Fyre: the greatest party that never happened
 

Excellent documentary about this festival fiasco on Netflix

FYRE, as a look inside the actual machinations of this massive failure, isn't solely about this hilarious payoff though. It smartly doesn't linger too long on the elements that we all experienced as an online peanut gallery a few years back. It brings us into the world of entrepreneur Billy McFarland and his pathological need to defraud people on his climb up a luxurious ladder of his own design. Parts of McFarland's scheming psyche are reminiscent of The Talented Mr. Ripley while other elements of his personality dip into the darkly comedic loneliness of The Office's Michael Scott. McFarland, who appears in tons of FYRE footage but never for an interview, needs the party to continue. He needs to be surrounded by booze and babes and "friends" as a way of assuaging his fears and drowning his quieted mind. If the bottles keep popping and the music keeps blasting then he must be having a good time.

I watched this earlier in the week, not sure how I got watching it, just randomly pressed it on Netflix and it is oddly very compelling and entertaining. So many people got swept up in it and refused for so long to admit that it had gone to **** :joker:. Like the festival organiser guy they had on board at the very start (when they still had the private island) who was telling them the only way to make it work was to have cruise ships as the accommodation (because they have built-in food / water / sanitation) and it was a totally feasible idea but they were like "NOPE" and fired him.

Then the promoter guy who, when it had clearly all gone wrong, was like "We need to just admit it and tell people not to come" and they were like "Nope and shut up or you won't get paid" :joker:.

But yeah it's the islanders who worked manual labour setting it up and never got paid I feel bad for. And the lady who was organising the catering and did pay her own staff, but out of her own pocket using all of her savings.

I felt more sorry for them than the idiots who paid 4k to see some non entities play on a remote Island just because some supermodels said it would be great :laugh:


Him scamming them again though while out on bail!

Thankfully a gofundme (or something similar) was set up to reimburse the restaurant owner, and it far surpassed her expenses so I would hope that the surplus money goes to the other workers on the island :love:

The (Netflix) documentary was fascinating in a car crash sort-of-way, but I just found myself getting irate with some of the people being interviewed. That Asian kid who just gleefully retold about how he and his friends ran around stealing supplies and pissing on others' mattresses :umm2: I hope he's bankrupt before 30.

And I also hope Ja Rule goes to prison. Disgusting, delusional man who never had much talent to begin with

Yes, a bunch of rich gap year kids going to an island expecting luxury and having to sleep in a pissy hurricane-refugee tent with no food/water/toilets is lowkey amazing, I would have loved to have been there just to observe :joker:.

Just watched it, don’t understand how Ja Rule is getting away with it?

It seems to me like he was more involved with the initial stages of "WOW isn't this a great idea" and the early promotion, but wasn't actively involved in any of the organisation. The only reason McFarland is in trouble is that there have been indications of actual deliberate fraud, mis-reporting figures, misleading investors etc... no one else involved has been charged with anything illegal as it's more down to sheer incompetence. People who lost money probably have a civil case against many of them but there's nothing actually criminal. It's not like they went into it deliberately planning something crap and selling it as something great - they seemed to believe they could actually do it and it was just **** up after **** up :umm2:.

Oh I'm glad to hear that. The Island workers were literally the only ones I felt sorry for in that whole thing. It's hard to feel sorry for a bunch of rich trust fund babies

I watched last night. The whole thing was crazy, hope everybody wrongfully out of pocket gets reimbursed. Very disappointed in Ja Rule, someone I have always been a fan of

tbf he probably didn't know that it was all going to **** and terribly organised. He probably just trusted that Billy and the team actually knew what they were doing :laugh:

Yeah it seemed like he was there for the "WOAH what a great idea!!" stage and bihlgged it up a bit on social media, but wasn't actively involved in any planning and probably thought it was all under control :umm2:.

Oh and sorry how hasn't the bit about that guy agreeing to give the customs guy a BJ to realise the Evian not been brought up yet?? It was almost an abducted in plain sight moment [emoji1787]

Good old Andy King

He almost seemed disappointed he didnt have to in the end [emoji1787]

Haha I thought that too!

the tone of the film was weird because i'm guessing it ws meant to come off as serious but it was just hilarious to me... also not gonna lie i really enjoyed watching rich kids get scammed and seeing them turn ferrel was the cherry on top. The only sad part was the Bajans not being payed for all their work.

DO NOT get me started on that one sdvlhfkvfnvuoi

That was the most ****ed up story I've ever seen

I'm CONVINCED that it was suggested to him as a joke and it was only him who took it seriously like "Ooooohhh if I really MUST I suppose let me just grab my chapstick" *tires screech as he pulls out of the driveway*

:joker:

Probably [emoji1787]

it was just constant plot twists with no time to process the last one i didn't know how to react.

It just came from nowhere, it was a proper spit out your drink moment [emoji38] (the hand job part that is)

My fav part is that his excuse was that he "was just being stupid I guess" or something. Like "d'oh! I accidentally wanked off that guy!"

That poor kid had no hope with those 2 as parents