Feels Good Man

It's a well made documentary with nicely animated segments. Largely following the perspective of the creator and what happened to pepe. All through an extremely narrow and biased view.

Around the 45min mark, it becomes just crystal clear how he doesn't understand his creation. How he, together with ADL, Hillary Clinton, Maddow and rest of left wing media helped enable this to become a "far right hate speech symbol". It never was that, until these people decided to make pepe into that. It seems completely out of touch with trolling and getting a rise out of people, and going against the mainstream and political correctness. The more these people wish to silence and censor people, the more crazy pepe memes they would get in response. They themselves are the enablers.

The 4chan guy they mainly choose to focus on was such a stereotype fitting 100% the narrative they attempted to persuade. While they did talk to a girl who also roamed 4chan, she was left too much out of the documentary so they could push their view on the audience.

As they show Hong Kong demonstrators towards the end who embrace Pepe, the creator and movie makers seems to not understand that them embracing pepe comes from similar reasons as why it was embraced in the US by Trump supporters. In both cases it's used as anti-leftists, anti-censorship, anti-establishment memes. If they happen to side with the Chinese government, I'm sure they would have labeled their use of it as "hate speech" also.

But all of this being said, it's not a bad documentary, as long as the biased view doesn't annoy you too much. Still a nice capsule of most of the pepe events and how the character grew beyond the grasp of it's creator.

Feels Good Man, the directorial debut of Arthur Jones, centers around the cultural transformation and appropriation of an innocent cartoon character: Pepe the Frog. The film follows Pepe's creator, Matt Furie, as he tries to comes to terms with all that is happening to his creation and eventually fights back to regain control of what was once his; meanwhile, we are also treated to a full unravelling of how Pepe was meme'd into internet infamy among fringe, alt-right groups, discovering just how powerful a tool the Internet can be and how hard it can be to turn back what's been done. The film's pacing is very good, the story is captivating, and the people brought in to break it all down are very interesting; however, while being well worth the watch, I think it falls short in its overall takeaway and message.

The film does a great job of bringing in a diversity of interviewees to help detail both the personal story of Matt & Pepe, as well as the digital journey that transformed Pepe into a profound hate symbol. Insight into Matt's life is drawn primarily from discussion with his wife and housemates, as well as from getting to see him interact with his daughter. It all draws a very quaint portrait of a guy who seems nice and, to be honest, pretty average, which makes Pepe's journey all the more startling while also helping to explain Matt's initial reluctance to act and rather just lay back. For deconstructing the underbelly of the web, we're introduced to a 4chan lifer (or a NEET - this guy's reality may in fact have been the scariest part of the film), my first-ever sighting of a memetist, an occultist scholar / magic librarian (can we talk about how this guy used the force to pull a book off of a shelf???), and the director of the Network Contagion Research Institute at Princeton - all these just to name a few. While the story itself is captivating at parts, what really pushes the movie towards success is the people you meet; the most interesting part of the film may in fact be when Matt meets up with a 20ish person group in San Fran composed of people who have devoted themselves to deconstructing and understanding these sort of internet phenomena; the sheer fact that these groups exist was quite eye-opening, and the juxtaposition of their deep concern and worry for what has happened to Pepe versus Matt's laidback nature was both hilarious and a little tragic. All these people understand something that Matt is seemingly still fully unaware of: he has completely lost control of his beloved character, and frankly, there is almost no turning back. This is not to say that every interviewee lends value - the two female cartoonists / writers seemed to contribute very little and felt more like a "We've already recorded the interviews so let's just use them" situation.

The film should also be given enormous credit for its efforts in trying to trace the origins and gradual transformation of Pepe. I think we all know how difficult it can be to find any "starting points" or sources of actual truth online, but the crew seem to have done very well in their research; likely helped, and perhaps influenced, by their interviews with members of these Internet hordes. Another short note is that the animation throughout is very solid and felt like a strong tool to complement the film's narrative. It wasn't overdone and tied nicely to the scenes where it was used.

