The Movie: Startup.com is a documentary that follows some boyhood friends on a wild ride as they start a dot-com with nothing but high hopes and big dreams, into explosive growth, on into the all too common dot-com demise. Along the way, their friendships are tested and strained to the limit as they struggle to make their company successful.

Having worked myself for a failed dot-com, I was rather intrigued by just how similar the story was to the place I worked at, not just on a general level, but even on a personal and emotional level. It really made me wonder just how many other companies went through exactly the same thing. Hundreds... thousands... maybe even tens of thousands?

This documentary does a remarkable job of conveying the emotions involved, and particularly toward the end, it is a surprisingly compelling film. At times it seems better than fiction, in that no one could ever come up with dialog so "real". You wouldn't think watching a bunch of computer nerds run around would really be like that.

That being said, the beginning seemed rather slow to me, and it really wasn't until about two-thirds of the way through that it really got interesting. But it was still a worthwhile film to see, so check it out.

The DVD: I would describe the video transfer as being "adequate" but nothing to write home about really. It is in its original 4:3 format. Some processing was done to give a "film look" to the original source video, but I'm sorry guys, when you leave stuff on auto focus and auto exposure, it's gonna look like video pretty much no matter what you do.

Audio was also adequate. Good enough for you to clearly hear everything, but let's face it, documentaries generally aren't the type of thing you're looking for to show off your phat home theater system.

Extras include a trailer, a little making of thing that i turned off after a few minutes... it just didn't seem particularly enlightening, and constantly switching between anamorphic widescreen footage that was meant to be letterboxed and full frame 4:3 shots made it kind of annoying to watch. There's also a commentary track which I didn't check out.

Overall a movie worth watching on a DVD release that can best be described as... "adequate".