Best movie of this year hands down!

A different way of telling a story

Blistering performances.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The 2010 American documentary film,"Catfish", directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, involves Ariel's brother, Nev, as he fantasizes about a "friendship" with a beautiful young woman on Facebook. A documentary reflecting our times, "Catfish" is a riveting story of love, deception and grace within a labyrinth of online intrigue. The film tells the unsettling story of cyber- friendship: who we are in real life versus the way we present ourselves online. A twisted fantasy world of surprises in Internet romance, this is the drama that novels are made of. Read the entire review on my blog at unhealedwound.com and let me know what you think!

Taken at face value, this is a documentary about how a young photographer was deceived by a lonely housewife... how he gently confronts her, discovers her desperate existence and gets a tearful apology.The way it unfolds is engaging. We do allow this woman some latitude. All of us can relate in some degree to the deep loneliness of a simple kind and the equally simple need for escape via fantasy.What we cannot allow is the deeper deception from the other side, the side of the filmmakers. This kind of documentary is becoming more common now, and that's too bad because it is a hard form to manage. The structure inserts the reporter as a key agent in the story, making it all but impossible to not be overtly manipulative.In this case, these three guys knew the Facebook character was fake, and decided to exploit it. They got lucky in some respects, but in others they made conscious decisions to extend the the story for the film's sake. I can understand this, but we have to be fair. There is manipulation and deception on both sides here. The drive in both cases is the same: to make a good enough story to hold a situation that selfishly sustains. They pretend to deliver insight on only one side of this.

Story goes fish mongers use to take cod from Alaska and ship it in a vat to china. They would turn mushy after all that time so a man had an idea to put catfish in with them to keep them agile and tasty. Going through life we meet people that keep us on our toes, keep us interesting, these people are the catfish in our life now as a reviewer I am going to tell you Nevs. Told through the eyes of Schluman and Joost's the classic story of a journey to the unknown into social media. This outstanding documentary describes the events of Nev as he develops an online relationship with an entire family hundreds of miles away. The story that unfolds as he drives to Michigan in a quest to find out who all these people really are. The open and closing scenes are both interviews of Nev and his feelings towards the Wesselman family, this depicts the change mentally of Nev from start to finish. Super imposed titles were used in this documentary to show information about Nevs journey. The documentary explores the theme of self discovery and deception to depict what can happen in social media as Facebook had just became popular, this shows the positives and negatives of instant messaging and the ways we use social media. Many people will feel "Catfish" by Schulman and Joost's is a sensitive documentary about Nev and the positives and negatives of social media and the deception of families and the people in lives that are our catfish.

With a name like 'Catfish" I wish the documentary was about good seafood cuisine, but it isn't. It's about the shiftiness of truth and lies on the Internet. It's seem like it would be a great documentary about the psychology of people who live through personas online and how the anonymity of the internet can allow them to make their persona life seem bigger than their real life, or say or do things that they couldn't do in public. The movie barely touches that; instead we get a documentary about a young man name Yaniv "Nev" Schulman who trying to meet a woman name Megan in real life, after a long affair with her, online. Filmed by his brother Ariel Schulman and business partner Henry Joost, the documentary crew guerrilla style filmmaking followed Schulman on the journey of falling in love with a girl he meets on the internet, but later finds out that she may not be exactly who she claimed to be online. The movie was market as if a thriller-like terminology. The trailer acts like it was an Alfred Hitchcock's type of suspense as if Megan end up being a serial killer or psychopath. It may have been a tad misleading. The story is extremely contemporary. Anybody who dealt with people online such as having a Facebook or Myspace account, knows that some of them might be lying on who they are. It's nothing new. Without spoiling the movie, in my opinion the ending wasn't really that shocking. It was pretty damn predictable. Still, there is questions how real the documentary is. Some viewers believe Catfish to be a fake documentary or a hoax. Even famous documentary director Morgan Spurlock thinks they knew beforehand who was Megan was, due to the obsessively documenting Nev's online relationship due to the release that there might be highly good chance that she might be a fake. Anyways the results of finding out who she is, isn't scary, but sadder and more melancholy about how one woman's life dreams dies and how hard her life is now. It just shows that some people are so lonely that they are willing to do anything to feel connect to somebody. Some people needed a fantasy world to get through their own misery. Anyways, the movie became such a success that Schulman teamed up with MTV to produce a reality television show similar to the idea of the documentary but which focuses on the lives of others who have been entangled in an online relationship with another person. His brother and his friend Henry Joost end up directing Paranormal Activity 3 and 4 after this. Even the word 'catfish' got famous- as it's now known as someone who pretends to be someone and create false identities on social media, particularly to pursue deceptive online romance. The title of the film comes from the story about how when fishes are caught and are transported in tanks, they would often die because they wouldn't swim around and keep themselves moving. So, people would put catfish in the tanks with the other fish to keep them stimulated and moving around. He says that catfish are people who keep you on your toes. Like people in your life who will keep you going in all situations. Overall: That's the best part of the movie. I didn't like how it was promoted as "A riveting suspense thriller with a jaw-dropping twist" with neither riveting nor suspenseful twist. I felt 'catfish' by this movie's marketing. Still, it's a pretty good movie worth watching so check it out if you want to.