Catfish

If everything really happened the way the film presents: earnestly, alive and without any plan or script, the filmmakers had more luck than sense, because this excellent topic for a documentary basically fell out of nowhere on their laps. But these doubts don’t diminish the impact of the documentary as a whole, or the tension (before the meeting) and the emotions (after the meeting) that it manages to arouse. (25/09/2014)

SPOILER ALERT!!! Personally, I have my own opinion on communicating through all those social networking sites, dating sites, internets, and suchlike, plus I'm paranoid even with people I know, hence I suffered quite a bit in the first half over a bunch of laptop-wielding investigative discoverers of America who can't believe their own eyeballs that someone might be pulling their leg through Facebook. But Catfish pulls an ace out of its sleeve, especially in the second half, with that immediate confrontation with the reality that no one on the crew bargained for. There's that tough talk about how they're going to whip the creator of the existing imaginarium into the woods and grab them by the balls over a Heineken, because suddenly everyone realizes that no one makes themselves Tony Stark on the internet to hunt down virtual prey, but as an escape from their own smallness and incompetence. And the sadly honest last quarter of the film actually inadvertently describes the way the internet has been working for the last few years. It's like a Dr. Frankenstein device in which petty people create their own monsters out of the elements they always wanted to be but are too lazy or incompetent to make it happen. It's just a shame about the filmmakers' cheap call for sensationalism, treating this problem of internet identities like an African famine and letting the film end with a retarded monologue by the lead character's totally effeminate husband, which was supposed to explain metaphorically why people like her are important. Which is as stupid as taking seriously the debaters (heh sorry about that word) on news sites. EDIT: If the Illuminati, ZOG, NWO, or any other conspiracy organization exists, the internet is their most powerful product because it gets people to act out into thin air thinking someone is listening. If the internet had existed back in the 80s, kids would still have a picture of Lenin above their blackboard. Imho, if the current European situation had erupted fifty years ago, the Old Continent would be in flames. Protests today take the form of the "like" button on the FB room "For the return of the old ways!". You can do it from home, you can eat while you do it, and no one can tear gas you through your monitor... (12/05/2023)