Catfish

Catfish

***Spoiler Alert***

                Catfish is a documentary following Yaniv Shulman,  Angela Faccio, and Ariel Shulman. It takes place in New York City and Ishpeming, Michigan. It was filmed in late 2007 and released on September 17, 2010. The film opened on 12 screens and grossed over there million dollars for the opening weekend. There has been hype about Catfish since its success at the Sundance film festival. The advertising for it is vague and misleading with a tagline reading, “Don’t let anyone tell you what it is.”

                The idea for this film grew from the relationship Yaniv had with an extremely talented 8 year old from Ishpeming, Michigan. The 8 year old is a girl named Abby who lives with her mother Angela, half sister Megan, and stepfather. Yaniv is a photographer living in New York with his brother Ariel. They begin corresponding when Abby sees one of Nev’s photos in a Newspaper and sends him a painting portraying it. This sparks a long distance friendship which leads Nev to become close with Abby and her family through telephone and Facebook. Nev develops feelings for Abby’s attractive older sister Megan and they begin a long distance “relationship”. Megan has Nev wrapped around her finger at first but he becomes suspicious of her behavior whenever attempts to meet in person consistently fail. Nev decides to drive to Ishpeming with his brother and close friend Henry to find out the truth. To his embarrassment he finds out the past ten months of talking with this family whom he endeared has all been a sham. Abby does exist and so does her mother Angela but Nev’s beloved Megan is nothing more than a dream.  Nev learns that the relationships he thought existed with Abby and Megan were actually just the attempts of a sad twisted woman to escape her real life of raising a daughter and two mentally challenged stepchildren.

                I walked into this movie not knowing a thing about it which was exciting at first but turned out to be unfortunate. Hoping for a comedy or action flick I was very disappointed when I realized it was a documentary about something I otherwise wouldn’t give two cents to see. A story of how another poor sap got duped by a woman just doesn’t strike my interest at all specially when filmed with shaky handheld cameras. I couldn’t help but think it was sad for a guy living in one of the largest most exciting cities in the world to become obsessed with a girl whom he has never met who lives hours away. Half the time it seemed like we were reading lovey dovey Facebook posts or text messages that turned out to be no more than a giant load of crap. I don’t know if these guys have any real directing experience but if they did they might point the camera at something people want to see(not a guy sitting in his apartment talking about some girl!). The saddest part isn’t that the guy got played and fooled into believing there was this amazing girl in love with him and that her sister was an extraordinary painter who loves his pictures. The sad part is that I believed it too and so did you and when I found out it was all lies that just made me even more upset about having sat through that bore fest.  In the makers defense I will say that Nev and his brother both seemed like nice charming people I just don’t care about their lives or documentaries in general for the most part which is why I’m giving this film 2 stars. One for the fact that they managed to do a great job splicing it all together, and the other for the fact that Nev didn’t lose his mind in anger when he found out the truth. He kept his cool and didn’t purposely make her feel bad about doing it which is one thing I don’t have to self-control for so props to Nev for that.