Ty Watches "You Can See Everything"
/I'm going to take another break from my preseason NBA countdown because I was fortunate enough to see "You Can See Everything" yesterday and I have some thoughts.
First off, this may be the best movie of the year, and it may have surpassed "Hoop Dreams" as the greatest documentary that has ever been made. I'm going to remain spoiler free since I believe, much like "Digger", that this movie should be seen in the theaters with a group of people. I was able to do that very thing, in a pretty much full theater yesterday, and it made the experience even better for me. There were moments in this documentary that made me and the crowd laugh and gasp, sometimes at the very same time.
"You Can See Everything" is the new Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary that shows the viewer the last 34 days before Holmes goes to prison for fraud, and then the aftermath of while she is in prison. Holmes and her partner, who is an evil, narcissistic and possibly insane, invited Fielder to film them, and eventually live with them, before she goes to serve her sentence. And it is as insane as people have said it was after seeing it. There are moments in this movie where Fielder will question Holmes and her partner, and the way they answer, or better yet, talk around answering, is so wild to me. There's a scene about an hour or so into the movie where Fielder shows them the famous who's on first bit, and their reaction to this, and Fielder's follow up questions had me throwing my hands in the air. I could not believe what I was watching, but even more, what I was hearing from Holmes and her partner.
As the movie continued to move on it became more and more wild. The way those two interact with people is so odd and off putting. The way Billy, Holmes' partner, treats Holmes' parents is so wrong and so ridiculous. Some of the stuff they say, some of the answers they give, some of the way they try to explain themselves, it's kind of scary to be honest with you. They seem to not understand social cues, and the way they talk around answering any real, any truthful question, is psychotic. Holmes at one point claims that she has never once lied in her life. I mean, what the hell?
And to let Fielder do this, to let him be one of the main people documenting this whole thing was certainly an interesting choice. I'm a massive Fielder fan. I have watched pretty much everything he has done to this point, and I truly love it all. But he is also the type of movie and tv maker that knows how to push buttons, and he has no fear in what he asks. He wants answers. He wants to get to the bottom of everything. He wants the person that he is interviewing to be uncomfortable, but also open and honest. That is not Holmes, nor is it the people that she has taken to and kept on her side.
The movie is just a few minutes under 3 hours, but at the 2 hour mark, when Holmes goes to jail, this movie turns into something I have never seen before, and it becomes more and more of a horror movie when Holmes isn't really the main subject anymore. I love how Oppenheim and Fielder kind of changed the way we see documentaries now. This will truly change the way docs are made. I fully believe that and I am excited for where these types of movies are going.
The hype is real. The critics are right. There's a reason this movie is the highest rated movie in the history of Letterboxd. All of it is real and all of it is correct. Go see this movie, and like I said before, see it in a full theater. This movie will blow your mind and I cannot recommend it enough.
Ty
Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.
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