![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseCatfish is a fairly straightforward film about people building up a relationship via Facebook before meeting in real life and one party, inevitably, discovering that the entire network that they’d expected to meet was in fact a fabrication. The premise is straightforward and believable but it’s the way it plays out that makes it interesting. There is no sense of impending trainwreck to the process until a romantic attachment to one of the fabricated characters occurs, and in fact until that moment, it could be a fairly innocent connection. It’s all an issue of gain and motivation: what possible reason the approaching party could have for investing in the situation after all.
Overall, Catfish turned out to be a fairly watchable film, lacking the clichéd setups that one would come to expect with this sort of situation and exploring the ease with which that sort of situation could arise.
In contrast to Catfish, Chatroom was very much playing on cliché. For a film produced last year it had a surprisingly retro feel to it, up to and including very prominent featuring of Cyberdog in Camden Town, which as I recall was an up and coming thing over ten years ago. To put that in perspective, I was still buying velvet jackets and admiring lace cuffs in Camden market around about the same time that this sort of thing was hitting the mainstream. Yahoo chatrooms were popular and Altavista was an oft used search engine back then.
Regardless of the era that Chatroom invokes or the surreal fashion in which the online portions of the film is presented, what really makes it interesting is the human element. Like Catfish it’s very easy to see how the desire to forge a connection can lead into some odd ones that might easily not have flourished in real life. Regardless of the various tropes the characters embody, the way in which they feed into each other’s emotional needs is believable, as is the fact that that emotional vulnerability can easily be betrayed. I’ve had a fair bit to say about the attempt to forge a fast rapport with people online via info dumps in the past and this film is a nice illustration of why that’s usually a bad idea.
In keeping with the theme of emotional connection, Heavenly Creatures is based on real events so there’s very little I can say about the actual storyline itself. The film is a very sympathetic rendition of matters and works as a chronicle of errors in how to deal with the situation rather than placing specific blame in anybody involved.
It would have been so easy to cheapen the story will a gimmicky focus on things but somehow, despite various fantasy scenes there was still a distinct sense of ordinary tragedy to it. The fantasy sections only serving to highlight the reality of the situation that both main characters were desperately avoiding.
Overall, Catfish turned out to be a fairly watchable film, lacking the clichéd setups that one would come to expect with this sort of situation and exploring the ease with which that sort of situation could arise.
In contrast to Catfish, Chatroom was very much playing on cliché. For a film produced last year it had a surprisingly retro feel to it, up to and including very prominent featuring of Cyberdog in Camden Town, which as I recall was an up and coming thing over ten years ago. To put that in perspective, I was still buying velvet jackets and admiring lace cuffs in Camden market around about the same time that this sort of thing was hitting the mainstream. Yahoo chatrooms were popular and Altavista was an oft used search engine back then.
Regardless of the era that Chatroom invokes or the surreal fashion in which the online portions of the film is presented, what really makes it interesting is the human element. Like Catfish it’s very easy to see how the desire to forge a connection can lead into some odd ones that might easily not have flourished in real life. Regardless of the various tropes the characters embody, the way in which they feed into each other’s emotional needs is believable, as is the fact that that emotional vulnerability can easily be betrayed. I’ve had a fair bit to say about the attempt to forge a fast rapport with people online via info dumps in the past and this film is a nice illustration of why that’s usually a bad idea.
In keeping with the theme of emotional connection, Heavenly Creatures is based on real events so there’s very little I can say about the actual storyline itself. The film is a very sympathetic rendition of matters and works as a chronicle of errors in how to deal with the situation rather than placing specific blame in anybody involved.
It would have been so easy to cheapen the story will a gimmicky focus on things but somehow, despite various fantasy scenes there was still a distinct sense of ordinary tragedy to it. The fantasy sections only serving to highlight the reality of the situation that both main characters were desperately avoiding.