Director: Ondi Timoner (DiG!)
MPAA Rating: R
Running time: 90 min
(4/5)(Preamble: We Live in Public is, among many things, about the flash intrusion of the internet on our social lives, something the subject of the film, Josh Harris, anticipated in the mid-nineties. Its relevancy to the very medium upon which this review is cast is not lost on this author. This thing we are doing here, being digital people in a digital community has its ramifications that Josh’s story validly explores. The explosion of social network platforms mixed with broadband speed that marks the 21st century has grown exponentially and the surge is so great, the curve so acute that it becomes incredibly difficult to gage the present, and when something like this film is made as a record of a decade of accelerated culture, it is a bit of a wake-up call. There is so much noise, so much speed and disposability to everything we say that it is almost a necessity to be an exhibitionist if only to get your point across. In context, what Josh does, though on the surface bizarre, is ultimately a reflection of what has become commonplace. Even now I feel the impulse to be an exhibitionist as the speed by which many of us process no longer allows for subtlety of craft or comprehension. Its a strange impulse, this wrestling for permanency, for meaning, for identity. I write this conscious of your impatient eyeballs, perhaps even in spite of them.)
As mentioned in one of the opening title cards, Josh Harris is the greatest internet pioneer you never heard of. What follows in We Live in Public is not merely a chronicle of a dot.com internet guru, but something more tantalizing: a social experiment within a social experiment. On one level we are shown the ‘social experiments’ that Josh Harris inflicts upon himself and those following in his wake, experiments which are part performance art, part prophecy, all hinging upon the heightened potentials of surveillance and exhibitionism posed by the arrival of the internet. The scale and ambition of these projects, most notably Quiet: We Live in Public, are so sublimely psychotic that they were the first of their kind and incidentally, ushered in the new subgenre of entertainment known as reality television (particularly the confined social experiment variety of this type). His experiments spanned the best part of the nineties until, much like Warhol’s Factory (which is continually evoked as a parallel to this ‘movement’) the excess took its toll and the party abruptly stopped.
The chief set-piece of the film and of Josh’s legacy is perhaps his Quiet experiment. Here he created a quasi-fascist commune buried beneath New York City made up of artists and disparate individuals who volunteer to reside in a ‘futuristic’ bunker complete with living quarters (i.e. pods), social areas such as a kitchen, a bar, a church, and a shooting range, all rigged by surveillance. The experiment was to last thirty days, and as the days progressed the breaking point for some came to the surface all captured by Josh’s cameras. Director Ondi Timoner was a participant of this experiment, and captures the events with an eclectic mix of Warholian exuberance and Orwellian dread.
In his follow-up experiment, Josh rigged his apartment with surveillance cameras and microphones to become part of the first couple ever to be streamed online continuously over what appears to be a span of months. This too ends badly, as Josh confronts the psychological and emotional ramifications of these projects, and sets off on a decidedly different course in the third act of the film (and perhaps, of his life). » Read the rest of the entry..
When the words “martial arts” are mentioned, most individuals will first think of Asian arts like kung fu or judo but what of Western Martial Arts? What of the art of the sword? What of the history that goes with it? It’s hard to believe, I know, but what we see on screen in film after film is not the historical tradition. It’s a rendition, an artistic interpretation of what was because let us be frank, a real sword fight would be short, ugly and anti-climactic. But over the century of film, something interesting has happened. The interest in the entertainment has spawned an interest in the history. Enter 
