Product: Startup.Com (2001)
Rating: 3.0
A murky look at a bright new world.
After an abrupt start, 'startup.com' is quite an entertaining documentary about two high-school friends, Tom and Kaleil, setting up an internet company, but its pleasures are almost entirely negative. it's refreshing to see the bright, shiny multi-million hype of the internet industry filmed in cheap, grainy digital. it is good to see loudly over-ambitious entrepreneurs stabbing themselves in the back as great projects go horribly wrong. It's fascinating, in a kind of scientific experiment Zola would have been proud of, to see the relationship between two long-time friends put into the incubator of commerce and slowly disintegrate. For someone completely alien to this world, it is instructive to see how business operates, and, more precisely, the limits you can reach with youth, hype and intelligence - the success of increasing amounts of bogus motiveation needed as things unravel is telling. And it is always refreshing to see the machinations of not particularly sympathetic, but articulate and bright young men.This is a film about a new subject that tells a very old American story about the promise of hope and fortune emerging from little or nothing. These guys just need to talk and they seem to sprout money. these pioneers try to connect with another American story, that of Thoreau, the Romantics and nature - there is an exquisitely embarrassing sequence when Tom takes their staff to his country home and encourages them to listen to the trees.It is always intriguing to see the personal stories behind the public news, in this case the rise and fall of the internet boom; and there is some marvellous footage of Kaleil meeting with President Clinton and offering him his card.Nevertheless, the film has its flaws. For me, there is the perennial issue of credibility in these documentaries - would these people really be so suicidallly honest in front of a camera, no matter how familiar the people behind it, especially in moments of crisis? There is also a lack of faith in the Direct Cinema fly-on-the-wall method (the film, produced by the great DA Pennebecker, places itself in a contentious tradition of the documentary), with the imposing of symbolic vignettes (e.g. Tom fixing his daughter's plaits to get both sides even, prologue to a story about two friends going off-kilter), or the biased structuring (Tom is a family man, his soul is saved; Kaleil is so egomaniacally obsessed with the business, his relationships lapse, and his gestures of religion seem insincere).My main problem is with the digital film-making - this, rather like the Internet, once promised greater freedom for film-makers in its cheapness, accessibility and portability, but the framing in this film is often heavy and intrusive. Further, the increasing indifference among film-makers to the texture and form of the image, their faith in flat, monotonous, murky shots, only obscures stories and can become dull. If directors cannot bring the visual wit of a Vinterberg or Figgis to digital, than maybe its eminence will be less assured than was once promised.