Product: Startup.Com (2001)
Rating: 4.0
A good doco that could have been great.
A very interesting subject, but this doco doesn't quite flesh it out satisfactorily.The opening 3/4 is fine, but it is the last 15 minutes that so disappoints. As the dotcom boom turns to bomb there is virtually no coverage of the monumental NASDAQ collapse and the financial hole that the likes of boo.com, epets, yahoo, aol etc fell/have fallen into. I appreciate that the doco is more about the relationship between Tom and Kaleil, but seeing more information about the actual govworks product, who was using it, why it failed, and how so many others failed, would have added so much to the story. As it is you get the feeling that govworks was alone in its failure. There is little of the additional background story which would have fleshed out the govworks story immeasurably.This failure to place govworks in the 2000 dotcom crash perspective saves this story from being excellent.Technically some of the focusing and framing is poor, as you'd expect. Worse tho is the terrible lip-sync which is sometimes wildly out of kilter which adversely affects ones ability to follow the story. A subtitle track would also have helped to follow some of the muffled telephone calls.Overall tho, a very good slice of life at the turn of the century.