The King and (F.B.)I: Elvis Found Alive

By Christian Lipski

Elvis Presley is alive and well and living in Simi Valley. Or at least that’s the claim of Elvis Found Alive, a new faux-documentary from Highway 61 Entertainment, who brought you Paul McCartney Is Really Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison (reviewed here). This time around, they’re doing a complete 180, revealing a conspiracy to fake a death instead of a life.

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Catfish: Beyond Real And Beyond Fake

By Less Lee Moore

Living on the Internet means that you often have to dodge spoilers. Luckily, the Internet is also so crammed with information there are enough things with which to distract yourself.

Such was the case with Catfish, a 2010 documentary that caught my attention via its unsettling trailer, which seemed like a faux documentary horror movie along the lines of The Blair Witch Project or the Paranormal Activity series. It was clear that an appreciation of the film was a case of “less is more,” so I added it to my DVD queue and successfully avoided spoilers for almost two years.

When I finally watched Catfish earlier this week, my stomach was in knots for at least 45 minutes until the movie completely . . . I’ll stop here because if you haven’t seen Catfish, you should watch it, and you should watch it not knowing any more than I did.

Catfish is a remarkable film and one that is thrilling, upsetting, disturbing, and moving. It makes incredible use of technology in its presentation of the Internet persona through GPS, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and all the other forms of social and searchable media we use every day. Such technology is so easily accessible and so widely used that it becomes a part of our lives that we take for granted, even though we assign it so much importance. We take all the veracity it reveals to us on faith.

As far as Internet personas, it’s common knowledge that we want to show everyone the best of ourselves, even if that means we make ourselves seem better than we are. But there is always a gap between our “real” selves and our Internet selves.

The width of this gap will likely determine how you treat your Internet friends. Do you treat them the same as your “real life” friends? Better? Worse? Do you subscribe to the “It’s just the Internet” theory to make yourself feel better about what you see and read there? The width of this gap will also determine how much Internet interactions affect you when you’re not on the Internet.

These were the ideas swirling around in my head right after I watched Catfish and right before I started looking up reviews online. Then, much like the film itself, everything changed. SPOILERS BEHIND THE CUT!

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Jesus Take The (Lunar) Wheel: Apollo 18

By Emily Carney

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar module Eagle landed on Earth’s Moon, beginning three years of unsurpassed, spectacular lunar voyages.

On December 14, 1972, Apollo 17’s lunar module Challenger departed the Moon’s surface, leaving a massive void in manned lunar exploration which continues to exist until the present time.

In the beginning of the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy sent out a resounding, powerful call to have a man walk on the Moon by the end of that decade, and NASA was wholly successful in their goal to meet such a momentous deadline.

It took Hollywood well over 50 years from that point to make Apollo 18. To paraphrase JFK, at the beginning of this decade, we made the worst space horror film, ever.
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