Well, I did go see Antitrust. I don't highly recommend it. Definitely a rental, unless you want to see the (usually very quick) screen shots in their full resolution.. If you want that, go see a matinee or watch it at a second-run theater.
I think the baseline story was good, it's just that the writer and director didn't quite know how to piece it together. I went and read a number of reviews, and I think many agree that there were some very good bits in it. A lot of them understood what the movie was supposed to be, and that the packaging just turned out to be pretty bad (although it looked good). Okay, the packaging was really, really bad. Ryan Phillippe? Why, God, why? A bunch of the sideline characters would have played the starring roles far better. There was one guy that helped introduce Phillippe's character (Milo) to the office that I thought really should have been played out much more. He had one of the best lines in the movie: ``You have a girlfriend? Like a real three-dimensional girlfriend? That's really rare around here, man.''
Also, the techie bits were pretty good. It looked like the f/x people actually listened to John Hall. It was kind of funny though, since some of the screenshots were based around Gnome, others appeared to be from CDE or something (the good guys used Gtk/Gnome, the evil guys appeared to use Motif).
In the end, the movie feels like it was an alpha release. I think it was spliced together pretty badly. It could be improved quite a bit by rearranging the scenes, making some cuts longer or shorter, etc. That would probably bring it up from one or one and a half star to two stars (of four). If they ditched most of the leading roles (Phillippe, Forlani, Cook) and replaced them with the supporting stars, it could have easily reached 3 out of 4.
I heard over the grapevine that Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman (along with a bunch of people from Ximian/HelixCode) went to see the movie. Apparently, Nat was very loudly making Miguel's presence known to the theater crowd, and Miguel wasn't terribly happy about that. But, like I said, that's over the grapevine..
Posted by mike at January 13, 2001 10:45 AM | Movies , Old Advogato Diary | TrackBack