Home Page

In this personal documentary, New York filmmaker Doug Block finds his midlife crisis leading him away from his wife and daughter and toward his son at Swarthmore University, where he entangles himself, and his video camera, in the already snarled and complicated life of the campus's most controversial Netmeister, Justin Hall. Hall's infamous home page -- 5000 hits a day -- is filled with the nasty details of his swarming-with-coeds Swarthmore love life. Is he a sadistic, self-absorbed gossiper or, as many of his cyberfans contend, the new geek Kerouac?

Hall self-consciously goes on the road, dropping suddenly out of Swarthmore (where he teaches a course in "media ethics"!), and Block follows after. They settle down for a time in San Francisco, but instead of Kerouac's North Beach and subterranean jazz, we get Hall becoming an employee of on-line guru Howard Rheingold at a Web magazine. There, three of the executives have a kind of Jules-and-Jim affair and report all the sexual cheating on the Web.

Block's documentary is alternately fascinating and creepy -- there's something seriously amiss and self-deceived about his Net-obsessed characters, who take their computers into their beds with them instead of the family dog. Talk about unreliable narrators! Block never explores the weirdness of his ignoring his own son at Swarthmore (too boring?) to take up with Hall, his surrogate crazy boy. Meanwhile, Block's wife, interviewed back home in NYC, explains, with the angriest of faces, how new-age-happy she is.

-- Gerald Peary