A Disappointing Continuation

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

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.

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!

I am not sure what the film maker, laura greenfield, is going for here, but she fails miserably. a documentary about self involved, self indulgent and greedy people might sound like fun, but it's not. believe me. you won't feel a drop of sympathy for anyone here. one thing i did notice. ms. greenfield seems to blame her mother for her own shortcomings. her mother is having none of it. proceed at your own risk.

Photographer/Director Laurie Greenfield's Generation Wealth was extremely well-received at Austin's SXSW Film Festival (coming off of its appearances at Sundance and the Berlin Film Festival). It is a remarkable cinematic journey as she revisits those she has photographed for previous projects which have often focused on excessive wealth. Greenfield eloquently captures the decaying of the American Dream as a form of corrupt capitalism has eaten away at American idealism and replaced it with a form extreme narcistic materialism. In many ways this film explains - while barely mentioning him - how this country could elect corrupt narcissist as its President. It describes a country where beauty, sex, fame, and status have all become commodities on sale to the highest bidder Greenfield takes it a step further by intriguingly adding herself and her own family as part of the story and suggesting that her careerism is also part of the problem. The photography is beautiful and provides a powerful narrative of the collapse of the American Dream. Highly recommended to all who care about the future of America. Greenfield should be commended for a work that is both personal and political.