Catfish

***SPOILER ALERT***

            Catfish is a 2010 Documentary directed by Henry Joost, and Ariel  Schulman.  It is a real story so the "actors" are actually real people rather than characters.  The central character of the film is Yaniv "Nev" Schulman.  The documentary is about a guy named Nev who gets a photograph of his published in a magazine, and upon this happening a little girl named Abby who is a painter in Michigan sends him a painting of his picture.  Abby then begins to request permission from Nev directly via Facebook to paint more pictures of his.

             Nev soon starts building friendships with members of Abby's family, and soon starts to get romantically involved with Abby's older sister Megan.  After several months of being involved, Nev starts to get suspicions of Megan's identity.  Nev, his friend, and his brother decide that they are going to take it upon themselves to go to Michigan to meet Megan for the first time and see who she really is, and if she even exists.

            The fact that the film is a true story and that there hasn't been any manipulation to the events to make the story more interesting is one of the big pluses to the film.  It's really interesting to see the raw truth in a documentary rather than someone editing it, or inventing facts, to make their documentary more interesting like most documentarians, such as Michael Moore, often do.  However, this also is one of the weaknesses with the film.  The fact that the story is true, and that the events are realistic is what makes the finale feel like a letdown.

            Most people will argue that the finale of the film is what makes the documentary so amazing and shocking".  However, I personally felt that the finale was one of the most realistic and probable outcomes that could have happened to Nev.  The fact that he gets involved with a very attractive, can do it all, type of woman via Facebook and then goes to meet her and finds out that she was really some middle aged, married, woman with two kids making everything up sounds pretty probable to me.  One could argue that this shows just how dangerous the World Wide Web can be, however events like this have occurred many times, they have even occurred in "safe" dating sites.  There is definitely a reason why you should never believe everything you read on the internet.

            Overall, the film was a very well done realistic documentary.  However, real life is not often why most audience members go to the cinema.  Due to the tremendous amount of buildup through the documentary the realistic ending was what made the story lose its spark.