HOME PAGE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Copacetic Pictures/Home Box Office Director: Doug Block Writer: Doug Block, Deborah Rosenberg Cast: Doug Block, Joey Anuff, Justin Hall, Jaime Levy, Julie Peterson, Howard Rheingold, Louis Rossetto, John Seabrook, Aliza Sherman, Carl Steadman, Stefanie Syman
At base, the question that documentarian Doug Block asks in filming "Home Pages" is this: When we sit alone at our computers tap-tap-tapping out our responses in chat rooms, scanning web sites, and contributing autobiographical details on our own pages, are we demonstrating our sociability? Are we reaching out to people the world over, or are we immersed in ourselves, hiding from actual contact with other human beings? The common-sense answer is, of course, both, depending on the individual who is doing the tap-tap-tapping. Since Americans change venues frequently--the typical resident of the U.S. exchanging one home for another every five years--perhaps we have lost the sense of community that we had before the Third Industrial Revolution cast us adrift. In that case, the people we relate to on the Internet are the denizens of our real neighborhoods--which is all to the good. Nonetheless the image that many people have of cyberpunks is of albino- like creatures who are living in a kind of Platonic cave, shielded against the burning rays of the sun, devoid of genuine contact with our fellows and hence appropriately labeled misfits.
The computer-addicted people caught by the 43-year-old Doug Block's cameras in his 1999 Sundance Film Festival "Home Page" are, in my humble estimation, oddballs and outcasts almost without exception. Block could have treated them as a director like Fellini might, with smiling condescension, but opts instead to take them as seriously as they take themselves, like a modern Frederick Wiseman, thereby eliciting, perhaps, a greater authenticity from his cast of characters.
While the millions of us who are already addicted to the Internet and those of us who are curiously considering the habit might be drawn to the movie, many will find Block's treatment of the early stages of web traffic quite disappointing. The film has two major weaknesses. One is that with two or three exceptions, the performers are not likeable people, not folks around whom the more rational among us would want to spend ten minutes. The second is that while this, like all other documentaries, is edited (in fact "Variety" reviewer Dennis Harvey reporting from Sundance, holds that "editor Deborah Rosenberg does an outstanding job weaving numerous threads into an affecting narrative shape"), I find no such evidence exists. "Home Page" looks like a story that shifts from person to person like a kid scanning TV channels, then slapped together with no more than a modicum of revision to give it cohesion.
The motivation for the film comes when its creator, Doug Block, appears to undergo a mid-life crisis and decides to follow Swarthmore College student Justin Block around the country. Justin, like a cyberspace Billy Graham, is meeting with people of all ages an backgrounds to extol the benefits of personal pages on the Internet. Hall, who took a brief leave of absence from his college to make his odyssey, sports a unique, knotted hairstyle (which he inexplicably shaves off when he reaches the age of 21, to make himself even more unattractive). Having built one of the Web's first links three or four years ago, he writes intimate details of his life into his journal to form a kind of erotic autobiography-- allegedly accessed by 7,000 regular patrons. One can only reflect that his dates must have been as exhibitionistic as Hall to allow intimate details of their relationships with this pioneer to be on view in much the style of the women in Myles Berkowitz's documentary feature "Twenty Dates." One of his pages features the author in the nude, prompting a plethora of notes on the walls of a women's bathroom at Swarthmore which ask the users their opinions of the man who craves so much attention.
When he is not focussing on Hall, filmmaker Block introduces us to his wife, a law professor, and to his mother, both of whom resist the web. His gray-haired, lively mom is one of the few down-to-earth people in the film, insisting that she'd rather talk with people on the phone to get immediate responses, insisting that she wants nothing to do with e-mail. (One of the final shots in the movie belies her statement: both she and her husband are seen tapping away late at night.)
Perhaps this movie targets a college audience, but more likely even the 20-somethings would be turned off by Justin, who rambles through the movie usually half-nude, an abysmally inarticulate person whose speech is permeated with "you-know"'s, "like," "I mean," "what-not," and other such fillers that have become a trademark of the Monica Lewinsky generation. Undoubtedly he is a better writer than he is a speaker, but Block spends surprisingly little time on the dynamics of the Internet, casting only an occasional look at what transpires on the screen. One can only wonder how a frightful fellow like Justin ever passed the interview that got him into Swarthmore, one of the nation's top colleges, but if he represents the typical student at that and other elite institutions, standards have indeed plummeted since I went to college back in the Jurassic Age.
The film becomes increasingly annoying as we are familiarized with one pretentious maverick after another, virtually none able to put together a sentence without a surfeit of empty verbiage and a clutter of hollow, unnecessary fillers. Editor Deborah Rosenberg must have the cleanest work room on the block, as apparently not a frame of this movie ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Not Rated. Running Time: 102 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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