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Indie Flix
By STEVE PERSALL
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 31, 2001
Movies in limited release:
Gored by the bull market
Startup.com (103 min.) -- Those stock market numbers crawling across the bottom of your TV set have lives behind them. That's easy to forget when billions of dollars are gained and lost each day, especially if you aren't playing the home version of this volatile game.
Startup.com is a riveting documentary that puts faces on the finances. Co-director Jehane Noujaim, a former MTV producer, was rooming with a charismatic dreamer named Kaleil Isaza Tuzman when he and lifelong friend Tom Herman built an Internet fortune before the NASDAQ slump. Noujaim enlisted Chris Hegedus (The War Room) to help film the rise and fall of two nice guys.
Tuzman is the front man, dashing and loquacious, quitting his stockbroker job at Goldman Sachs to oversee govWorks.com, a Web site allowing people to pay parking tickets and other fees easily. Herman is the brain behind the plan, a cyberhippie more interested in what his programs can do than how much money they can make. They've been dear friends since childhood, a subtext adding tension when things go wrong.
At first, the partners can't even agree on a company name. Another friend and co-creator who isn't interested in joining a rat race must be handled. A rising number of employees are greeted each day by their cheerleading bosses, a kinder, gentler management style that's sweetly doomed to fail.
For a while, it's a fantasy come true. Media interest is high enough for Kaleil to join an Internet industry summit with President Clinton. Buy-out offers in the millions are shrugged off while estate homes and limos become a way of life. Kaleil and Tom are overgrown kids in a candy store, and their exuberant drive practically pours off the screen.
Then, there are times when the real world intrudes: a friendly, subversive visit by a competitor, a burglary smelling like corporate espionage and, of course, last year's stunning tech stocks collapse. Each crisis brings out something fascinating in Kaleil and Tom, nurturing or destructive, and the ultimate question is whether their friendship, not the company, will survive.
Without the guys' profanity, this movie would be a great classroom tool for economics teachers. The editing is concise enough to avoid talking-head explanations and charts while delivering a crash course in market dynamics. But, people matter most, so maybe sociology teachers could borrow it, too. Startup.com is relevant entertainment, even if you don't know the difference between common and preferred stock. It's a gainer all the way to the final bell.
Opens Friday at Tampa Theatre. A
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So . . . what are friends for?
Beautiful Creatures (88 min.) -- Director Bill Eagles brings a Scottish burr to the cinematic notion of tough women turning tables on tough men. Petula (Rachel Weisz) and Dorothy (Susan Lynch) are merely distant cousins of Thelma, Louise and the women of Bound.
Dorothy saves Petula from domestic violence, accidentally killing the abusive boyfriend in the process. They spring a bogus kidnap plot to cover up the death and collect a ransom. Double-crosses and bloody deaths ensue.
Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert wrote: "Here is a movie about two of the most loathsome women in recent cinema, and the movie thinks the male characters are the villains. It gets away with this only because we have been taught that women are to be presumed good and men are to be presumed evil. Flip the genders in this screenplay, and there would not be the slightest doubt that . . . Petula and Dorothy are monsters.
"There is some dark humor in the movie, of the kind where you laugh that you may not gag. And the kind of convoluted plotting that seems obligatory in crime films from Scotland (consider Shallow Grave) . . . If the movie had been able to make me laugh, I might have forgiven it almost anything."
Opens Friday at Channelside Cinemas in Tampa.
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