Awesome Movie

A different way of telling a story

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

This film had possibilities, but it never took advantage of them. Studying the mid-90s rise in Internet and WWW popularity, the director lucked into interviewing Justin Hall, who toured the country and got hired by Hotwired and Electric Minds. Unfortunately, he only gives us brief insight into the lifestyle of the Webhead crowd, trading instead on a soap opera affair between Hotwired employees and footage of Howard Rheingold getting interviewed by foreign news crews. A sappy Baby-Boomer ending doesn't save the film from its own pointlessness; nothing of relevance emerges from the screen. Save your money, and just stick to reading about the modern relevance of the Internet.

Home Page is an insightful, thoughtful and well crafted piece of work that follows the life of Justin Hall over the period of roughly one year from Swathmore College to a job in San Francisco. Using Justin's unique relationship to the web, the film coaxes the viewer to perceive reality through this digital medium of the 'open' notebook. Justin tells it like it is on his home page; Doug Block tells it like it is as he follows Justin around and meets others who bare their souls in the public forum of the internet. My favorite aspect of Block's film is the way in which he allows the object of his study - the internet and home pages - to form a new context in his own life. Block creates his own home page and juxtaposes interviews of his wife with his own self-examination through the one year + making of the film. In the end, I walked away feeling like I had participated in other people's lives - an experience that I may have gotten by reading the characters' home pages, but probably not with the same intensity as I did by watching this film.An excellent and timely piece of work.