Born Rich

Rating:
Summary: and a half. I'd give 4 if he needed the money.
Review: First, I think Jamie Johnson deserves some credit for tackling this project. For a subject that is supposedly "taboo", most of the subjects seemed willing -- if not eager -- to offer some insights, but careful to limit what they said in great detail.

The overwhelming impression I had from these kids is that they suffer from a lack of any sense of purpose. Whereas most of us have to tackle the question of who we are while at the same time worrying about how to pay the bills, they make their quest for identity seem that much greater in comparison, just like the bigger houses and bigger cars. Overall, they come across as self-involved and uninteresting beyond one facet of their character.

The most seemingly deplorable person in the film was Luke, who was remarkable in his honesty when it comes to gold-digging b****** and citing his need to subjugate others with his social entitlement. The affectatious Cody comes across as just plain ridiculous, stressing the importance of subtlety in conversation and spending his time focused on the lapel height of his suits. In contrast to Cody's pseudo-intellectual quoting & commentary of class structure is Carlos, the neurotic chain-smoking royalty descended from a German Kaiser, whose detached and emotionally devoid comments made me wonder how much a scarily small gene pool contributed to the mishaps of European history.

On the other hand, some of the other other participants (Josiah, S.I. and Stephanie) make honest efforts to carve out their own niches in the world. I don't feel sorry for these people, but I wouldn't necessarily trade my problems for theirs either. They can put the accomplishments of their families in perspective with their place within that family & the world -- they don't need to make excuses for having money or question whether they are deserving of what was given to them. If money seemed to be the variable behind most of the psychological or developmental issues these kids had, there was an outlier with Ivanka Trump. She seemed far more normal in her reaction to abnormal plights, like discovering her parents divorce in the papers. You would never know Donald Trump could juggle fatherhood with everything else, but he must have done something right. Maybe he was planning on writing a book on how to raise normal rich kids. Jamie deserves a big nod too & hopefully in the process he found part of his calling.


Rating:
Summary: Watered Down
Review: I read about this documentary before it even had a distributor in W magazine (12/02). I was SO excited when it finally came out on HBO, but it was terribly different from the article. It was just really watered down. The article was really great & much more in depth. I suppose they weren't able to get a distributor making all those rich kids (with rich influential parents) look like spoiled brats. If they weren't spoiled brats they seemed like they needed to be on medication (or were on too much medication). The only one that seemed semi normal was Ivanka Trump, who was the only not to have the attitude of "I get whatever I want, whenever I want it". Its sad when a 4 page article is better than a 75 minute movie. Maybe instead they should have just distributed it themselves.

Rating:
Summary: Money can't buy happiness
Review: Interesting choice of topic. Interesting angle - someone who is born rich and about to inherite his money looks at how money affects the people of his social class. Lesson learned after watching the movie - Money can't buy happiness, class or manners. Rich kids have the same types of social issues growing up that middle class kids have, just on a different scale.

Rating:
Summary: content wise, it was a 5, but production wise, it wasn't
Review: What an intriguing notion -- get the youngest beneficiaries of inherited wealth to discuss something that is considered the ultimate taboo. The results Jamie Johnson gets are really very interesting.

What the kids say really runs the gamut. Ivanka Trump comes across very level headed, even saying at one point that she couldn't understand why people treated her differently when she was younger, because the money that got her that type of attention was her parents', and she wasn't going to give it to that person. Josiah Hornblower and S.I. Newhouse came across really sympathically, seeming really embarassed about their family's money. As some of the newpaper reviewers have pointed out, these two seem to want to succeed, despite their parent's money.
Stephanie Ercklentz and Christina Floyd come across as a bit frivolous, but not shallow. Cody Franchetti seems to be desperate to sound really intellectual, and for the most part he succeeds, but at times, it seems really forced. Carlo Von Zeitschel and Georgina Bloomberg are only seen for short clips, so it not possible to get a really good sense of who they are. Von Zeitschel does do a good job of playing all European and jaded, but he also seems very nervous about talking on camera.

The most ballyhooed participant was Luke Weil, because he sued Jamie Johnson. He seemed really troubled and dysfunctional when it comes down to it, like he was going to fall apart at any moment. Everyone who reviewed this documentary before said he came across as shallow, but to me, he just seemed really pathetic. He was the sort of person no one would take an interest in if he didn't have money. Velvet ropes part for him, because he is a wealthy person. One wonders if that would happen if he wasn't. The part about his education was also pretty astounding considering he lives his life on a knife edge, and if for some reason his fortune were to disappear, like from his father getting angry about him for appearing in a documentary about rich people, he wouldn't have much to fall back on.

Another very interesting thing about this movie was that some of these people -- not all of them, if their money were taken away, would really not be all that interesting. The fact they have money makes people pay attention to them, not anything special about them or their personalities.

I don't personally know any of these people, and it is possible that Johnson, a life long friend of most of these people, cut the clips together to make them come across as more sympathetic, which they do for the most part.

Overall, I think this is a very interesting and insightful film. Johnson must be commended for making it, especially in this society, where wealth is so prized and so talked about. This is an even bigger accomplishment given that the way he portrays the rich is that they travel in such a tight circle, really not letting anyone "new" in.

The production however, is really crude. Maybe it was the filmmaker's intent to do so, to show the rich, warts and all. There were parts that I thought could have been refined a little bit.