I had heard a lot about this crime growing up but I was just at the wrong age when it happened to really understand the gravity of the situation, so being able to watch it in a documentary format was really fun and definitely shows you how much celebrity culture has changed in such a short amount of time.

The Bling Ring is the name of a group of teenagers who would go into the Hollywood Hills and steal things from celebrities including Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom. These teenagers would steal anything from jewellery to money to even drugs just so they could live the high life like these celebrities were, and they justified it by saying that these celebrities were rich so really losing a few thousand dollars worth of items wasn’t going to make that much of a difference to them, and if they didn’t want their stuff stolen they should have learnt to close and lock their doors.

These burglaries went on for quite a while but soon with the use of CCTV home cameras the assailants were caught, but that’s just the beginning…

One of the Bling Ring members and a woman who claimed she only robbed Orlando Bloom’s house and none of the others was Alexis Neiers. Alexis at the time lived with two sisters and her mother and had just got a reality TV slot that would basically follow her in her family’s shenanigans and was thought to be the hillbilly version of the Kardashians. Of course the producers of the show didn’t know at the time that Alexis was part of this ring and so their show really took off and blew up because suddenly they had all these court drama moments going on with Alexis possibly going to jail.

Another big personality from The Bling Ring and in the documentary is Nick Prugo. Nick seems to be the self-confessed leader of the group and was definitely the one who revelled the most in what they were doing, however it shows how cold, calculated and cowardly he was when he takes a plea deal basically throwing everyone else under the bus just to save his own butt. I find Nick quite a hard person to watch because he seems so uncaring of what he did and while yes, you can think these celebrities have millions of pounds so losing some money might not matter to them, what actually matters is the fact that their home no longer feels like their sanctuary, their home is no longer their safe space and is now a place where strangers have come in and defiled everything.

In this documentary we get to speak to the Bling Ring members who are happy to talk out about what they did as well as the celebrities that were affected and even Perez Hilton who we all know was a huge personality and blogger at the time and is still very prolific. What I found fascinating is how different the world of Los Angeles is to normality, even Alexis’ mum was so money and fame hungry that she didn’t seem to care what was going on as long as it was giving her and her family notoriety. She really reminded me of Regina’s mum from Mean Girls in that her daughters could do no wrong even if it meant criminal charges.

But what I really loved at the end of this documentary was how all the way through things felt a bit off, things didn’t feel quite what they seemed and at the end we see that all of the people being interviewed on this documentary were on green screen. You expected these lavish homes that were behind them in the shots to be their own, to be the life that they have built up for themselves since everything that went down, but it’s all a facade and that’s the perfect way to describe these robberies and these callus actions is that it’s all for illusion. It’s all for them to think that they are something that they’re not by stealing it from someone who is, and it really goes to show that regardless of the materialistic things that you own that doesn’t actually change who you really are inside or how dark your heart actually is.

What do you think of The Bling Ring?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Film and TV critic. View all posts by shonaharding