Web Dreams
Written by Chris Cooke | Posted by: Anonymous
Possibly no film genre has been driven down as many dull, predictable roads as the romantic comedy. Thankfully, I only review independent films, or I might find myself obliged to watch all the unimaginative love stories Hollywood seems to crank out at a stultifying pace. There will always be a market for vaguely satisfying but forgettable date movies, and Hollywood is all too willing to satisfy the need. The indie film "On_Line," directed by Jed Weintrob and written by Weintrob and Boston-area native Andrew Osborne, doesn’t quite break free from as many of the genre pitfalls as it promises, but it challenges the audience far more than the standard fare — and pumps enough irreverence and inventiveness into its tires to make you forgive some of the bumps in the road. It is certainly no date movie.
Changes in society due to technological advances often provide good story fodder, giving storytellers a means of telling the same old tales from a fresh angle. Very often this approach succeeds — or at least manages to change enough scenery to make us forget for a while that we’ve seen it all before. "On_Line" chooses to focus on the exploits of roommates John (Josh Hamilton) and Moe (Harold Perrineau Jr., best known as Prisoner #95H522 Augustus Hill in the HBO series "Oz"), who happen to run a website that provides the lonely and sex-deprived with the intimate encounter of their lives — all over the Internet, of course, via web-cam.
John and Moe have enough spare time — presumably while they’re not busy spamming everyone’s Hotmail accounts — to try to get a little loving themselves. Moe fancies himself a real Don Juan, not the kind of guy to take a fling seriously. John, on the other hand, doesn’t have a funny bone in his body. Dumped by his fiancée many moons ago, he’s still pining, wallowing in dreariness. He spends his pathetic days and nights avoiding personal contact, preferring to roam cyberspace and post the occasional diatribe on his personal website. Other than Moe, the only friends he’s got are e-friends. Moe, never one to mope, practically has to drag him out of the apartment. When John finally does take the real-world plunge, he gets a date with Jordan (Vanessa Ferlito), one of the website’s regular "performers," a party chick who’s obviously not his type. Moe, on the other hand, has scored with the dark, serious Moira (Isabel Gillies). Clearly, our lads have picked the wrong women, and we’ll get to spend the rest of the film watching them realize their mix-up.
If you ever take a class in screenwriting, one piece of advice that will inevitably come up is that you must avoid, as much as possible, telephone conversations. There’s no drama, they’ll tell you — no visual interaction between characters. Nowadays, though, not all long-distance communication takes place over the phone. Now we have the Internet and web-cams, with more visuals to work with but still the same old distance barrier. Here, a sizeable chunk of the action takes place online, including a handful of masturbation scenes. Thankfully, Weintrob’s skillful use of split screen presentation (possibly the most appropriate use of the technique I’ve seen) gives the long-distance scenes a dizzying vitality. Panels of action slide across the screen in much the same way a website is broken into panels. We see the "chatters" as they see each other, simultaneously.
Indeed, some of the online scenes are the most vivid of the movie, where the characters show themselves at their most daring and most vulnerable. Distance can be a barrier to emotional expression, or it can aid it. Other online scenes, however, don’t fare as well, in particular the online sex scenes. Porn always makes sex seem so staged, and the web sex here can’t seem to get beyond this, even when it’s supposed to. If a real, live girl moans in cyberspace, some someone’s always there to hear it, but how will he or she know if the sounds are genuine?
The film as a whole, though, isn’t faked. A subplot involving Al (John Fleck), an aging gay man doomed to a dreary future as a cyber-sex performer, and young Ed (Eric Millegan), stuck in the middle of nowhere, Ohio, adds a nice human touch. And as we watch John fumble his way down the road toward Moira, an unexpected turn or two lie in wait for us along the way. "On_Line" isn’t the ground-breaker it might have been, but it’s a provocative yet enjoyable, ride.
'On_Line' won the jury prize at Cinequest in San Jose, California for best narrative feature. It plays at Boston's Coolidge Corner Theatre through August 7. For more information about the film, visit www.onlinethemovie.com.
