Don't Mess With WE LIVE IN PUBLIC – New Press Round-Up!
Friday, October 9th, 2009Wow, what a week for great reviews! As we continue our theatrical run at the Roxie in San Francisco, open at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, TX and play at the Vancouver International Film Festival, we continue to feel the love from journalists and bloggers. Check it out!
Wired Magazine
Review: Smart We Live in Public Probes Web Genius’ Hubris
“Timoner… deftly treads a tightrope between admiration and skepticism for her central character… a whale of a good story.”
“There’s no question that this is one of the best documentaries of the year…”
“(Critic’s pick) We Live in Public: Ondi Timoner has a way of making non-fiction films feel entirely personal… In her award-winning follow up to Dig!, she takes us deep into the dark heart of dot-com millionaire and disgraced internet pioneer Josh Harris. Harris was the first person who saw humanity move toward virtual encounters, and set up a performance piece involving a community of subterranean pods. Watching the social network short-circuit and the entire fabric of civility shred before your eyes can be very compelling, and Timoner doesn’t miss a syncopated beat in this detailed study of public personality, and the self denied. Harris may remain a complete enigma by the final frames, but Timoner captures the blurry line between who we really are, and what we pretend to be.”
“…a provocative and compelling examination of dot-com millionaire Harris and his cutting-edge art projects that attempted to plumb the profound differences between our understanding of private and public space…Through it all, Timoner’s camera bears witness to each subtle shift in Harris’s persona as he attempts to bargain with his own public image, and sell the notion that he’s just so far ahead of his time, he’s doomed to be ridiculed in the puny minds of his peers.”
Spieler
Ondi Timoner’s We Live In Public At The BFI
“Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.”
ZHIV – a blog about nothing
Two Movies for Bloggers: Julie/Julia and We Live in Public
“The film tells a truly amazing story and it’s quite disturbing… Go see We Live In Public if you want a better idea of what’s really going on and where this whole thing might be headed.”
Fan The Fire Magazine Blog
London Film Festival: Film Review: We Live in Public
“There are three things that may never cease to fascinate me: the early 90s (because it was so recent, and is considered by the generation who shape our conscious to be irrelevant in comparison to their “special” generation of the 60s, and yet it was so vibrant and culturally rich); the internet (because nobody is capable of predicting where it will go… it is like a wild frontier, but every time someone thinks they have discovered California a whole new plain appears before them); and finally men (and I use that word to denote a member of my species, not necessarily my gender) who seem to have it all, but then manage to throw it all away… If you feel like you are interested in any or all of the above, then you really need to see Ondi Timoner’s ‘We Live In Public’.”
“Timoner’s investigation into Harris’ past exploits couldn’t be more timely. The dotcom mogul’s sometimes sadistic “social experiments” evidence that he was well ahead of the curve in recognizing and exploiting the fact that a) we love to watch and b) we love to be watched… Fascinating.”
All These Wonderful Things by AJ Schnack
“…one has to admire Timoner’s innovative thinking toward the promotion of her film.”