Fyre festival – Christian Sauvé

Fyre Festival (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-04-122023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2019) Canadians who had abandoned hope of every seeing Hulu’s Fyre Festival got unexpected help in spring 2019 from Super Channel, which secured Canadian distribution rights to the documentary offering another perspective than Netflix’s near-simultaneous Fyre. Much has been said about the ethical shortcomings of both documentaries—while the Netflix documentary was co-produced by the Jerry Media company behind the festival’s promotion (and its social media criticism suppression), this Hulu doc actually paid convicted fraudster Billy McFarland for interview footage. As one can expect, this Hulu production has harsher words about the social-media promotion of Fyre, and some largely useless footage of the main instigator. The angle is slightly different, and to its credit Fyre Festival offers more detail on the social-media aspect of the fraud, and on the complex web of scams that followed McFarland throughout his career. On the other hand, there are other things about Fyre Festival that are just annoying: its insistence on treating millennials as some sort of mystical generation is fit to launch my usual generations-aren’t-so-different rant, whereas the visual style of the film is huge on impressionistic visuals thrown nilly-willy in the narration. The Netflix documentary offered a more structured narrative, more striking moments, and a far better depiction of the increasingly disastrous project planning. It’s fascinating to see two interesting documentaries emerge from the same event—but then again disaster is always interesting. Some influencers come across very badly here, but Billy McFarland comes across as even worse, with evasive glances and lengthy pauses perhaps enhanced through editing but unmistakably portrayed as duplicitous in his answers. Despite the annoyances, Fyre Festival is also worth a look, even if you’re up to speed with the topic. At its best, it doesn’t forget to tie up the Fyre fraud with other signs of the time—The Soho grifter, Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes and, of course, the current occupant of the White House himself. How badly have we erred to end up at a time when reality itself is subservient to hype and fraud?

Movie Review

FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-01-182020-09-06 Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, January 2019) I’m not sure what’s most amazing: the resounding failure of the Fyre event, which touched upon the worst aspects of late-2010s culture, or the hoopla surrounding the making and releasing not only of documentary FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, but the duelling between this Netflix-distributed film and the competing Hulu-distributed Fyre Fraud. But let’s go back to the beginning: In late 2016, several “influencers” broke the announcement of a music festival with an idyllic tropical setting, top-rated artists and a luxurious atmosphere. Fyre, as the festival was named, lured unsuspecting attendees through overinflated claims that, upon reasonable analysis, had no chance of being met given the low ticket prices. Despite plenty of warning signs and critical commentary, attendees converged on the festival’s grounds in May 2017 to find that the event had been … well, something like cancelled but worse in that there were no events, bad accommodations, terrible food, unpaid workers yet no official cancellation. The resulting social media postings were the highlight of that week, fuelled by undisguised schadenfreude from many at seeing the influencer lifestyle blowing up in the attendee’s faces. Those are the facts that pretty much everyone agrees on. Now FYRE takes us inside the organization of the festival through interviews with some of the people involved in the failure. Perhaps the best aspect of the film, especially for those with a background in event planning or project management, is the horror show of seeing the event disintegrating well before it took place, as locations changed, promises couldn’t be kept and the gulf between the promises and the results grew wider and wider. If you’ve been involved in failed projects, there’s a familiar hollowness to the way it gets worse and worse, well past the point where any sane person would put an end to it all. A special mention goes to event planner Andy King for telling an astonishing story of what he was prepared to do in order for a relatively small part of the festival to come through—he got rewarded with short-lived meme infamy after the release of the documentary. Still, as fascinating and detailed as this story can be, FYRE does stop short of calling it fraud (despite ample evidence to the contrary) or seriously studying the role of social media influencers in the debacle. And that (thunderous music) is because you have to watch the credits in order to understand that the documentary is being produced by some of the people involved in the marketing of the Fyre festival. Of course, it wasn’t a fraud. Of course, the blame wasn’t on the shoulders of the social media people who convinced so many people that Fyre was worth attending despite the critical reaction to their announcement. For that story, you have to watch Hulu’s Fyre Fraud, which is both more morally dubious in its production (by paying Fyre founder and convicted fraudster Billy McFarland for an interview) yet a bit more honest on-screen in calling a fraud a fraud. But of course, considering the post-truth environment that led to the current American administration, a dishonest documentary seems entirely appropriate at this moment.