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Doug Block, whose "The Heck With Hollywood" was an informative, enjoyable documentary about the struggles of independent filmmakers, has now wasted a good opportunity to make a film about the infatuation with the Internet. He has given us the excruciatingly detailed documentary "Home Page," which focuses mainly on a boring exhibitionist, a college egotist named Justin Hall, who invades the Internet with his own site and blathers about his life, including sexual descriptions involving the exhibitionist women he beds and whatever else comes into his head. Too bad the horseman of Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" wasn't around.
Hall and his peripheral cyberspace addicts might have been worth about 10 or 15 minutes in a broader documentary that stressed really interesting avenues involving the Internet. There is so much out there to survey, and so many individuals and commercial enterprises to contemplate, as well as a mass of ethical, social and economic issues. But sitting through a narrow film with this totally absorbed nonentity running off at the mouth ad infinitum and meeting the fringe characters representing that portion of those who are in love with cyberspace is more than either a critic or a paying customer should have to endure. Block vainly wraps all of this in his personal journey that leads to a comparison of Justin's world with his own.
Sorry Doug, I admire your work in general and there is nothing incompetent about your movie, except for your choice of its primary subject and your judgment in lavishing so much time on him. A Copacetic Pictures, Home Box Office and ZDF Arte release.
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