The Bling Ring (2013) is a surprisingly funny, biting movie

Title: The Bling Ring
Director: Sofia Coppola
Language: English
Rating: R (mostly for language)

I was pleasantly surprised by The Bling Ring, which was funnier and sharper than I expected. It's a crime movie for the age of celebrity obsession and passive consumerism.

The characters are teenaged criminals and striking in how aggressively passive they are. They commit their crimes with minimal thought, but also with an obsessive repetitiveness. In the moments when they try to sound forceful and in command of themselves, they use passive phrases and clichés to describe their own actions (their crimes are "circumstances that happened"). They'll latch onto an opportunity and exploit it, but only if it drifts within easy reach; they'll adapt to the moment, calling on ready-made personae (as thieves, groupies, stars, wounded children, whatever).

Here's one of the teens, Nikki (Emma Watson), defending herself at the start of the movie:

I'm a firm believer in karma. And I think this situation was attracted into my life as a huge learning lesson for me. To grow and expand as a spiritual human being. I want to lead a huge charity organization. I want to lead a country one day, for all I know.

So what have these teenaged criminals done? (And keep in mind, this is based on a real-life crime spree…)

Week in Seven Words #236

dupe
Her way of preserving peace between us is to think that I'm incapable of coming up with my own ideas. My head is a bucket, basically, and other people come along and drop ideas into it. This means that when I disagree with her, it's not really out of my own willfulness; I just didn't protect the inside of my bucket-head well enough. (The alternative is to think of me as a calculating opponent, purposefully against her.)

fibrosis
There are relationships held together by scar tissue and not much else.

indignant
A car protesting at getting towed - its alarm going off in the early morning.

lures
She tosses food to the birds, but not to feed them - only to get them closer to her when she begins her chase.

scattering
Her brain trips her up. She makes rapid deductions, but can't focus well. She chases down each stray piece of information no matter how irrelevant it is.

scholastic
It's a theater of the academic: pants rolled at the ankles, square-framed glasses, bike and backpack, a spotty beard.

staged
The barrel outside the store has filled with rain, and now the lamplight dances in it.

Half-Day in Boston

From the same trip with the Cambridge morning walk and Salem in 25 photos…

Boston Museum of Fine Arts



Mary Baker Eddy Library





At the library, there's the Mapparium - a huge walk-in glass globe you can stand right in the middle of. The globe dates from the 1930s, so it's a snapshot of the world then. Wasn't allowed to take photos in it, but here's a look from the website.

Week in Seven Words #235

carousel
Paintings, mirrors, glassy music, kids bobbing on waves of color and noise.

fetching
A winsome, curly-haired lawyer picking her away through old warehouses and artist lofts.

genuine
People talking about what they love or what they're interested in, without competitiveness or preening.

patrol
Wasps swooping over a green plot where Lincoln sits and listens.

platinoid
Skyscrapers that look like they were made entirely of platinum group metals: ruthenium windows, iridium roofs.

sunny
Yellow brick, bright as fruit, a backdrop for trees.

traces
In a neighborhood saturated with history, I wonder who once stood beside the lampposts or looked out the windows with the white shutters.

I have Paloma Faith's Upside Down stuck in my head

Week in Seven Words #234

afloat
A chair floating legs-up in a lake, like a creature from Seuss.

busted
A building grinning through broken teeth.

civilized
A well-to-do woman from San Francisco sits beside me on the bench. She asks several questions about New York - recommendations for museums, etc. - and after each suggestion, she points out that in San Francisco there's something better. "You have fine museums," she says, as if she fears I'm deeply offended. "But…" And here she tells me another thing that's wrong with New York, in tones of gentle regret. I hope she doesn't guess how amused I am by our conversation.

deposits
The lake has a marble quality to it, light and glass as you look to the floor of the shallows and find pink rocks and twisted scrap metal.

guardedness
I'm becoming better aware of what resources I can spare for others and what I should better protect. Another line of defense against those who alight on other people's emotions in a vampiric way.

heartsease
To make train fare, he tries selling artwork, some of it not his own. Out of a book he's torn a detailed sketch of a pansy drawn in three colors. One dollar for it.

pressured
A morning of quiet sidewalks and still trees. The air doesn't move, and the sun pounds on my head.

Mr. Sammler's Planet: Mr. Sammler Is the Moon

(I read this novel for the Classics Club challenge.)

For much of Mr. Sammler's Planet, Artur Sammler reminds me of a gasping fish on a garbage heap. In some ways, he is also like the moon.

Why is he gasping for air?

Sammler is living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1960s. He has a keen eye for all the ways society is crumbling. He makes note of the crudeness and immaturity, the lack of dignity and stuntedness in people's behavior. As an intellectual, he is asked at one point to give a talk at a university and is soundly rejected by the audience for being old and impotent. Society, he thinks, has been given over to children and barbarians.

Had the book stayed on this level, of an elderly intellectual analyzing the defects of the society around him, it would not have been as interesting as what it becomes. Because, even as Mr. Sammler assesses the surrounding degradations, he doesn't think that he has any solutions to offer.