Indie Film World

Like other reviewers of Catfish, I have the problem of talking about this film without revealing spoilers. While I won’t get too specific, it’s hard to discuss this movie without giving away, at least in a general way, the direction it moves in. Yet I think this problem has been exaggerated, as it’s not really a suspense film as much as a psychological and cultural study. You could know all of the main conclusions up front and still enjoy it.

Catfish is a documentary by New Yorkers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman that chronicles a series of events involving Ariel’s brother Nev, who corresponds with a strange family in rural Michigan. Nev is first contacted by the youngest member of the family, an 8 year old girl named Abby, who is apparently a child prodigy who paints. Later, Nev starts chatting with Abby’s older sister Megan, and the two begin an online romance. Soon, however, Nev becomes suspicious about the whole family and the whole crew descends on the family’s home in Michigan to find out the truth.

Reading the reviews, both professional and by customers, is almost as interesting as the film itself. While Catfish has won it’s share of praise, it’s also provoked quite a bit of hostility, for reasons that range from reverse class snobbery to a misunderstanding about what the film is supposed to be. Reading some of the reviews on Netflix, for example, it becomes clear that many people thought this was going to be a suspense, or even a horror film. There’s one scene where this is hinted at, when the film crew discovers the family’s farm late at night and there’s a Blair Witch Project-like atmosphere. But that really has nothing to do with the movie as a whole. I’m not familiar with the original marketing of this film, and some have charged that the filmmakers deliberately tried to trick people into believing it was going to be a horror movie. If this is true, then this was certainly a poor decision, but it still doesn’t detract from the actual film. When reading customer reviews, you also have to keep in mind that the average modern moviegoer isn’t a fan of documentaries.

Another criticism that has been leveled against Catfish is that it’s fake. This is something I obviously can’t verify one way or the other, but strangely enough, it makes no real difference, as the whole point of the film is to make us think about “what is real?” on social networks like Facebook. To me, everything seemed real and if the directors faked it, they did a good job of it.

It really seems doubtful to me that Catfish was staged or faked in any substantial way (all documentaries use a certain amount of staging, just like reality TV, to create a certain atmosphere and reaction in the audience, but that’s not the same as saying the main theme was made up. Nev, the young man who begins corresponding with, first a young girl who paints, and then her mother and sister, begins to have doubts about the family’s truthfulness quite early on. Unlike what some critics have said, it wasn’t presented as though it was supposed to be a major twist late in the film. So the suspense factor, while present, isn’t really the point here at all. It’s more of a psychological study of how people in the modern age communicate, and the impact certain online actions can have on others.

While the customer reviewers who hated Catfish were mainly disappointed that the Michigan family didn’t turn out to be something out of Deliverance, or perhaps The Hills Have Eyes, the professional critics turned on it in another, more interesting way. The average high profile movie reviewer is, almost by definition, well educated, affluent and urban. They also tend to be very eager to portray themselves as liberal, politically correct and anti-elitist. So many of these reviewers were made distinctly uncomfortable by the interaction between the filmmakers, who appear to represent the educated elite of Manhattan, and a poor middle America family. To make matters worse, there are two severely handicapped children in the house, so one could easily read a “Haves vs. Have-nots” subtext into this film if one were so inclined.

The reviewers who took this track were quite vehement in condemning the insensitivity of the filmmakers, and seemed strangely eager to embrace a member of the family who displays clearly delusional-bordering-on- psychotic tendencies. Yet the film itself maintains an admirable equilibrium, and helps to bring about an unlikely conclusion where no one is demonized and everyone comes clean. The fact is, class and geographic distinctions play a relatively minor role (if any) in Catfish, which is really about truth and identity in the digital age.

If you’re philosophically inclined, you could even look at Catfish as a study in topics as deep as the meanings of truth and identity in general, not just online. I highly recommend Catfish to anyone who wants to look at some of the cultural consequences of Facebook and other modern forms of communication.

