Fyre Fraud - Festival-Desaster im Paradies

7/10 - interesting documentary reveals some truths about the much talked about Fyre Fest

One thing I found endlessly frustrating is that there is a sit-down interview with the Zuckerberg wannabe/Con Artist who gets to trot out his highly fabricated version of what happened but he is repeatedly asked direct questions which he never appears to answer - but it's hard to know because it's a quick cut edit and on to something else. If he doesn't answer 'You lost a box of keys to $2 Million worth of houses? Why didn't you tell that to the guests?' - I want to see him sit there and squirm for as long as he did in the interview. But overall, it's a fascinating spectacle to watch, as was the other Fyre documentary. I don't despise the type of people that are featured in this film: cell-phone zombies that begin every sentence with 'Literally..' and describe everything as 'Amazing'... but I do enjoy watching them actively make themselves a victim of their own narcissism.

I was very interested in the Fire festival fiasco when it broke in the spring of 2017. I watched the Netflix documentary first, and then Hulu's Verizon. Overall, I think the Netflix version has a more linear story progression and I like how it focused on the victim impact more so than the Hulu version. This Hulu doc also simply seems more amateur than the Netflix doc. I'm surprised no other reviews have mentioned it, but in this documentary when they want to relay informtaion from a court filing or statement, they have it read by one of those awful computer reading services which just sounds incredibly hokey and is frankly distracting. I've never seen that "artistic" choice in a film before. However, it you are very interested in all the details of this scandal, I would recommend both documentaries as they both contain distinct information. If you're trying to choose between them, then I would recommend the Netflix one over this.

"In the millennial era, scamming is the air we breathe." - Jia Tolentino, writer for the New Yorker

'Fyre Fraud' tells the story of a con man pretty well, and also puts it into the larger context of the current generation and social media. Between the cons, enablers, internet influencers, and the entitled, all of them reeking of incredible selfishness, it made me want to weep for humanity.

I cannot handle documentaries like this that use so much B roll and unrelated clips. Well, related only in the sense of a key word. It's that "stylized montage" from Reality Bites that I can never get out if my head. The one with the pizza spinning around like a record player. That's my definition of irony. The actual documentary looks like the awful, fake documentary in a fictional movie. Ugh