FilmSnobReviews

Title: Fyre Fraud
MPAA Rating: Not Yet Rated
Director: Jenner Furst, Julia Willoughby Nason
Starring: Ja Rule, Billy McFarland, Bella Hadid
Runtime: 1 hr 36 mins

What It Is: A look at the controversial the only ever “Fyre Festival” a music festival scheduled for two weekends in the Bahamas. Due to many factors including bad planning and all sorts of corruption and lying the festival was never completed. No talent ever showed and the whole fiasco led to a massive amount of “influencers” stuck on the island. In this documentary, which includes an interview with creator and CEO Billy McFarland. A man who is himself dealing with all the legal fall out from this event.

What We Think: There are two of these documentaries, and we’ll discuss the other in due time. First up is Hulu’s shot and I really think that this is an insightful and informative documentary. Having Billy McFarland in this doc and focusing on the influencers and the millennial/social media culture was a really good choice. This really puts the focus on how precisely McFarland was able to pull such a swindle. Visually I understood but hated the decision to have Instagram usernames popping up everywhere. It was a major irritant. It was actually somewhat funny and satisfying to see so much idiocy counteracts by such unmitigated fraud.

Our Grade: C, By no means a failure of a documentary it just is. It is a movie. This did happen. In fact, Netflix followed with their own doc on the same subject (review pending). I don’t find the subject all that interesting so the necessity of ONE doc is questionable but two? Have we really run short on things to make documentaries on? Skip this. If you want a solid documentary, go with Won’t You Be My Neighbor? or Midnight Family. It isn’t a bad film and I can give a SLIGHT recommendation this stems mostly from its ease of access on Hulu.