Related Blogs

Edge of Dreaming is a fascinating documentary about a woman who has a possibly prophetic dream of her own death. Amy Hardie is a 48 year old Scottish woman, a wife and mother as well as a documentary filmmaker. Her films are scientific and she doesn’t seem to believe in anything beyond the material. At one point, she confesses to believing that death is simply the end.

Yet when Amy dreams that her horse will die and he is indeed dead when she awakes, she is disturbed. Even more disconcerting is another dream, where her deceased ex-husband tells her she will die before her next birthday. So she films her life for the next year, as she ominously develops a serious lung disease that the doctors can’t diagnose.

As she struggles with her health issues and the memory of the dream lurking in the background, Amy talks to scientists about what happens to the brain when we dream.

In the latter part of the film, Amy visits a Brazilian shaman, who tells her that it’s possible to change the outcome of a dream by re-entering it. This is also related to the concept of lucid dreaming, though that phrase is never mentioned in the film. When Amy goes into a shamanic trance, it’s never mentioned if she was given any type of mind altering substance of if the shaman simply leads her into an altered state. In either case, this is a fascinating path for someone of a scientific bent to take.

Edge of Dreaming can be found at Amazon.com, and is available for instant viewing on Netflix. It’s definitely recommended to anyone interested in dreams, psychic phenomena or shamanism.

Related Blogs

Stone is a surprisingly complex and thought-provoking film from director John Curran. To describe the plot of this film -a probably sociopathic prison inmate (Edward Norton) schemes with his wife (Milla Jovovich) to manipulate his parole officer (Robert DeNiro) to win early release – makes it sound like a possibly interesting, but predictable crime drama. Yet the longer it goes on, the more nuanced and complicated things get.

Robert DeNiro, of course, specializes in playing unhinged, or about-to-go-unhinged characters, and this is no exception. As Jack Mabry, an unhappily married parole officer about to retire, he listens to provocative religious talk radio on his way to work and has a cynicism, borne of long experience, towards his inmate “clients.” Norton, meanwhile, gives a great performance as Stone, a streetwise career criminal doing a long sentence for arson. When he pressures his beautiful wife Lucetta to contact his parole officer outside, it seems like a fairly straightforward set-up -Lucetta will try to seduce Mabry so they’ll have something on him, and Stone will go free.

Yet mid-way through the film, Stone apparently has a spiritual awakening after reading a prison book that instructs him to repeat a certain mantra. Is this real, or part of his scheme? Much of the film involves conversations between Stone and Mabry. At first, Stone behaves like you might expect a violent convict, barely able to suppress his anger at Mabry having power over him. Yet after his “experience,” his personality is transforms, which only makes Mabry dislike and distrust him all the more.

Meanwhile, Lucetta’s motives are not as clear cut as we first assume. A natural seductress, she doesn’t have much trouble getting to the repressed Stone, but we are soon left wondering whose side, if anyone’s, she’s really on. As for Mabry, it is revealed early on that he has a violent and unstable streak in him, and we’re not sure when he might become unravelled.

There’s a certain ambiguity to Stone that will not please many viewers. Yet I was impressed with the psychological subtlety of it, and how it maintained its integrity by not devolving into a standard Hollywood climax. Highly recommended if you like character based stories that have some psychological, and even spiritual depth.

Related Blogs

The Kids Are All Right, not to be confused with The Who’s, The Kids Are Alright from 1979, is an indie drama (that for some reason is labeled a comedy) directed by Lisa Cholodenko about the challenges faced by a same-sex married couple played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. When it comes to cultural values, this film is a strange blend of postmodern political correctness and conservatism. Yes, I’d say that in the end, the movie ends up arguing for an almost radically traditional idea of family values, albeit in a new form.

This film in some ways feels like a six person play. We have the couple, Nic (Benning) and Jules (Moore), the two children Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), who are actually half siblings and Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the sperm donor who is the children’s natural father but whom they’ve never met. We are led to believe that everything has been fairly calm in this extremely contemporary Southern California household until Laser (talk about a contemporary name) gets it in his head that he wants to meet his biological father. Joni tracks him down, and things begin to get chaotic.

