Generation Wealth
Generation Wealth
| 20 July 2018 (USA)
Generation Wealth Trailers

Over the past 25 years, Lauren Greenfield's documentary photography and film projects have explored youth culture, gender, body image, and affluence. Underscoring the ever-increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots, portraits reveal a focus on cultivating image over substance, where subjects unable to attain actual wealth instead settle for its trappings, no matter their ability to pay for it.

Reviews
Jeanskynebu

the audience applauded

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Spoonatects

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

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Hayden Kane

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

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Taha Avalos

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

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fitnessfawnia

If you have a parent you will relate to this film which seriously took my breath away. So many lives were followed and even the producer was swept into the script and followed. A must watch! I can't wait to get my book copy.

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petrelet

People are going to disagree about this movie. How you rate or value it is going to depend a lot on your own sense of aesthetics. You can call it complex, or murky; multi-layered, or muddled. It pulls from the projects of filmmaker Greenfield's whole life, which is certainly ambitious - many will say that it's too ambitious, and that the film completely loses focus. Others will say that focus is overrated.Greenfield presents images and stories of excess - mania for wealth - mania for commodities - desire to shape oneself as a commodity. This content combines in several narratives or patterns:(A) At times we are told (on several occasions by leftish moralist Chris Hedges) that this is a uniquely bad time in the history of our global civilization. We are told that crescendos of hedonism and greed inevitably mark the imminent deaths of empires and ways of life. This sense of the coming apocalypse is sometimes accentuated by musical and visual elements as in Koyaanisqatsi, say, which however did it better and more single-mindedly. I should say that I find Hedges' interventions to be kind of irritating, not because they're anti-capitalist, which I would take as a plus, but because I don't think they're particularly well grounded in theory.(B) Mingled with this, we see that for some individuals in the work the crash has already come, pointedly in the collapse of 2008. A hedge fund millionaire became a wanted fugitive; an Icelandic fisherman who became a bank employee had to go back to his boat; other persons experienced other kinds of bubble-bursting. But some of them have actually survived and accepted their new lives.(C) Another pattern one sees is that some of the people just grew out of it. Early in the film we see teenagers who, back in the 1990's when she first photographed them, were given to all sorts of unhealthy excesses. Then, today, 20 years or more later, they have gotten over it and became kind of okay people. This is a hopeful note, by the way. The excessive kids you are panicking about today may be a lot different after they have had a few years to mature.(D) But also on some level the film is really about Greenfield's own life - her experiences with her mother, whom she saw as obsessed with work, and with her own kids, who have seen her as obsessed with work. I should point out here that the farther the film progresses, the more it takes the position that "wealth" encompasses just about any thing that someone is overly obsessed with, such as work, one's body, having a child, and so on. You will hear that Greenfield "has always been photographing and reporting on wealth", but someone else can say "well, sure, once you have decided to define 'wealth' as just about anything, of course she has." Apparently this film is just one facet of her opus of oeuvre compilation, which we see has also produced a coffee-table book for people with very sturdy coffee tables.My own bottom line is that I am happy to have seen it, but then I'm pretty tolerant of ambiguity and of filmmakers pursuing their own visions even if they aren't exactly clear and don't have what you would call "a point" exactly. This may help you decide whether you will like it or not.

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sandyvillettimarketing

Lauren Greenfield's new film about the American Dream of acquiring money, fame, status, and having more, more, more in life to satisfy the me, me, me attitude is brilliant, disturbing, shocking, but the most utterly entertaining and eye-opening. It will make you stop and exam your own life...or at least it should!

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mattshonfeld

Ms Greenfield spent two decades documenting wealth and consumerism and the influence of affluence. This is a brilliantly made, highly entertaining, alarming and hilarious movie.Loved it!

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