Fyre

I'm an oldie, and a festival veteran that has seen once great events get hijacked by the rich and gentrified. Even Burning Man is now a cabal of trust fund kids desperate to prove that their inherited wealth isn't the reason for Global Warming, because they got there in a pig poop powered bus and have a Celtic tattoo. Glastonbury is now about which fashion designer made your wellington boots.

Getting covered in mud, rained out, wind swept, sun burnt, dehydrated, not eating for 2 days were part of the experience. One thing you could rely on was that fellow festival goers would help out if you needed it, there was always a sense of camaraderie. Even the original Woodstock, a living hell, was turned into one of the greatest ever experiences because of the love shown to each other by total strangers. The common factor back in the day was that these festivals had grown from nothing, were organic, the bad ones died off, the good ones grew. Not FYRE, my God, not even close.

The more I watched this doc' the more vindicated I felt about my own views of what the festival scene has become. It's now riddled with fakers, fraudsters, wannabes, poseurs, social media addicts and worst of all...people that don't even love music, just themselves and their Instagram accounts. From the beginning, although I have no conclusive evidence, I suspect cocaine was a huge factor. Macho Alpha's trying to out snort each other and construct more elaborate party schemes to promote an app' until they ended up with FYRE. Surely buying Pablo Escobar's island, and then promoting it as such is a clue? (The festival was on that particular island until cancelled by PE's lawyer after FYRE used his name).

The oneness and kinship often displayed at other festivals in the past when things got tough was missing here. The slightest adversity turned 5,000 socialites into a baying mob that turned on each other for toilet roll. Imagine Lord Of The Flies but without the rescue at the end? Welcome to FYRE on day 1, day 1 !!! In all of my time I've never heard the cry 'Where's my villa'?! You were lucky if you had a 2 person tent and it was definitely a luxury. FYRE had large domed tents with beds and mattresses in, but just weren't good enough, apparently. As organisers fled the blood thirsty, vengeful mob and unpaid contractors we're left looking at the wreckage and an island ripped of by rich guys yet again.

This is a story of greed, machismo, hype, fakery and blatant fraud. But also a moral tale. Karma does exist and it really doesn't care how much money you have.

I laughed so much I'm about to watch this again. It's my new happy place.

This is exactly the right documentary about the social media age and the so called influencers. How a specific guy took advantage of the whole absurdity in order to make a profit and turned out to be a huge crook, taking full exploitation of the morons who are so into the lifestyle of the 21st century - trying to be social media models (or look like them), playing their own little reality show by living the high life. And at the end you're reminded that there were some hard working people, festival professionals and local Bahamians, that worked really hard to pull this off and ended up losing a lot of money plus part of their own dignity. Strong piece of film.

A nice in depth look to the disaster Fyre event and a behind the scenes look at how a great business idea can explode when you don't plan properly and you're selling an idea rather than a product. You'll be satisfied by the outcome but bittersweet knowing that a rich boy never learnt his lesson in the end.

I remember seeing the infamous promotional video for this festival (not that I'm wealthy enough to attend this kind of event, but some friend sent me the link, so I could "contemplate" the "dream" that other people were going to live). I remember feeling confused about this: what is it, exactly? It's some music festival, but all we see is this Caribbean landscape with a yacht, jetskis and girls in bikinis. Not that this seemed just like a lure, but clearly this was just pretty archetypical promo that could have been just one of a thousand meaningless "influencer" videos in this Instagram era where people are more busy turning their life into a promotional object than living and enjoying it.

I also remember reading the Vice article documenting the extent of the disaster the actual event was. That article is what got me to understand that this was actually supposed to be a music festival (I did not bother looking into that sort of detail after being sent the initial promotional video, as it seemed like your typical, meaningless Instagram garbage).

Then, over a year later, I see this thing in the Netflix menu, and decide to watch it. This is an interesting story where what one would initially perceive as pure naivety clearly turns into plain deceit, and where the expectations of grandeur for the "dream" being sold were artificially inflated through social media. And on that last point, I think this documentary does a pretty decent job of mocking how social media and "influencers" (still can't believe that's how these parasites are called), in today's world, is all about style over substance, expectations vs. reality, and the culture of appealing people with luxury items and "lifestyle" while having an empty bank account or being in major debt. How many of these stories have we heard over the years, of people living the "good life", only to go bankrupt a few year later? This is the new "15 minutes of fame" concept, one heavily filtered picture at a time.

The documentary gathers a satisfying amount of interviews with people who worked on the event, of on-site footage before and during the event, and of other significant moments that show you the true colors of Billy McFarland and Ja Rule - the founders of this scam. You do get some insight on their mentality throughout, as Ja Rule and McFarland have no grasp whatsoever on reality and won't take no for an answer, regardless of whether what they want to do is within the realm of possibility or not. It does not matter to them. They're in the Caribbean, they always got a beer in their hands, and they couldn't care less about the logistics - until the very last second, when they got their back against the wall, but will take their customers' money regardless.

As I mentioned before, at first, it seems like they really are doing their best to materialize the vision they had. That vision, however, is soon enough unveiled as something that obviously won't happen, with mountains of financial and logistical challenges that just can't possibly be climbed, as could have easily been predicted, had the founders not been so short-sighted and stubborn.

The structure of the documentary quickly turns into a countdown to the event, and boy it's not short on cringey moments, let me tell you that. It obviously escalates as the event approaches and you know the ship is about to hit the iceberg, big time. While it may be hard to feel pity or sympathy towards rich kids who can afford to spend 25K on that kind of weekend getting ripped off, "Fyre" somewhat debunks a mentality that plagues North American society and reveals the emptiness behind each lavish lifestyle picture posted by these "influencers" on Instagram to a much wider scale by giving a prime example of an empty shell that was created and promoted on social media.

Overall, this "anatomy of a modern day disaster" documentary is very well put together, one cringeworthy moment after another. Worth watching if you've heard of this fiasco and you're curious about how it all went down.

As much as being about the failed festival, it's also about the unwieldy power of social media, which single-handedly created and destroyed this whole thing. But for those of us who take comfort in planning out events thoroughly, this is, quite simply, bone-chilling.