The film is essentially a series of dialogues between various pairs of the above characters. Some reviewers have praised the film for the matter-of-fact way that it treats gay marriage. To its credit, it doesn’t romanticize or idealize this type of relationship, as by the middle of the film the couple is on the brink of splitting up and neither is close to being perfect. Nic is portrayed as a controlling person with possibly alcoholic tendencies, while Jules is on the flaky and indecisive side.

What gives The Kids Are All Right [Blu-ray] its perversely conservative foundation is the way it portrays Paul, the literal odd man out. An unattached business owner in his late thirties, Paul typifies one ideal of the contemporary urban lifestyle. He has a casual relationship with one of his employees and seems content to live the archetypal laid back California way of life. His relationship with his newly found offspring starts off a bit awkward, but there is mutual affection between everyone and at first it looks like Paul is about to become a member of an unconventional extended family. Until, that is, things get complicated.

I won’t divulge any more specifics about the plot except to note that the movie is ultimately not contrasting the gay vs. straight lifestyle, but the casual/unattached vs the committed. We are reminded several times what a self-centered Paul must be -apparently because he’s single. The point seems to be that no matter how dysfunctional a committed relationship may be, it’s still the cherished ideal worth fighting for. Oddly enough, the fact that the film uses a gay couple to make this essentially 1950s era point allows it to do so in a way that it would otherwise take more criticism for.

Related Blogs

No one seems to know for sure if Exit Through the Gift Shop is a real documentary or a prank played by street artist Banksy. Either way, it’s a fascinating portrayal of both the street art movement, pop culture and the strange point where the two meet.

The film starts out with Frenchman Thiery Guetta, the cousin of street artist Space Invader, filming various street artists in Paris, Los Angeles and other locations. Street art was the next phase of graffiti that became popular in the 1990s, and we see leading practitioners of this art, such as Shephard Fairey at work, painting their elaborate creations in prominent locations around cities. While some people label graffiti and street art simply as vandalism, and on one level it is -and I doubt that few street artists themselves would argue with this- much of it is also undeniably creative and original. While it’s sort of redundant to say it’s subversive, it may be one of the few statements that can be made nowadays that this could truly be said about, as there’s no commercial intent behind it. Or so it would seem.

Yet Exit Through the Gift Shop ends up being more about the commercialization of art than street art per se. When Thiery finally meets the mysterious English street artist Banksy, we watch him leave his mark around Los Angeles, London and, most daringly, on the infamous wall in the West Bank, right under the noses of military patrols. When Banksy pressures Thiery to put together an actual documentary, however, the result is a disaster and it’s revealed that Thiery knows nothing about filmmaking, so Banksy takes over the project and the focus turns on Thiery. That’s at least the official story, which hasn’t been confirmed to this day.

The denouement of the film comes when Thiery reinvents himself as Mister Brainwash and has a major opening in L.A. that turns him into a celebrity. At this point, a man who starts out as an amiable eccentric is transformed into a near megalomaniac who proclaims himself the next Andy Warhol. Indeed, many of his paintings are variations on Warhol’s themes, with lots of giant Campbell’s Soup cans, Elvis renditions and distortions of famous paintings. Despite the obviously derivative nature of his work, his opening is a huge success, and he goes on to design one of Madonna’s album covers. The people Thiery filmed earlier, from Fairey to Banksy are now less than enthralled with him, and the implication is that he is a sellout while the art critics and general public are gullible fools.

