Where has the time gone? I can't believe it's been a whole month since I last reviewed a book-I've read a ton since then! It seems that life has gotten crazier with each passing day. Since my last post I left on a whirlwind trip to France and Switzerland and a couple days after I got back I was back to work. As a teacher I enjoy my long summer breaks, maybe a little too much. It was really tough to get back in the swing of work and in the run up to the first day of school not much other than work related things were getting done. (Okay a lot of wedding planning stuff was getting done)
I did find some time to catch up on a boatload of reading though and I have several different books on tap to review soon.
First up is “The Bling Ring” by Nancy Jo Sales. If you watched the short lived E! show “Pretty Wild” you already know a little bit about the Bling Ring (or if you followed TMZ during 2009-2010). If you haven’t watched “Pretty Wild” it’s on Netflix streaming, go take a gander at the trainwreck. Alexis Neiers, one of the main cast members and a participant in the Bling Ring, was addicted to heroin while filming and it’s a sad thing to watch her go more and more off the rails. (I’m happy to report she has since gotten sober, gotten married and had a child).
“The Bling Ring” tells the tail of spoiled California rich kids who are jealous of the celebrities they aspire to be one day. These high school students covet the designer wardrobes and expensive jewelry of their favorite celebrities. While many of us can relate to this obsession (I admit to a lust for designer products) these teens took it too far.
Instead of just lusting from the sidelines they take action to achieve their dreams. They started a business, it’s really a heartwarming story of kids achieving the American dream. Well, except for the fact that their side business was robbing the very celebrities they admired. These high school students would stalk the celebrities on TMZ and other websites to find out when they were out of town and then break into their houses.
Nancy Jo Sales is a writer for Vanity Fair and wrote the article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” covering the case. The article got even more press when Alexis Neiers left Nancy Jo a ranting, sobbing, ridiculous voicemail and the frenzied recording and re-recording of the message was aired on “Pretty Wild”. The clip then appeared on “The Soup” and various other talk shows and suddenly was a bit of a cult phenomenon (only in America).
The book is just an expansion on the article and not a very good one at that. Sales attempts to take something that is by nature a ridiculous story of excess and greed and turn it into a psychology paper. She is constantly delving into the psychology behind why these kids possibly felt the way they felt and she tried to dive into the collective psyche of the American populace.
In all honesty, no one is interested in the psychology of these ridiculous teenagers and their ridiculous obsession. We admired them because they did something so completely off the wall and we vilified them because they did something they shouldn’t have and barely acted contrite about it. 80% of the book’s information has already been covered in the extensive media coverage surrounding the case and the other 20% isn’t really that interesting to begin with. Nancy Jo inserts her self so seamlessly into the case that her personal biases really show through the writing. She presents Nick Prugo in a sympathetic, wounded victim light and presents the rest of the defendants as evil and manipulative. It is rare that the truth is so polarizing and while it may be true that the other defendants were manipulative not all of the blame can be taken away from Prugo. Is it any surprise that Nick was the defendant that Nancy Jo spent the most time with?
The book was made into a highly anticipated and badly reviewed movie directed by Sofia Coppola. It seemed like every person in the world detested this movie. I was lucky enough to score myself and the dear fiance (who’s a really good sport about girly movies) a private showing (okay to be fair it was a private showing because we went in the middle of the day and no one else wanted to see the movie-you haven’t seen awkward until you’re the only two people in a movie theater) and I loved it.
The movie was exactly what I expected of the book, it didn’t try too hard. It capitalized on the humor, the ridiculous and some odd form of glamour that came out the story without trying to psychoanalyze the participant. It made the characters seem human instead of the strange characters they appeared to be in the book. They weren’t some symbol of national decay and the changing mores of American society, they were portrayed for what they really were-ridiculous teenagers with WAY too much free time, a slightly unhealthy obsession and overindulgent parents.
Overall, “The Bling Ring” gets a ⅖
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