Generation Wealth

I enjoyed this film. It was very compelling. All profiles are of damaged people with a lot of regret. Including the film maker, who confesses her feelings of abandonment by her own mother as a child, only to repeat the cycle herself...

This is surely one of the most important stories we can be telling about the way we live now- the relentless pursuit for wealth and fame that obsesses up so many us. Celebrated photo journalist Lauren Greenfield brings her unique eye to bear on over twenty years of excess. The stories she focuses on are both appalling and touching. Greenfield looks at the wealthy LA teens of the 90s including a young Kim Kardashian and talks to the extraordinary disgraced hedge fund manager Florian Homm, a former porn star and most heartbreakingly of all a neglectful mother obsessed with plastic surgery. It's an idiosyncratic documentary about the pursuit of money as an inadequate sticking plaster over the pervading wounds of scarcity and lack we feel in a secular, fame obsessed society. Greenfield seems to acknowledge her own unreliability as a narrator by turning the camera on herself and her family and documenting her own absences from them as she relentlessly pursued her subjects over the years. It makes for an uneven narrative and a story without easy conclusions. But it felt truthful to me because of it. We're all in this mess together and we are all voyeurs.

Most of it is really interesting, but the way subjects are strung together is a bit sloppy at times, most noticeably during a very jumbled second half.

It's frustrating, because there are few scenes on their own that are boring or poorly made- it just suffers when it comes to editing, because the whole ends up feeling less than the sum of its parts.

Still, if you can get past that, there's some very interesting points raised, and it'll probably get you thinking and/or feeling about how intensely some people fixate on wealth, and just how much damage can be caused as a result of such an obsession.

It's a decent documentary, but with some better editing and more of a flow between scenes, could have been great or close to it...

Started out with topic at hand. Generational wealth splattered with self promotion of her other movies/ writings. A tablespoon of her family biography and an inner look at some family pathology. Too self serving for my taste. For the love of God stay on topic.

Literally all over the place. Large disappointment.

What interesting subject matter spanning decades of following kids born with silver spoons. And there definitely IS some interesting photography and inter views, but the biggest issue is that it fails to draw any big conclusions around the central theme. It feels a little bit like, "here is some info from my work as a journalist/photographer and make with it what you well." Which is fine, but it lacked follow-through thematically.