Fraud

Amazing how prescient this film was in anticipating our current post-truth era.

With AI ascendant, all authenticity in film gets waylaid by a constellation of algorithms.

*Interesting aside: I researched the star behind Dean's film: the enigmatic father behind the camerawork.

In the aftermath of Dean's film, Gary's life has taken quite an epic turn.

He's networking with world-renowned scientists, audio forensic engineers, a Nobel prize nominee & intelligence officials of several 3-letter agencies to solve one of the greatest puzzles of all-time:

The EVP Mystery.

So, are these bizarre whispers aliens or ghosts?

It is a confounding riddle that certainly merits further investigation.

One of Life's Great Questions seems about to be answered: Are We Alone in the Cosmos???

Gary's also repeatedly winning BIG jackpot$ using EVP messages to pick lottery #s.

This sensational aspect invites the curious to look closely at the man portrayed in the film.

Gary's trailblazing research is getting recognized across the globe:

Just google: Medium WeAreNotAlone Gary.

As the patriarch of the actual family depicted in Dean Fleischer-Camp's subterranean séance, I sincerely hope everyone out of sheer curiosity gives FRAUD a good "look-see" to experience the cinematic magic...

I feel like I was mislead to see this film. It is promoted as being a new style of documentary film, but in reality, it is a fictional story made by editing and distorting a family's home movies.

There's nothing clever about lying and misleading the audience and making it sound like you are presenting a true story documentary film only to find out that after you've watched the film you were lied to. If the director wasn't there to tell you about some of the fictional elements you might think you watched a true story.

I heard the director speak at a film festival and the first thing he said is "I just want to say that the family did not commit any crimes and we just made it look like they did".

Basically, the director took a bunch of scenes from home movies. Put them out of order and distorted things out of context, put fake time stamps on the scenes to make it appear chronological. The time stamps have nothing to do with actual dates of when the film clips were made. The fake time stamps are merely there to help fake the fabricated fictional story that did not occur.

There were also fabricated fictional elements, and fictional scenes created to help tell the fictional story. For example there is fake news story shown in the film. Also video clips were added that had nothing to do with the family. For example the director leads you to believe you are seeing the family's house burning down. The family lives in the United States. The house on fire is a film clip the director found of a Russian house on fire and the house has nothing to do with the family.

The real fraud is that this movies is not a documentary film even though it described as being a documentary film.

Most people find it boring to watch home movies of people you don't know. Perhaps to convince people to watch this movie, the director had to make up some fake fraud story and mislead people to believe it is a documentary film.

This tactic isn't anything new or revolutionary. PT Barnum used to do that in circus side shows. Blair Witch project also created hype about a fiction found footage documentary. Reality Television shows do the same thing and distort things to create drama in shows that they claim are reality shows.

We don't need false reality "documentaries". Film makers who mislead their audiences trying to get them to watch films that are not what they promoted are not respecting the time or interests of the audience.

It would be like telling people they are going to see a romance movie and then giving them a gory slasher movie. People expect to see what they are lead to believe they are going to see and false advertising is not a good way to attract an audience. I wish I hadn't wasted my time watching this film. I was at a film festival and I missed seeing a good film because this film claimed to be a new form of documentary film making. It is not a documentary. It is fiction.

A couple (and their young child) live a life beyond their means, putting them in a desperate spot. What will they do and what is the aftermath?

"Fraud" is one of those films that makes me uncomfortable. Not because the material in the film is controversial, but because I tend to respect the old saying about only speaking nicely or keeping your mouth shut. And, unfortunately, this just does not give me much to work with if I want to be strictly nice.

One might say it is clever, innovative, or at the very least "experimental" that the film is shot on a home video recorder, and most scenes are really only a few seconds long. So the plot unravels through partial vignettes, leaving the viewer plenty of room to make their own assumptions about the characters. This might be seen as a clever device, perhaps, but it's a hard sell.

Any movie made with a home video recorder is hard to watch. Only on rare occasions to "found footage" and similar styles really work. This one works if we ignore the fact that the dad seems to be always filming… always… no matter how big or small an event is. And he continues to film while questionable activity is going on, making him either really stupid or unbelievably addicted to his camera.

Simply put, there is not much to see here. It has no humor, it has no scary bits. There is a modicum of suspense, maybe. If this were an actual documentary, it may have some sort of value in that regard, but it is quite obviously not a real documentary and hopefully does not pretend to be. Allegedly the director had to tell an audience that the family in the film had not committed any real crimes… but what gullible audience would have believed they did?

Right now, the film is making the festival rounds, and can be seen March 25 at the Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF). This is not the must-see film of the festival, and it seems unlikely that a distributor will jump at the chance to buy it up. (And, frankly, with all the music clips in the background, it may not even be able to be released legally.)

FRAUD is a timely and relevant film if one takes a moment to consider all the current commotion over "fake news", politics and American consumerism run amok.

Dean Fleischer-Camp's direction and Jonathon Rippon's impressive editing create quite an artistic feat of pure magic.

After watching the movie, I did a bit of research to find the family's actual YouTube channel AND it sure doesn't disappoint in the sheer number of home movies and adventures they have posted online.

If one is even remotely curious to see how different fact is from fiction, then a quick finger's waltz atop the keyboard will let you explore the REAL family who inspired the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0pr_wuOvA