In brief: The Bling Ring

About a third of the way into 'The Bling Ring' - maybe less; it's a mercifully short film - a couple of over privileged teens decide to break into Paris Hilton's palatial LA residence. Entry is effected thanks to the cat-walk strutting heiress leaving a key under the door mat. The majority of viewers at the screening I attended groaned or face-palmed. Someone muttered, loudly, "No fucking way." Reading up on the background - yup, we're in "based on a true story" territory - it transpired this actually happened. This pair of designer-clotheshorse douchebags - later joined by various in-crowd buddies - were able repeatedly to break into the house of Hilton and rip off clothes and jewellery worth hundreds of thousands because Paris Hilton left a key under her door mat.

As the film progresses, more lamentable security lapses come to light, notably Audrina Partridge, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson and Lindsay Lohan's inability to simply lock their doors before they leave the premises. Nor, it would seem, does anyone who lives in Hollywood and works in the entertainment business have the slightest idea of how to programme a burglar alarm.

Thus the walk-in-marvel-at-the-designer-goods-walk-out-with-said-goods approach of our happy band of douchebags, all of whom had names and were played by people I'd never heard of before (except for Emma Watson who, to be perfectly honest with you, was the only reason I bothered with the film), but after a very short while I really didn't care and looking the cast up on IMDb hardly seems worth it for a 400 word review.

The big problem with 'The Bling Ring' is that, in depicting the actions of a bunch of vacuous nobodies obsessed with vacuous celebrities, the film becomes equally vacuous. This needn't have been the case, and a more satirical script and a sharper directorial approach could have made for an excoriating study of materialism and the dubious lure of celebrity culture. There are a few moments, particularly towards the end as the gang are unmasked and brought to trial, where writer/director Sofia Coppola comes close to engaging with the material with some degree of focus, but it's a case of too little too late. Whatever interest the last half hour generates, the first hour of 'The Bling Ring', with its desperately trendy soundtrack and oooh-look-at-me visuals, is little more than 'Hipster Douchebag: The Movie'.

(Oh, and to whoever designed the poster: it’s B&Es they’re pulling, not heists. Don’t try to dignify douchebaggery.)

This is the End

Okay. Imagine that Tarkovsky’s ‘The Sacrifice’ took place not in a remote dacha but a couple of miles from the Hollywood sign, that its protagonists were not a group of moody cerebral eastern Europeans but a cluster of egomaniacal actors, and that its coming apocalypse was signalled not by portentous reports on the radio but by the arrival of a Godzilla-sized demon with a penis of fire …

I’m not selling you on this, am I?

Okay. Remember when one of your mates first got a camcorder and a whole bunch of you decided you’d make a movie over the weekend only you put effort into drinking, smoking weed and arguing about what topping to order on your pizza than you did actually scripting the thing or worrying too much about blocking, camera-work, direction and, y’know, general coherence? And remember when you watched the resultant opus, some time later, stone cold sober, and realised it was an egregious embarrassment that ought never be seen by another human being? ‘This is the End’ is kind of like that, but made by celebrities and with a special effects budget. Oh, and there are actually some decent lines and a few scenes manage to land the occasional satirical punch, and …

I’m still not selling you on this, am I?

Hey, guys: for anyone who’s ever wanted to see Michael Cera impaled by a street light, Rihanna swallowed by a pit of fire, Emma Watson wielding an axe, and a bunch of over-privileged celebrities degenerate into full-on slanging matches over rights to a bar of Milky Way, the dividing up of a piece of cheese, and who jizzed on James Franco’s porno mag, then buddy THIS IS THE MOTHERFUCKING MOVIE FOR YOU!!!!

By the way, that splurge of capital letters and overdose of exclamation marks, hammered home with the expletive, is intended to introduce the reader, gently, into the brash aesthetic of the movie. The, ahem, plot involves Jay Baruchel, Seth Rogen, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill and Danny McBride – all playing versions, spoofs or public perceptions of themselves, sometimes all of these things within the same, ahem, characterisation – converging at James Franco’s house for a party. Franco also plays a version of himself. Baruchel and Rogen nip down the block for a pack of smokes. The rapture happens. They freak out and head back to the party and ostensibly safety. However, the End of Days doesn’t give a flying fuck about their combined box office clout and hellfire rains down, a pit of fire ruins Franco’s lawn, and demons run amok. A small band of survivors scream at each other, run around and trade in sick humour for the next hour and a half. The overriding impression is that you wouldn’t want to hang out with them on a good day, let alone the Day of Judgement.

‘This is the End’ is bludgeoningly unsubtle, juvenile to the point of emotional retardation, and vulgar in a way that makes you wonder whether the script was actually written or simply assembled from a horrible alphabet soup created by sticking the spleens and bowels of Roy Chubby Brown, Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison in a blender until various combinations of dick, piss and man-boob titty-fucking jokes bubbled up to the surface.

It should be utterly dire. It should be reprehensible. It should be the kind of film that earns a zero-word count on Agitation. And it is, at multiple points in its running time, all of these things. But it’s also genuinely funny and unexpectedly inventive at times. A running gag about a possible sequel to ‘Pineapple Express’ pays off in a sequel that recalls ‘Be Kind Rewind’, and there’s a send-up of ‘The Exorcist’ that is much much funnier than it has any right to be.

‘This is the End’ is not, by any set of critical perameters, a good movie. It’s not a movie I’d have any reason to watch again. But I laughed more often than not while I was watching it, and sometimes that’s all that’s needed.