Ladies and Gentleman, hospitable Southerners, the French Foreign Ministry of Culture,
surfers, hip hoppers, David Lynch, Pantera, and Limp Bizkit. While television may try to slay the cinema Gods. I can always count on a few lads and lassies to keep pushing the envelope even when the box office return rate has shell shocked the rest. After Steven Soderbergh's "retirement" State of Cinema speech I got a little nervous it was an amazing speech from a cinematic wizard with tent pole success. So when he said cinematic art is vanishing quicker than Barnes & andNoble I got concerned.
Then I went to the first day of the summer Summit Cinema festival and it all changed. The red carpet
was out in Hollywood. The Magnum Ice Cream bars sponsored. Which of course means the stiletto Magnum Girls. Sofia Coppola and Paris Hilton did the ceremonial ribbon cutting. The assortment of
noir black and white fashion was there. Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, and Karl Lagerfeld brought high fashion onto Sunset.
The room went dark for none other than the cinematic treasure aka Sofia Coppola's "Bling Ring".
Opening shot of teenage kid's scaling a celebrity's fence etched in security camera lime green night vision set the tone. The film chronicles rich teenage angst with a bull's eye. In "Rebel Without a Cause" James Dean enters a new school friendless. The same is true for Israel Broussard's character. When Dean asks Buzz as they are about to drive cars off cliffs "why are we doing this?" The response from Buzz is "we have to do something". Reckless teenage excess has been happening since the 1950's in cinema and now Sofia God bless her has taken a whack at youth gone wild. For all the critics who find the characters as shallow, unlikable, and are aimlessly searching for a protagonist happy hunting. When I looked I found teenagers that were bored. I was happy that Sofia chose not to judge them. I myself have no idea what high school would be like today? Celebrity and reality television may be the other focus of critics. I saw the stealing and home burglaries of celebrities as teenage rebellion. Ironically in "Rebel Without a Cause" teens die the same could be said for "Less Than Zero". Nobody dies here, but jail is on the menu. I never really thought throughout the movie how hard Paris or Lohan's life must have been as a result of the burglaries. Sofia Coppola turns the stealing into an addictive art form.
Onto the best part and away from the academic analysis. The feeling as a viewer was amazing. The bucket of color Sofia dumps is awesome. The shoes, jewelry, handbags, outfits, and homes themselves jump off the screen like a Porsche driven by Duran Duran. The club scenes and color patterns reminded me of Michael Mann's "Miami Vice" movie. The party atmosphere and quantity of drug sequences set the mindset and tone of these crazy teens. The music is perfect rap, techno, and Sofia's personal picks. Nobody is writing about the parents in this film they are just as out of touch with reality or missing in action as the teens are. The best visual images are Katie Chang spraying Lohan's perfume in slow motion, Paris Hilton's shoe room, Emma Watson' s outside of court television interview, and the best visual the exterior shot of the Hollywood glass doll house mansion as the camera slowly zooms forward and the interior landscape is occupied by Katie and Israel.
The Summit Film Festival is of to a sizzling start. Don't touch that dial cinefiles!
