{"id":28742,"date":"2012-01-23T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2012-01-23T20:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/?p=28742"},"modified":"2018-02-20T21:33:27","modified_gmt":"2018-02-21T05:33:27","slug":"sundance-queen-of-versailles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/sundance-queen-of-versailles\/","title":{"rendered":"Sundance Journal: &#8216;The Queen of Versailles&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Only rich people would use a phrase like &#8220;cheap money&#8221; and think that there&#8217;s nothing wrong with it. David Siegel and his wife Jackie are\u2026 well, were\u2026 billionaires. David owns Westgate, the time share giant of the world.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>These are the blood-sucking leeches that promise you free trips, and all you have to do is give them a few hours of your time so they can hard-sell you into buying a time share.<\/p>\n<p>Since the real estate market went belly-up, now David and his wife are finding out the hard way that things aren&#8217;t as easy as they seemed back when they were flying in private jets and planning to build a 90,000 square-foot house in Orlando modeled after Versailles.<\/p>\n<p>Good golly, &#8216;The Queen of Versailles&#8217; is frustrating on so many levels. Not that it&#8217;s a bad movie \u2013 on the contrary, this is one of the better documentaries I&#8217;ve seen at the festival. It&#8217;s just that watching these rich people whine about their lots in life is so grating. They&#8217;re so detached from reality it&#8217;s unfathomable. At one point, when the family has to cut back on expenses, Jackie (the mother) asks one of her kids, <em>&#8220;So, how was it flying commercial?&#8221;<\/em> This is the type of person she is. She&#8217;s absolutely, positively clueless about life, and it&#8217;s simply flabbergasting to watch.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s actually heartbreaking to see the stories of the family&#8217;s housekeepers juxtaposed against their opulent lifestyle. One lady from the Philippines laments that she hasn&#8217;t seen her own children for 20 years, and then the movie cuts to Jackie piling shopping carts with anything she can grab at Wal-Mart just because she can. Or Jackie pulling up to McDonald&#8217;s in a limo. It&#8217;s disgusting. You&#8217;re almost\u2026 wait, no, you <em>are<\/em> rooting for them to lose it all. They&#8217;re so callous and full of greed that I can&#8217;t remember ever seeing such a sickening display.<\/p>\n<p>If you ever want to get mad \u2013 like really, really mad \u2013 then keep an eye out for this documentary. It really is something else. It&#8217;s pure, unfiltered decadence at its very worst.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rating:<\/strong> <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/star-rating-for-reviews\/images\/star.png\" alt=\"&#9733;\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/star-rating-for-reviews\/images\/star.png\" alt=\"&#9733;\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/star-rating-for-reviews\/images\/star.png\" alt=\"&#9733;\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/star-rating-for-reviews\/images\/halfstar.png\" alt=\"&frac12;\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/star-rating-for-reviews\/images\/blankstar.png\" alt=\"&#9734;\" \/><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Only rich people would use a phrase like &#8220;cheap money&#8221; and think that there&#8217;s nothing wrong with it. David Siegel and his wife Jackie are\u2026 well, were\u2026 billionaires. David owns Westgate, the time share giant of the world.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_excerpt -->","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":28743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4508],"tags":[924,1234,4506,1959],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28742"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28742"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28927,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28742\/revisions\/28927"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}