Catfish review

It’s a fucking strange thing when people lie, know they’re lying, and when they’re caught- they go on with the lie anyway and build a huge tower of contradictions.

Some people have a severe case of mythomania, or “pseudologia fantastica”, for all you super-smart people. Mythomania is compulsive lying but you actually start to believe your lies, and people with this disorder can eventually admit to lying after being confronted with their bullshit stories, discrepancies, and facts.

I was writing a blog for my other blog site, and in the second paragraph, I began by bitching about how people treat the internet like a game. And then I basically wrote a list of people who should be banned from the internet. I had totally forgotten about sock puppets.

ANYWAY…

Catfish, I feel, was unfairly shitted on by the average movie-goer. The film’s trailer made it look like it was going to be some Blair Witch Project type of movie. Obviously, people’s expectations were too high and when they saw this documentary in its entirety, they went apeshit. They flung shit at each other with negative comments on this film. You’ll notice that comments regarding the film usually consist of “it was boring” and “I wasted my time watching this”. In the film’s defense, this documentary accurately portrays people with this mythomania problem when they’re on the net.

The documentary starts out with our star, Yaniv Schulman. He shares an office with his less-attractive brother, Ariel, the director of the documentary. Also sharing the office with him is Henry Joost, the producer, and a friend of the brothers.

Yaniv befriends a child prodigy, Abby, who loves to paint. Or so he believes. He writes emails to the 8-year-old child (nothing creepy about that) and their friendship grows to the point that Yaniv starts talking to Abby’s mom on the phone, and eventually, Megan, Abby’s half-sister. He falls for Megan and pretty much has a long-distance type of relationship with her, although he never admits it to Ariel and Henry.

Megan records a cover song for Yaniv and sends her recording to him. Yaniv, in front of cameras, Googles the shit out of the song and finds strong similarities in Megan’s singing voice with a particular singer in a YouTube video- singing the exact same song, thus creating the first case of things not adding up as the relationship grows and the filmmakers pressure Yaniv into pursuing Megan for the documentary. And so it begins, in 2008, the men go into plane trips, and then a road trip, to see if Megan is indeed the woman from the Facebook profile and the same woman Yaniv has been talking on the phone with for several months.

The trailer includes a quote from a film critic, claiming that “the final forty minutes of the film will take you on an emotional roller-coaster ride that you won’t be able to shake off for days.” It only took me 2 minutes and a cigar, but the critic is right about the last 40 minutes (I counted).

Pretty shocking and disturbing shit. You should avoid reading the comments for the film’s trailer on YouTube because there are way too many disappointed reviews and spoilers. I believe you should see and judge for yourself. Are the filmmakers lying about Yaniv romanticism with Megan from Facebook and the shocking results just to make a movie out of it? I don’t care. This documentary presents a real issue just like any other documentary. And it does it in the form of the people it’s about.

I give it 3 stars out of 4.***