*** From the Archives ***

This article is from July 21, 2000, and is no longer current.

Eye on the Web: PC, Browser, Action!

There’s no better panacea than a good movie. A fast-paced adventure film can make light of a rainy day, a tear-jerker romance can make a dateless night more bearable, and a screwball comedy can make troubles seem further away. Americans make no bones about their love of movies. We flock to theaters on weekends, idolize actors and directors, trade celebrity gossip, and otherwise feed as much money as possible into an industry that barely needs more of it. Which is why, perhaps, there are more Web sites dedicated to movies, in various fashions, than anything else on the Web, save perhaps porn (and even then, there’s quite a bit of overlap).

Not only are there many movie sites, there are many different kinds of movie sites. To begin with, you’ve got MovieFone and its clones. MovieFone (the site you’ve likely seen commercials for before the previews at your local multiplex) is packed with reviews, celebrity information, and show times around the country for films currently in theaters. Very handy if you’re on your way to a new town and want to go straight to the theater playing the latest blockbuster when you get there. Other such sites include MovieWeb, Film.com, Reel.com, Film Threat, and Hollywood.com. And these don’t even include the celebrity news and gossip sites, such as Mr. Showbiz, E! Online, Entertainment Weekly Online, and Premiere.

Browse-in Theaters
Lately a new type of movie site has cropped up on the Web: sites that release actual movies over the Internet. That’s right, the Web may not be much like TV yet, but it’s striving to be a lot more like your neighborhood movie theater. Of these sites, Atom Films is perhaps the most popular, or at least the most shrewdly managed. It has a flashy Flash interface and film channels that include animation, cinema, extreme, and Euro. Atom produces its own shorts and recently made a deal to stream twenty of them to handheld devices running PersonalPC, Microsoft’s retooling of Windows CE.

MovieFlix is a pretty darned comprehensive library of movies you can watch online (notably older films, from as far back as the 1960’s). CinemaNow, also sporting a funky Flash interface, has a Hong Kong channel and a screening room that boasts such titillating fare as "Hellgate," "Eliminator Woman," and "The Unnameable." Another site, iFilm is pretty much the omnibus of movie sites: Film industry news shares spaces with downloadable movies, and with links to a plethora of other movie Web sites.

SightSound is an odd mishmash of downloadable feature-length movies you’ve never heard of that star famous actors. Indeed, the Stephen Simon-produced Quantum Project, a 32-minute $3 million lark available on SightSound, is being billed as the first feature film to be released solely on the Internet, which was apparently the producer’s desire. Still, it’s hard to see why audiences would jump to download the 200MB-plus files of most films on this site. Even broadband isn’t that broad yet.

Other sites invite aspiring filmmakers to debut their films online. FilmFilm offers help with casting and pitching, and lets viewers ask advice of established filmmakers. E-ScreeningRoom collects documentaries on such topics as trains and forest fires, and lets visitors watch them online.

Established Hollywood is getting into the online movie game as well. The yet-to-launch POP.com is backed by Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Paul Allen, among others and promises to create original content that will use iPIX (Internet Pictures Corporation) immersive 630-degree panorama technology to draw viewers in. Then there’s the Miramax-backed Greenlight project: Aspiring filmmakers can submit screenplays electronically and the winner will get $1 million to make a film. The process will be documented by Miramax golden boys Matt Damon and Been Affleck for a 13-episode HBO series set to air in January 2002.

Pick Your Flick
As cool as many of these sites are, and as much information and entertainment as many offer, some of the most successful movie-related sites, if you ask me, are still those tied to actual Hollywood theatrical releases. For the film Galaxy Quest, about the misadventures of a group of actors from a cancelled, Star Trek-like TV show, the clever marketing folk dreamed up a fan site spoof, called Travis Latke’s Galaxy Quest Page. Complete with old-style animated GIFs and nerdy gushing, the page does a better job of advertising the movie than any straight studio site.

We all remember the furor generated by the Blair Witch Project site, which featured, among other mockumentary tidbits, news clippings about the mysterious disappearance of eight children from Burkittsville, Maryland, home of the titular Blair Witch. The folks behind the current summer blockbuster X-Men have followed this lead, by creating Senator Robert Kelly’s Mutant Watch page — a compendium of McCarthyesque edicts about the movie’s mutant heroes, complete with a waving America flag.

Coming Soon
Still a relative youngster, the Web is maturing quicky, and the slew of movies sites on the Web is maturing along with it — and growing a lot more entertaining at the same time. And it seems a certainty that movies aren’t going away. Every time you log on, the day can’t be far away when we won’t even have to leave our houses to experience the great cure-all that is film.

Read more by Andrea Dudrow.

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