Home Page

A delightful and inviting look into the personalities of early internet adopters and how having web pages shaped their lives.

I really enjoyed this time capsule of a film, as someone who absolutely adores early internet culture and tech. It gives a fascinating glimpse into the way we once used the internet, the excitement we felt as it slowly changed the world around us, while also propping up the idea that projecting all of our inner most thoughts to strangers around the world may not be the healthiest way to live.

Check it out if you feel nostalgic for dial-up modems and retro 90s fashion.

Home Page is an insightful, thoughtful and well crafted piece of work that follows the life of Justin Hall over the period of roughly one year from Swathmore College to a job in San Francisco. Using Justin's unique relationship to the web, the film coaxes the viewer to perceive reality through this digital medium of the 'open' notebook. Justin tells it like it is on his home page; Doug Block tells it like it is as he follows Justin around and meets others who bare their souls in the public forum of the internet. My favorite aspect of Block's film is the way in which he allows the object of his study - the internet and home pages - to form a new context in his own life. Block creates his own home page and juxtaposes interviews of his wife with his own self-examination through the one year + making of the film. In the end, I walked away feeling like I had participated in other people's lives - an experience that I may have gotten by reading the characters' home pages, but probably not with the same intensity as I did by watching this film.

An excellent and timely piece of work.

The documentary consists of ongoing interactions with Silicon Valley narcissists and space cadets who are obsessed not only with the possibilities of creating Brand Me (LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!) on the web, counterbalanced by the director's hesitation about the medium.

I found myself in a state of constant agitation watching this.

It seemed like there was an unexplored vast middle ground in which the Web could be a democratizing medium in the positive sense of the word. A little humility, a little balance, choosing one's words carefully, respecting the privacy of others always seemed like common sense to me.

Among others, the documentary follows some guy named Justin Hall, am insufferable chronic over-sharer who compulsively posts details of his personal life online and seems to have been building a career and a reputation on this, although I'd never heard of him until this documentary.

I would have liked to watch Howard Rheingold harangue him for his personality excesses for two hours. Julie Petersen, or whatever her name is now, also needed a good talking to. But then again, I don't think Julie truly believes anyone other than Julie exists.

If nothing else, it was an excellent foreshadowing of what the Web would become when social media began dominating the space a thing a few years later.

The documentary is fair, taken at a point in time when the ramifications of the Web, especially the dark ones, were less clear. At that point, most of the dystopian aspects of the web were more of a theoretical possibility.

I love the web. I'd been online for several years before this documentary came out. But if I hadn't heard of the Internet, there is nothing in this documentary which would encourage me to check it out.

This is not a failure of the filmmaker. The documentary, as a snapshot in Web time, is interesting enough but now that it's over, I'm kind of annoyed, and I have to be at work in a few hours and can't sleep.

This was the zeitgeist in the late 90s, at least in California, brah. Worth a watch. I'd drink before watching it, if I could do it again.

This film had possibilities, but it never took advantage of them. Studying the mid-90s rise in Internet and WWW popularity, the director lucked into interviewing Justin Hall, who toured the country and got hired by Hotwired and Electric Minds. Unfortunately, he only gives us brief insight into the lifestyle of the Webhead crowd, trading instead on a soap opera affair between Hotwired employees and footage of Howard Rheingold getting interviewed by foreign news crews. A sappy Baby-Boomer ending doesn't save the film from its own pointlessness; nothing of relevance emerges from the screen. Save your money, and just stick to reading about the modern relevance of the Internet.