Home Page

When asked by a journalist whether he considers himself a "net addict," author and Internet guru Howard Rheingold retorts, "do you consider yourself a reading addict?" A paradigm-shifting kind of question posed at a watershed moment in cultural history: 1996, still in the heady early period of the exponentially exploding World Wide Web. Filmmaker Doug Block (The Heck with Hollywood, reviewed in VL-9/93) drops his cinematic pole in this brave new data stream and lands some fairly exotic fish: in particular, 21-year-old cybercelebrity, Justin Hall, a Swarthmore undergrad, whose "Justin's Links from the Underground" website, with it's public tell-all (and I do mean all) personal diary attracts some 7,000 hits a day, including the girlfriends who are reading their most intimate thoughts and actions recast for a global audience. But Hall is no simple lothario with a technological come-on: the lanky blonde (sporting a hairdo that looks like a beehive by way of Sid Vicious) truly believes in the transformative power of the WWW to reinvent personal, cultural, and business relationships, and--in one of the film's best sequences--we watch this Tom-Peters-on-a-different-plane outline his vision to a roomful of (no doubt paying) sober-looking suits. In fact, even Block is bitten by the "home page" bug, and under the halfhearted tutelage of the flighty Hall, creates his own site (this parallel excursion is the weaker part of the program, especially in the interview segments with Block's wife, who seems to be painfully uncomfortable with her husband's venture). In addition to tracking Hall (who eventually hooks up with Rheingold as part of a large commercial endeavor called Electric Minds--which goes belly-up after seven months), Block visits movers and shakers at HotWired, including Julie Peterson, whose torrid adulterous affair with a web designer ended because the apartment only had a single computer (which is kind of like giving one mirror to a pair of narcissists and asking them to share). A valuable, if uneven, snapshot of the Wild Wild Web when it was still primarily frontier, Home Page is well worth the watch, and a great bargain at $21.95. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)