today: 6.24.99
every day

SPECIAL MOVIE REVIEW EDITION!

last night i was picking up a friend of mine who works at hbo, and noticed hbo was hosting a private screening of an upcoming documentary called "homepage". i'd read about this film and was eager to see it, especially since there were all sorts of familiar faces interviewed in the doc. plus, i'd been to hbo screenings before and they usually include drinks and cold shrimp, followed by free cakes, cookies and sweets. can't lose, right?

we lost. the movie was fantastically awful. i-don't-care-about-any-of-this kind of awful. which is really awful because, theoretically, i do care about most of this and i wonder what people will think who have never cared a bit about online personalities, web journals, etc. (my friend was irritated and ready to leave after the first scenes in which swarthmore girls talked about how justin hall was here to "deliver a message") here was a filmmaker who didn't seem to know anything about the web and made this whole film based on limited knowledge, the hunches of a couple friends, and a completely unfathomable fascination with justin hall.

you occasionally get a sense that this guy thought he was going to make a millennial sherman's march, because there are light shades of it in the film's opening. then he meets justin and spends an utterly insane amount of time with him, trying to get inside his head, which made no sense since i imagine most people in the audience "got" justin after about 5 minutes of screen time. (here's a hint: it rhymes with "gwarcissist")

it is through his interactions with justin that he meets a bunch of other web folks -- some interesting, some not. between these discoveries are a bunch of (back to sherman's march, i see) interviews with his wife (i feel like the filmmaker savored the very emotional responses he received from his wife, even if they had nothing to do with the thesis of this film. by the way, if anyone can find the thesis of this film and prove it to me, please let me know.)

unfortunately, though there were interesting moments that might warrant further discussion, the film succeeded in (unintentionally, i think. this filmmaker was far too wistful about the medium to truly see it with a critical eye) validating a lot of criticism about the web -- that it's filled with emotional cripples, socially inept recluses, passive-aggressives, cowardly exhibitionists, and this guy.

ok. those are my general impressions. here are some things i actually learned from the film (when i say "learned", i mean inferred. i don't know if any of these are true but the film made me think them, despite what i might otherwise think about any of the individuals featured in the film. that's my disclaimer, because i think i'm going to sound like a bit of an asshole. by the way, "I THINK I'M GOING TO SOUND LIKE A BIT OF AN ASSHOLE" is the working title for my next volume of memoirs.

jaime levy is a smart designer (or was. i haven't followed her work for a while) but idiotic words come out of her mouth when the camera's on her. (she acts embarrassingly self-satisfied about living someplace she believes to be dangerously drug-addled and criminalized, to unintentionally hilarious effects. this is 1996!! the east village was 98% gentrified by then.she asks, "wanna buy some crack, doug?" um, jaime, if he doesn't feel like buying any crack, maybe you guys could buy a Spirulina Blast at one of those fruit smoothie places that started popping up on avenue A around 1996?)

justin hall, though i appreciate his pioneering work and his obsessive behavior, has next to nothing to say. he will say 'deep' things -- mostly to liberal-arts college girls, i think -- and then immediately report them online, instantly undermining their importance. my movie-going partner doesn't really give a shit about the web and kept commenting on how justin was a proto-actor, projecting everything out and actually taking nothing much in. it's weird to hear him speak because most of the time he seems to be in awe of the words that come out of his own mouth. maybe that's the camera's effect again. i'm trying to be even-handed. it's work.

i invented a new expression while watching justin hall blab blab blab (at one point, incorrectly pronouncing truman capote's last name). here it is: "I WISH I HAD A GUN LOADED WITH SHUT-THE-FUCK-UP BULLETS RIGHT ABOUT NOW." enjoy this expression, inspired by justin's tireless monologues.

julie peterson's husband might kill her and wear her flesh to work any minute now. man, was that hard to watch. that was the closest this movie came to real movie-making, HOLLYWOOD-STYLE! there was just so much sadness and tension there, and i feel like the two of them playing out the rest of their marriage is either fantastically evolved or excessively cruel. the jury is still out but there's a heavy "excessively cruel" sentiment building.

wait a second here...did howard rheingold have a crush on justin? he's a grown man with interesting ideas and a fantastic moustache. but he takes this skinny, self-absorbed (ok, justin's in college during the movie's filming. it's hard to be anything but self-absorbed for some folks during that time) kid into his life, into his career and into his HOME. when howard described justin as his "guru", all i could think was, "doesn't he mean 'catamite'?

carl steadman is affable, securely intelligent, and very human. i guess i might have known this from his writing but a part of me couldn't help but wonder beforehand if he was also a total creep, even though friends assure me he is not. so far, so good.

an editor could have possibly made sense of this whole mess. sure, that would have meant cutting out all the grandparents stuff, most of the family stuff, jaime levy (i'm sorry, but billy idol's enhanced cd and jaime's love affair with weed are not terribly compelling...and what exactly does this have to do with your movie?), and 30 minutes of justin (alternately, this movie could have been entirely about justin if doug was trying to make the point that he found a mirror in him -- even if that would be a sad and unwatchable point), but you might even find a movie in there somewhere.

there must be department stores for circus clowns, because i simply cannot think of another place howard rheingold could have purchased some of his clothes. i am well aware this is an unnecessarily personal attack, but i've never painted myself as a more noble creature. honestly: i appreciate his sense of self-comfort, but it would not prevent me from wanting to throw a milkshake at him from a moving vehicle if i saw him walking down the street.

i need to grow up in some areas. i shouldn't want to hit howard rheingold with milkshakes or fruit smoothies or rolled-up copies of L'HUOMO magazine. baby steps.

i wish i liked homepage more. it wasn't the lack of car chases or the excess of problem-hair. it was the complete absence of a singular purpose (homepage is a HOT TOPIC! why should anything else matter?) that i think just made me realize more and more why this medium is totally marginalized. it's enough to make you shut down your homepage and do some charity work.

it's also enough to make you write an unbearably long diatribe against the very medium to which you quietly contribute. how pomo...

prequel | sequel

all these words © 1999 todd levin.