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Jan 18, 2019 · There’s something to be said for people who forge on, pushing past adversity and jumping the hurdles placed in front of them by life. However, realism is also a virtue, and McFarland kept forging until he left literally hundreds of people in his wake, conning investors, getting free labor, and ultimately going to jail for his crimes.
- Fool's Paradise.
- FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened Gallery
- Verdict
By Matt Fowler
Updated: Jan 24, 2019 2:00 am
Posted: Jan 18, 2019 7:00 pm
FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened -- produced by Danny Gabai at Vice Studios, along with Chris Smith, Library Films and Mick Purzycki at Jerry Media -- premieres Friday, January 18 on Netflix.
Let's get this out of the way right at the top: Fyre Festival's entire "dramatic irony/poetic justice" spiral into chaos and degradation is hilarious. It was 2017's gift to all us snarky, schadenfreude-seeking hellhounds, and the entire delicious ordeal played out perfectly in real time on Twitter. It was the best horror comedy in ages. And the new Netflix documentary, FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, certainly leans into this aspect. It knows what we all want to see. But, thank goodness, it's also more than that.
Yes, we want to watch self-important social media influencers suffer some form of humiliating comeuppance. We want the wealthy, beautiful, and carefree to experience extreme levels of discomfort and inconvenience. It's the dream. And you'll definitely get that in FYRE. There's an appropriate build-up, about an hour's worth, and then - BAM! - hundreds of rich, selfie-obsessed youths get hit with sopping wet hurricane tents, vile food, and an inability to escape from a place ill-equipped to care for them. It was a brand of catfishing in a way, but for VIP villas, yacht parties, and celeb-adjacent activities. And yes, it was criminally great that one dude with a couple hundred followers on Twitter was able to go viral with that image of the dreaded, sloppy cheese sandwich and have it topple all the work done by Instagram influencers with millions in their tribe.
McFarland is an amiable, expert salesman capable of inspiring others to follow his various visions. His venture with Ja Rule, to create an app called Fyre which would help event coordinators book top line musical acts (an actual good idea that Ja Rule would still go on to do later, after the collapse of Fyre) would however lead him down a dead end "emperor's new clothes" road of broken promises and colony collapse. He's now serving a six-year prison sentence for a litany of deception and fraud charges and FYRE is mostly about his glossy, gregarious world of wheeling, dealing, and ability to convince hard-working, capable people to follow him into the abyss.
For those heading into this documentary unaware of the Fyre Festival fiasco, or any of the fallout, it was a heavily-hyped music event designed to mark the launch of the Fyre app. McFarland and Ja Rule hired a bunch of supermodels and brought them to an island in the Bahamas where they filmed a promo for the event, which promised ticket buyers a once in a lifetime milk and honey moment of tropical luxury. They also paid Instagram influencers to advertise Fyre Fest in a coordinated mass-post. The buzz was on and the fix was in.
Anyone who's now in a job, or has been in a job, that requires a high level of planning, organization and delivery on expectations will cringe in terror as the saga of a completely unattainable island concert experience is chased by people working hard to quickly (within a couple of months) transform an area of the Bahamas, that's unable to accommodate even a fraction of what was promised to customers, into a paradise for lifestyle models and opulence experience curators. You'll come for the moment when all the rich kids step off the plane and see, basically, Bartertown from Beyond Thunderdome for the first time - and not Xanadu, as promised - but you'll stay for the engrossing, and terrifying, build toward that moment. That moment when everyone involved more or less knows they're on the Titanic, yet continue to polish all the brass because McFarland is an aggressively driven huckster obsessed with selling people intangible things that can't be made manifest.
Pay particular attention to the final twenty minutes of this tale though. Once the entire Fyre Festival crumbles, take note of who suffers. Yeah, a bunch of people who can afford to lose money lost money, but it's a dangerous thing to get caught up in laughing at swindled one-percenters as heaps got hurt here and McFarland's crazed chicanery should be demonized no matter the demo he targets. His own employees, those who actually worked on the Fyre app, suffered. The workers on Great Exuma, who never got paid for all their labor and effort, were left in the lurch - with one woman having to blow her entire savings in an attempt to make her staff whole. The best thing about FYRE is how it turns a punchline into no laughing matter.
FYRE delivers greatly on the delight in the misfortune of the wealthy and the shallow that we all expect and crave, but it also smartly doesn't hang its hat on it. It's mostly about the actual well-intentioned people involved in this fiasco and how anyone can be suckered into a vision or dream when no one in a collective is willing to speak out as ...
Jan 18, 2019 · ‘Fyre’ Review: Doc on Disastrous Music Fest Is One Three-Alarm Autopsy. Netflix's look at how greed, corruption and lies led to an epic music-fest fail is an expert portrait of a great ...
Jan 18, 2019 · Rated 4/5 Stars • Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/24/24 Full Review Gareth v A good doco on the mess that was the Fyre festival. Did have a good chuckle about some of the people getting scammed by a ...
- (94)
- Documentary
- Chris Smith
Jan 16, 2019 · “Fyre” hurls the swindle at its center like a bowling ball. The movie, which Chris Smith directed, finds the players in and around a 2017 scheme to pull a music festival out of thin air ...
- Chris Smith
- Wesley Morris
- 97 min
Jan 18, 2019 · Netflix's new documentary, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, is clueing everyone else in on the drama—and giving those of us who thought we knew all of the debacle's hairy details ...
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Jan 18, 2019 · Chris Smith ’s documentary, Fyre, provides a solid overview of what happened and how it went so wrong. At the center of the controversy is entrepreneur/con artist Billy McFarland, whose desire ...
