TALHOTBLOND

talhotblond is one of those tales that would be too crazy to believe, so is all the more shocking because it is completely true.

In this day and age of electronic communication, whether it be via email, text, or messaging, it seems more and more that you hear about people getting in trouble, pretending to be something that they are not. But in this case, a love triangle based entirely on lies leads to one man killing another over a woman neither had ever even met.

The bizarre love triangle occurred entirely online. A 47-year-old factory worker named Thomas Montgomery passed time on internet gaming sites where users like to chat. Bored with his life (married with children), he chats under a made up identity. Online, he is 18-year-old "Tommy," a young Marine that is about to be shipped off to war. Tommy meets, and begins an online affair with a beautiful 18-year-old who calls herself "talhotblond". Their affair and chatting becomes passionate and sexual. They exchange photos and professions of true love.

But talhotblond is a manipulative vixen, and Tommy/Thomas becomes jealous. To make her 18-year-old Marine jealous, talhotblond starts an online affair with Thomas' real-life co-worker, a 22-year-old man who apparently doesn't know his co-worker's dark side. When all is said and done, one man actually kills his colleague over a woman that neither of them has met.

talhotblond is obviously a cautionary tale for the internet age. As the facts unfold, the story goes from fascinating to completely crazy to jaw-dropping in a "WHAT?!?!? EW!!!!" way. If you think the summary above gives things away, you have NO idea what else is in store in this sordid, unbelievable story.

But here's the thing: Though talhotblond has a too-good-to-be-fiction plot that ranks up there with any twisted crime of passion ever portrayed on screen, the film itself is... well... kind of lacking. For one thing, the documentary is "narrated" by the dead man, which seems a strangely exploitive stunt on the filmmaker's part. There's no indication that it was his own words (from a journal or anything), so this stunt was a little discomfiting to me. And though portraying the actual texts on screen (as though you are watching a chat between two users) works well, the rest of the doc is unexceptional in style.

It is hard to put my finger on what seemed lacking in talhotblond. Ultimately, I felt it was a great story... a fantastic story, really. But the movie itself? It was just OK.