Taken at face value, the film doesn’t quite add up. Why would the anarchic Banksy put his name behind the film if he truly despised the result? The fact that we see Banksy himself with a very public art opening earlier in the film proves he isn’t as adverse to publicity as he pretends. Still, whatever we might suspect about Banksy’s intentions or honesty, he undoubtedly has real talent. In a review in the English paper The Sunday Times, Wendy Ide mentions that she once interviewed Banksy, and he revealed that It’s A Beautiful Life is his favorite film. Probably not coincidentally, that’s the name Thiery/Mister Brainwash gives to his art exhibit that Banksy allegedly had nothing to do with.

Exit Through the Gift Shop [Blu-ray] is a truly postmodern film about contemporary culture, which means its ultimate veracity, or lack thereof is of secondary importance at most. It causes the viewer to contemplate that ancient question, “What is art?” This makes it more meaningful than 99% of other contemporary films.

Related Blogs

The Last Big Thing (1996), newly released on DVD

I first saw The Last Big Thing shortly after it was released, some twelve years ago and thought it was brilliant and hilarious. Amazingly enough, it still holds up today. On the DVD cover this film is described as a “scathing satire of modern-day Los Angeles.” What is so interesting and original about it, however, is that it’s at least as much a satire of alternative culture and cultural criticism as it is of mainstream culture.

The hero/anti-hero is Simon Geist, an intellectual slacker/cultural critic who pretends to edit a magazine called The Next Big thing in order to make fools of all the desperate people who want to be famous in L.A. Of course, Geist is so humorless and sophomoric in his judgements that most of the time we are laughing at him rather than his targets. Writer-director Dan Zukovic, who plays Geist, made no attempt to make him likable or sympathetic.

Certainly, The Last Big Thing satirizes the silliness of pop culture (which, going by this film, hasn’t really changed that much in fifteen years; except for the absence of cell phones, it could have been filmed today), such as rock bands obsessed with 1970s sitcoms, but if there is a message at all, it’s that you can’t look down on the rest of society from a great height, as Simon Geist attempts to do, without becoming ridiculous and, ultimately a hypocrite.

Aside from the great performance by Zukovic, Susan Heimbeinder as Geist’s girlfriend, with her bizarre mannerisms and brilliant sense of physical comedy, adds to the absurdity of it all. Geist, like every college radical, underground magazine publisher, is obsessed with creating a movement that can’t be “co-opted.” Meanwhile, his idea of a grand statement is imitating Munch’s The Scream while staring into a chrome garbage can. As someone in the film, I don’t recall who, points out, there is a Warhol-esque theme to the whole thing. The Last Big Thing succeeds at being both a criticism and a meta-criticism of modern culture.

Related Blogs

Note: A slightly edited version of this review has recently been published on Devtome.

You can’t deny that Michael Moore has mastered the art of creating documentaries that are persuasive, entertaining and informative. Well, the first two at least; the informative part is a little murky in some ways. He hits you with a series of interesting and usually infuriating or depressing facts, adds personal anecdotes and then draws some very broad conclusions. Capitalism: A Love Story is an extreme example of this style.

This documentary goes from one outrage to another: heartless banks, the Bank of America plays a large role as villain, repossess the homes of struggling families; a loyal workers are fired with three days notice, a corrupt, privately owned juvenile home bribes a judge to incarcerate innocent teens; commercial pilots are paid less than fast food workers, giant corporations are bailed out while the poor are neglected…it goes on and on. By the time you’ve watched all this, you are ready to join the revolution. But what revolution, exactly?

Michael Moore is a propagandist par excellence. He knows exactly how to pull at the heartstrings and evoke the maximum amount of rage and class resentment in his viewers. The problem is, the target in this case, “capitalism” is ultimately an abstraction. The particular cases Moore focuses on are real, and they are examples of injustice, corruption and ignorance. However, to blame an ideology for such things is a kind of simplistic and naive conclusion that doesn’t really solve anything.

For philosophical ammunition, Moore curiously turns to an institution that is at least as tainted as capitalism –the Catholic church. He quotes priests and a bishop, who assure us that capitalism is evil and that Jesus would not have endorsed it. Now when right wing Christians try to invoke the widely satirized, “What would Jesus do?” we can smirk at the silliness of it; apparently liberals are allowed to do it, though.