With regards to the film's overall goals and purpose, Matt Furie's story is interesting and he is a generally likeable guy, but the real meat of this film is its examination of internet culture and how it can basically turn anything on its head and morph it for its own use or gain, without almost any repercussion. The way in which we see an innocent frog cartoon slowly become a symbol of hate and bigotry is enthralling, but also terrifying as we realize that it all happened through the efforts of people sitting right at home and operating under the anonymity given to them by the Internet and its platforms (e.g. 4chan). Once they took hold, there was really no going back. Sure, Matt's been able to win lawsuits with public figures that have appropriated the character, such as Alex Jones, but almost nothing can be done to the thousands (or millions) of people still using it for their hateful purposes online. While the film tries to end on a positive note by displaying how Pepe went from an alt-right symbol in the US to a symbol of freedom in the Hong Kong protests, it feels like a lackluster solution and rose-colored view, frustratingly trying to give the viewer a hopeful message while denying the harsher truth and reality that it itself has painted. While it's great to see that Pepe can still be a symbol of hope and positivity, the true conclusion is much more ambiguous, demonstrating how we can project almost any emotion onto a character or piece of media, meme-ing it into "this" or "that". Everything comes with a dark side or at least the potential of evil - while we can hope that good is the stronger force, it doesn't really make it any easier to put a stop to the bad.

This documentary has two focuses; the story of Pepe being adopted and appropriated by the internet, and the story of a cartoonist losing his creation. It is in the telling of the former story where the film excels. It follows Pepe from when it first becomes popular on bodybuilding forums to becoming the most popular meme on 4chan to eventually becoming a symbol of the alt-right in the 2016 U.S. election. The movie frames this entire story in the emotions of the people posting the meme. It is not so much about the meme itself as it is about what it means to them, and Pepe meant a lot.

The presentation of the documentary is creative and well paced, mixing animation, interviews, television footage, and screen grabs to keep from ever becoming monotonous. The result is an exiting presentation that emphasizes the empathy for the people being talked about. When the movie gets to the point where Pepe is becoming the symbol of a political movement and Trump is posting himself as Pepe, it is exhilarating. I remember this happening in real life and despising these people, yet despite myself I was getting caught up in the excitement of it all.

There is a sobering transition of tone when, after this section, the camera is back on Matt Furie, his life made so difficult by what was done with his creation. He was naive and maybe wilfully ignorant of what was happening, but he did what we wish more artists would do today, letting people be creative with their characters rather than sending cease and desists. By the time he tries to recover Pepe it is too late and he finally kills the character as 4chan rejoices that Pepe is officially theirs. It is terribly sad.

I thought about downgrading my rating to a 9 because the ending is optimistic in a way that i didn't quite buy, but I've decided to forgive it. The story of this movie is an unprecedented catastrophe that no one could have predicted. Maybe its foolish to assume I can predict where the story is going.

I'd heard a lot of good things about this film after its premiere, with the added assurance that, yes, it is a documentary about Pepe the frog and yet it's still really good, so I was expecting something interesting.

And I still finished it thinking it was so much better than a film about Pepe the frog has any right to be. It's a film about symbolism, psychology, the internet, the death of the author, meme culture, all while maintaining a sense of grim disgust but still being funny, optimistic by the end, an interesting character study about a modern day tortured artist, AND never once feels the least bit cringey even though it's about meme culture, which is an extreme rarity in a world where most films centering around the internet are produced by out of touch 60 year old boomers.

Not a word of the script feels wasted, the choice to animate Pepe in various ways illustrating the voice over was genius, and every one of the people it looks at are all really interesting.

The few things I could maybe complain about are that the soundtrack wasn't all that great to me and the last 20 minutes or so feel a bit slower than the rest of the film, and not really in a good way. However, if you have even a passing presence or space of your own on the internet, this is an absolute must-see.

Even if it is a documentary about Pepe the bloody frog.

As someone who experienced almost all the events presented, this was just a huge trip down memory lane. so i was just constanly pointing and saying "aah i remember that". so i enjoyed a lot of those moments. though im kinda let down on the fact that the story focuses on one side of the story. the whole alt right thing isnt the place where pepe currently resides. so in summary, i really liked it because it is a story close to home, but there were some things that i dissagreed on from a narrative standpoint.

8/10: really enjoyed it, but has some flaws