15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not As Interesting As I'd Hoped, January 2, 2006
This review is from: Hooked: Get It On (Line) (DVD)
As a person who does spend some time in gay Internet chat rooms, I purchased this video sight unseen. I reasoned it to be an interesting enough topic to take a chance on buying the film without being previously familiar with it, which is always a risky proposition. What I got were mixed results for which the filmmaker gets an A for effort, but the film on the whole was a bit less than satisfactory and not as fascinating or as revelatory as I'd hoped.
Writer / director Todd Ahlberg spent several months finding likely contributors by doing ad-hoc surveys in gat chat rooms, and assembled what he judged to be a fairly representative group of diverse gay men who cruise the net. He then interviewed them, and pieced the interviews together into a fairly cohesive documentary that presents many of the interviewees' opinions, gripes and aspirations, but offered little solid analysis of the phenomena known as "cruising the net".
The film is about an hour long, and as much as the subjects get to talk about what attracts them to on-line cruising and we hear some interesting stories, the film seems to conclude that many of the gay men who spend time on-line are sexually compulsive, addicted to cruising, inordinately lonely or all of the above. The problem is that the film doesn't offer much in the way of solutions or alternatives. I kept waiting for some of my own observations of on-line cruising to surface (such as the chronic ageism that permeates the chat rooms) or some of my pet peeves concerning the meat-rack that is cyberspace (such as the endless rudeness and shallowness of many of the participants) but a lot of my concerns as well as many thing that I would have liked this film to address were not covered. I wanted the film to branch out into still more issues and observations, but, as a film that ran only one hour, there just wasn't time.
I was also confused by the information presented on the DVD box. It read: "Feature: approx 60 minutes; extras 100 minutes". I wish they wouldn't lie about such things. The feature did run about an hour, but the "extra's" consisted of a short but informative "making of" piece that lasted about 20 minutes, and the trailer, which was three minutes long. Even if you count the directors commentary (which I don't think should count) it hardly comes up to anywhere near 100 minutes. I think it's time that distributors start being held accountable for such things. I don't consider the film a complete waste of time, but I am looking forward to a more fully realized documentary that really does the subject justice.
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