon gives a great performance as the villain of the film. There are also two really great, well done cameos in the film. All in all, X-Men: First Class is surprisingly and refreshingly damn good.
Grade: B

Black Swan

Black Swan is this beautiful yet disturbing thriller set in the world of ballet. It's like a crazy fever dream where there is little room for reality. To say director Darren Aronofsky is fearless is an understatement. This is the man, afterall, who brought us Pi and Requiem for a Dream (which is, arguably, the most depressing movie I have ever seen in my entire life). He has said Black Swan is a companion piece for his last excellent outing, The Wrestler, and I can't say that I disagree. The two films definitely have their similarities - the manic pacing, the behind the scenes feel, the search for perfection, and definitely the endings. However, I think Black Swan is a better film. At the very least, it's definitely more beautiful looking.
Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a dancer in the ballet company who wants to be perfect and strives to be a star. She is a good technical dancer, but lacks passion and intensity. She gets to audition for the lead in Swan Lake and while the demanding, seductive director of the company (Vincent Cassel) thinks she would make the perfect White Swan, he doesn't quite see her as the dangerous and sensual Black Swan. Newcomer to the company Lily (Mila Kunis), however, is perfect for the Black Swan. She's got a back tattoo, for Christ's sake! In the end, Thomas chooses Nina anyway. So, then we get to the good stuff. Nina has to struggle to find her sensuality (Thomas suggest she go home and touch herself). She also has to deal with jealousy from the other dancers and bitter resentment from Beth (Winona Ryder!!!), the aging star who is being pushed into retirement and is none too happy about it. Nina also has to deal with her super over protective stage mother (Barbara Hershey) who treats her like she's 12. To say Nina cracks under all the pressure is an understatement. But what is real, and what is all inside our pretty little ballerina's head? Is she really pulling swan feathers out of her skin? Is Lily really trying to steal her role? Is she really making out with boys at bars and girls in her bedroom? Is she really turning into the black swan she is so desperately trying to find a way to inhabite on stage? Black Swan is a wonderfully thrilling film, trying - and not trying, really - to answer all of those questions.
Natalie Portman is revelatory as Nina. At the beginning, she's meek and naive, sweet, innocent, seeking perfection but never raising her voice. By the end, she's a cracked and broken version of herself - all seduction and intensity and passion. Portman, who is so often rigid in many of her movies, really let's herself become this character and it's her best role to date, by a mile. She most certainly deserves that Oscar come March (sorry Annette Bening!). Mila Kunis is also quite surprising. Best known as comedic Jackie on That 70s Show, Kunis, who looks shockingly like Portman, is all raw sexuality. She's charming, seducing both Portman and the audience. Hershey is perfect as the overprotective mom, watching her sweet daughter transform right before her eyes. And is all of this her fault for pushing her too hard? You can see in her eyes that she wonders the same thing. Cassel is impressive as well as the lecherous director. Then there is my girl Winona! It's so good to have her back in a worthwhile movie. Sure, she's only in it for a few scenes, but they are key scenes and she nails the bitterness of a once hot young thing being pushed into oblivion (oh, wait! the irony!). Portman's Nina wants to steal her lipstick and her earrings to become more like her... and who wouldn't want to be like Winona, the it girl of the 90s, making a long-awaited comeback in a fabulous arthouse film?
To be frank, Black Swan is a beautiful mind fuck of a movie. And, really, what's better than that?
Grade: A