Moore could just as easily have done a 2 hour expose of the Church’s many evils (which happen to be in the headlines right now). Moore could have done a polemic, perhaps following in the footsteps of fanatical atheists like Richard Dawson, against religion. This, however, would be out of line with his populist image. He is betting that the masses in America are more likely to turn against capitalism than God. Nor would such an anti-Church message have been any more accurate. However, at least the Church is a discrete institution; capitalism is really just a word; the exploitation and robbing of average people by the rich and powerful is not dependent on the current economic system.

How, exactly, is Capitalism: A Love Story a distortion? Because, like all propaganda, it simplifies and gets you to make a mental leap from particular cases to broad generalizations. Exploitation and injustice are as old as civilization, while capitalism is a mere few centuries old. In what may be the best part of the film -the very beginning- Moore shows scenes from the Roman Empire, using the familiar but still effective analogy between that empire’s decline and our own. The problem is, the Romans weren’t capitalists.

Libertarians and fiscal conservatives will, no doubt, argue that Moore is wrong because the actions he condemns are not really capitalism at all in the pure sense. After all, bailing out a failing company is not an example of the free market. This is true, but all this does is show how murky words and semantics can be. The truth is, banks who operate like loan sharks, corrupt politicians and special interest groups are not really ideological creatures at all; their kind has always been around, and they are able to wear any sort of political mask that the times demand.

In another of the film’s sneaky ideological gimmicks, Moore associates the Obama election with a populist revolt against the status quo. There is, no doubt, truth to this. He does not, however, show exactly how Obama has done anything differently. Obama, it turns out, has been just as complicit when it comes to corporate bailouts as Bush.

Like all of Moore’s documentaries, Capitalism: A Love Story is worth seeing even if you don’t accept all of its conclusions and implications. The outrages it portrays are real enough. The problem with associating them with such a broad target is that it makes it all too easy for someone to come along with the right banner, such as “socialism” and play out the same agenda.

The fact is, we are living in, or on the verge of a post-ideological, post-industrial and probably post-political era. There will probably never be a purely capitalist or socialist economy again (if there ever was, which is unlikely). Moore evokes FDR’s New Deal as a paradigm of benevolent government, but looking to a past era, with completely different economic conditions, is not really a solution. Another thing worshippers of the New Deal fail to consider is that many of the cultural and environmental woes of today, such as suburban sprawl, the proliferation of automobiles and the rise of the permanent war economy and military industrial complex follow directly from that era.

Capitalism: A Love story may move you and remind you how greedy people can be, but it ultimately fails to suggest a viable solution.

Related Blogs

Warning: the following contains cynical anti-Oscar sentiments.

This year, 10 films have been nominated for Best Picture. They are:

“Avatar” James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
“The Blind Side” Gil Netter, Andrew A. Kosove and Broderick Johnson, Producers
“District 9” Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham, Producers
“An Education” Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey, Producers
“The Hurt Locker” Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro, Producers
“Inglourious Basterds” Lawrence Bender, Producer
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness, Producers
“A Serious Man” Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Producers
“Up” Jonas Rivera, Producer
“Up in the Air” Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman, Producers

This list, double the usual number of nominees, illustrates more than ever how silly the whole notion of having a “Best Picture” (and, to a lesser extent, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, etc.) has become.

How can you compare war movies, animation, sci fi and contemporary dramas? Several of the nominees, in particular Up, The Blind Side, Avatar and Inglourious Basterds are fairly stereotypical of the type of film the Academy prefers — heavy-handed social drama and epic adventure or war movies (in the case of Avatar, a kind of mixture of the two!) These are overwhelmingly the kind of films that predictably win Best Picture.

The world, fortunately, has grown too decentralized and complex to narrow things down this way. Let the Oscars persist as an anachronistic spectacle, but let’s not mistake this ritual for having much to do with movies in the contemporary world.

