Fyre Fraud

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

It is some fairly deep irony when a "documentary" on a subject of exploitative people, using vapid, shallow influencers, to dupe rich kid victims who themselves may have deserved what they got, turns out to be itself exploitative, vapid and meaningless as well. Essentially the makers of "Fyre Fraud" engage in the same cheap marketing and lack of substance as the subject they are covering. We don't even learn why Ja Rule was not jailed

If you want to learn about this festival, the stages of fraud, and just how nasty everyone involved was, read one of the news articles, and skip this documentary which is so shallow and laughably emotional it could have been made by the fraudsters itself.

"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.

Two documentaries about the Fyre Festival debacle came out days apart, Netflix's Fyre and Hulu's Fyre Fraud, and each shines in different ways.

The Netflix documentary approach is a methodical chronology. It describes what happened as it happened and how people saw it at the time. It really puts you into the day-by-day experience.

Fyre Fraud takes a different approach. It actually sketches out the basics of the entire thing in the first 15 minutes, then builds upon the various components to create a whole.

The titles actually hint at the different approaches. Fyre describes the Fyre Festival as a slow-mo disaster, only at the end fully revealing the shadiness of Fyre's charismatic creator, Billy McFarland.

Fyre Fraud, on the other hand, immediately establishes Billy as a sleazy con man, and portrays Fyre as a series of shady transactions. Netflix portrays the festival as a disaster, Fyre Fraud as a crime.

Fyre Fraud spends a lot of time framing the Fyre Fraud hysteria within the current culture. It's the sort of pundit "hot take" that is easy to poke holes in, but it's sometimes persuasive. Fraud also has an interview with Billy, although the guy is to slippery to offer much satisfaction.

If you only wanted to watch one Fyre documentary, go for the Netflix one. But after you've seen it if you want more details and a different angle, Fyre Fraud is well worth your time.

Con Artist have been around forever but there are particular times when they thrive and benefit from a societal situation more. For example Con artist ran rampant during America's Great Depression era due to the heartbreaking need to survive at all cost by the public. Most people needed to have faith in something during that time and con artist were more than happy to provide that source in things like fake jobs, get rich quick schemes or even religion. What this documentary exposes is that we are in a new era that appears to be ripe for the same tactics used in previous times but on a larger scale. The big difference is the size and scope of the scam and more importantly the fact that we aren't in a Great Depression. As a matter of fact , these new scams are now in the form of politics, social status and popularity. And often times take advantage of the very wealthy. This particular scam only worked because of the uncanny need of its victims to want to be apart of something exclusive and to , in a way, execute their very own scam of false success through social media. What this documentary does a good job of showing is that the success of cons are as much about the people who fall for them as it is about the con artist. The main culprit in this film looks and acts like every single con artist through out time, he's confident to the point of arrogance, talks a mile a minute and never takes no for an answer. He's narcissistic and greedy but yet really doesn't hide those negative traits. As a matter of fact, like most frauds, the first con is to convince people that those negative traits are actually positives. On the surface, none of this scam should've worked. But like what his developer parents no doubt taught him, it's not about what an item is in the present , it's what it could be in the future. In many ways real estate developers have the same traits as con men because of that ability to sale what isn't there. They are masters at getting people and financial institutions to buy into a speculation. This main character spent a lifetime doing exactly this over and over again. And like most con men they fail, they fail big, but yet they find a way to convince their victims to not focus on their past failures but to focus on the awards of the future. Every single person who was involved with or attended this failure of a festival could've used the same social media to find out that its leader was a con artist. But yet they didn't. They decided to once again put their faith into the speculation. Ja Rule ,for example, who maintains the whole thing wasn't a scam , actually worked with the guy before ,executing a previous scam that was funded by yet another scam artist oil tycoon. How do you ignore all of this and decide to go into business once again with the same person? Well the same reason a bank decides to invest into a development when the developer has filed bankruptcy 3 times, by investing into the dream. Ja Rule , like everyone else desperately wanted to be a part of the dream. Whether it's greed or the need to be wanted, those desires override the logical because being logical is not "exciting". Mark my words, we will hear from the main character again and I guarantee the next con will be bigger than this one and once again it will be successful, because the victims will need for it to be.