ONLINE FILM
The race is on to see who can be the Mr. McFeely of video entertainment, the speedy deliverer of movies straight to desktops via phone lines or coax cable, bypassing the traditional mediator of theater/video shop/TV network. Sites like Sightsound.com and Intertainer promise to bring Hollywood to your PC - for a fee, of course. And if you've got DSL, all the better. In the meantime, we modem slowpokes can get free flicks at iFilm (www.ifilm.net), a gathering of independent filmmakers and fans with more than 200 short works up and running.
More revival house than megaplex, the shorts (most run under 30 minutes) tend toward introspection and have the slightly grainy quality I associate with lo-fi highbrow film. But their themes vary wildly, from a docu-ode to bread (Bread) to a startlingly effective story of a teenage girl psychologically lost in her own town (Deadtime).
Unfortunately, the viewing experience - by way of RealPlayer G2 - doesn't approach bigger-screen quality. Bandwidth is key, and my 56K modem is good enough only to screen films in postage-stamp size (double size is prohibitively blurry). If a film's sound is simple - that is, little background noise or music - it comes through clearly. Otherwise, distortion is high.
At first these glitches aggravated me, but soon I was spending hours trawling the channels for intriguing storylines, and raptly squinting at the screen. As far as bypassing theaters and video stores, we're not quite there yet. But the potential definitely is.
iFilm: +1 (415) 773 2080, www.ifilm.net.
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