This is How Movies Should Be Made

Purely Joyful Movie!

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

It will restore your faith in humanity. I was absolutely blown away by this documentary just now. The level of generosity, humanity, compassion and empathy shown by the people Joe meets in his journey around America present a far different picture of us than what you're seeing on the news and on facebook. I simply cannot recommend this highly enough!

"Craigslist Joe" tells the story of a man who makes it his goal to leave his home and make it by for one month. Here are the rules: no money, no credit cards, no check books, and no contacting anyone that he knows. So how does he do it? Craigslist. On Craigslist, he is able to post ads and respond to those posted by others in order to arrange plans for where to stay and eat food. Each day, he meets new people, who are each interesting in their own way. To me, this movie is fascinating because no man would have been able to manage anything like this before household technology was common. Also, the generosity and compassion of the people he meets is breathtaking. To sum it up: creative concept, impressive feat, great movie. I'd recommend "Craigslist Joe" to anyone.

Craigslist Joe is a road film documentary that challenges the viewer to reflect on his or her own generosity. In this film Joe Garner voluntarily leaves his home for 31 days with only a laptop, cell phone, and the cloths on his back; with the hopes that he can rely on the generosity of people through Craigslist ads to travel the Unites States. Through Craigslist, Joe comes across a large (an odd) spectrum of people, including businessmen, hippies, a compulsive hoarder, Iraqi immigrants, and a dominatrix. Towards the end of his trip he even gets to meet the founder of Craigslist himself. The road film genre of Craigslist Joe, paired with the many collaged videos of Joe's adventures, made the documentary feel like a scrapbook of Joe's journey. As Joe narrated the scenes, it made me feel as though I too was along for the ride. This film was entertaining throughout and because of the unpredictability of Craigslist, I never knew what to expect next. Having used Craigslist before, I was curious about this film to see how and if it is possible to live off of the website. Craigslist is notorious for being dangerous, because you never know who you're trading with and I personally have been put off at times by the potential of coming across a "bad" person. After watching this film I think I would feel a little more open to the idea of using the site, because a large majority of the people (although bizarre) were kind and charitable. The were a few technicalities that hindered the practicality of this experiment working. The fact that Joe was a clean-cut, attractive, white male, with a camera following him around, may have contributed to the ease in which he found assistance. It would be interesting to see how this experiment would have worked if done off camera, and or with someone of a different race and gender. With that said, the help that he received came from ads that people had posted regardless of Joe and his film. Although Joe's presence may have heightened peoples warmheartedness, there generosity was there to begin with.

I felt like there may have been a Heisenberg factor throughout the show, that is the fact that people are aware that a camera could be recording them so perhaps they would act differently (I would suspect they'd be nicer)? Nevertheless, overall it was a very intriguing, honest and perspective altering show frankly. I mean people really did offer to do things without knowing that he was writing a documentary.I think I liked this documentary so much because it was more of an experiment for a given hypothesis rather than an investigation trying to convince you of something. I guess it was trying to convince me that there is good in the world and well it pretty much worked! That doesn't mean tomorrow I am going to go on Craigslist and do what he did, but I think there was something valuable to take away? :)