Related Blogs

This is a movie I started watching with very modest expectations, given the gimmicky sounding premise (an alternative world where lying is unknown). The film surprised me with funny and original satire, and the promise of a possibly insightful look at the very concepts of truth and lies.

Mark (Ricky Gervais) is an average, perhaps a little below average guy who has reached his 40s without achieving much success in either career or relationships. He is a screenwriter on the verge of being fired. The entire notion of screenwriting, of course, has to be rethought in a world without lies! Lacking the ability to create fiction, they must churn out incredibly boring documentaries.

Soon after being fired, and called a loser by more than one always-honest co-worker, Mark is also informed by a girl he has a crush on (Jennifer Garner) that he is too fat and ugly to be a match for her. Mark’s life looks grim, but then, just as he’s about to be evicted from his apartment, he makes a radical discovery -he is able to fabricate things. Since no one is familiar with lies, he is able to talk money out of a bank teller and a woman who is a perfect stranger into a hotel room (telling her that the world will end if they don’t have sex).

Some of the best and funniest early scenes are simple, tossed out lines, the kind you might find on The Simpsons. Since even advertisements must be truthful in this world, we get some hilariously honest descriptions of popular products like Coke and Pepsi. It’s surprising that these products were mentioned by name in a less than flattering way, in a kind of anti-product placement for a change. A nursing home has a sign outside that reads, “A Sad Place Where Old People Come to Die.” Truth, we are reminded, is not always pretty.

Unfortunately, The Invention of Lying is not able to maintain the same strong writing it starts with. The decline comes soon after the film becomes a satire about religion. Mark’s mother is dying, and, to comfort her, he tells her that death does not mean eternal emptiness but a mansion in the sky where all your loved ones are waiting. Next, the whole world wants to know about this afterlife. Mark, then, invents a Man In The Sky, and we learn how the concept of God was invented, at least from an atheist’s point of view.

No doubt many people would be offended by this poke at religion. For me, the problem is that it starts the film on a downward spiral after a strong beginning.
The religious issue is simply too broad, so instead of examining the truly interesting and original ideas that surround truth and lies in an everyday context, we get a rather banal (if still amusing at times) explanation for why people believe in God.
Then, towards the conclusion, even the pseudo-religious theme fades away and the film devolves into a standard Hollywood romantic comedy ending.

I might be less harsh about The Invention of Lying if it hadn’t sucked me in early with the promise of something bordering on the profound. Why do I say this? Well, the very notion of connecting lying with fiction, while not completely original, gets to the very core of things like art and ethics. For example, it leads to questions like, does lying actually serve a necessary purpose for relationships and society?
It’s the kind of thing seldom dealt with in movies, and the fact that The Invention of Lying started off by handling such a heavy theme in a light and satirical manner was truly impressive.

Once the Man In the Sky issue started, however, the sharp edge began to dull. The ending is pure cliche, with Mark interrupting a wedding ceremony. I wonder how often, outside of movies, anyone has actually answered the question rhetorically asked at weddings, “If anyone has reason to object…”

So, The Invention of Lying is something of a mix, starting off as an original satire and turning into a typical genre flick. If you don’t expect a profound discourse on aesthetics, as I foolishly did, and aren’t overly sensitive about religion being ridiculed, you might enjoy it.

[ReviewAZON asin=”B00275EHBY” display=”inlinepost”]

Indie Film World

Catfish -Facebook vs. Reality

Related Blogs

Edge of Dreaming -Are Dreams Prophetic?

Related Blogs

Stone -a Film With Psychological and Spiritual Depth

Related Blogs

The Kids Are All Right: Postmodern Family Values

Related Blogs

Idiot With A Tripod

Related Blogs

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Related Blogs

The Last Big Thing

Related Blogs

Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story review

Related Blogs

Oscar Nominations for Best Picture: Does It Matter?

Related Blogs

The Invention of Lying film review

Reviews, news and information related to independent films.