Real or not????

The documentary Catfish is a great film that goes deep into the world of fake identities in the Internet. The controversy revolving around this film is whether it is real or fake.

Most people automatically think that just because a film is a documentary that it is “real” but what they fail to understand is that most of the time, the filmmaker can influence the film and the perception in which we see certain things. Although Catfish seems very realistic, some things do not add up to the movie. Like most documentaries in the same genre, it seems very amateur. The only problem I have with that is that they specifically say that the people recording are “professional filmmakers” and not amateurs, so then why are there so many little mistakes and why did it come out so obviously. The camera angles are not straight sometimes, the white balance is off, and corrections are made on the spot as they are filming, if the are real filmmakers, those are things that should have never occurred, because those are amateur mistakes that people who have no idea what they are doing make.

Another problem brought up was the fact that the chances of having the narrative unfold so eloquently and easily as it did on the film is very unlikely, granted the filmmakers have not said its fake, but if highly improbable that anything of this sort could randomly start occurring as a camera happens to be filming the life of a person. They say that they start filming because of the relationship the main character is having with a young girl that likes his photography, but that is not something that would be interesting to the point for busy filmmakers to take time off and film what is happening. To me, it feels too set up and so easy to follow for it to be such a good documentary.

With all that being said, I would like to say that I enjoyed this film a lot and although it may or may not be real, it is very realistic in the sense that people do create fake profiles on Facebook, and that we all need to be careful with the people we meet because one never really knows who is on the other computer typing words to you. I personally don’t care if it is fake, but my natural human curiosity dose come up and leaves me with a yearning to know the truth behind the movie.