Product: Startup.Com (2001)
Rating: 5.0
so good, you'd hardly beleive its a documentary
I had the pleasure of seeing this film at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. ......."Startup.com" is an amazing documentary following the rise and fall of an Internet startup company. A handful of twentysomething entrepreneurs, armed with an idea, a $200,000 initial investment, and a vision to facilitate government interaction on the Internet, set out to assemble a business from the ground up. From half a dozen partners to hundreds of employees and millions of dollars in investment capital, the young businessmen grow faster than they'd ever dreamed. Soon come CNN appearances and meetings with President Clinton. But before long, we're no longer following the rise of an Internet company... we're following its destruction.The subject of the film is amazingly engrossing: seeing and feeling the emotions inside a startup business was so fascinating. However, "Startup.com" is brilliant for reasons beyond its superb subject matter. Documentary has, to me, come to mean a clunky outsider's perspective. This film, though, dispelled that myth. The story, the testimony, the interactions in "Startup.com" really do take you inside the subject matter they set out to explore; this is the work of two master documentarians. Two distinctly different persons are followed as the film subtly depicts friendships and the conflicts of personal and business relationships. This kind of multi-layered narrative and characterization is something I've witnessed before in only the greatest of screenplays. And therein lies what makes "Startup.com" so incredible--there was no screenplay, it was real life--5 stars.