The Movie: e-Dreams is a documentary that follows the rise and fall of Kozmo.com from its inception, almost up to its ultimate demise. Director Wonsuk Chin followed Kozmo founders Joseph Park and Yong Kang for a number of years as the company went from being run out of an apartment through its explosive growth, followed by its deconstruction. For those who don't know, Kozmo.com was basically an online convenience store from which you could order anything from snacks and drinks to movie rentals... and everything was delivered within an hour.

Perhaps the biggest contributing factors to the company's decline (in my opinion, anyway) was way too rapid expansion, and a lack of a minimum order size. I mean, you could pretty much order just a 2 liter bottle of cola and get it delivered within an hour. That just doesn't seem like a recipe for profit. But as you see in the film, in the heyday of the dot-com explosion, people weren't really paying attention to whether or not these companies they were investing in were actually profitable or not.

I found e-Dreams to not be as effective or poignant as Startup.com which other than being released a number of years before e-Dreams, was also more effective at communicating the emotions of the parties involved, drawing sympathy from the viewer, although I guess for the casual viewer, this film might be more interesting simply because it involves a much more recognized name in fizzled dot-coms.

The story just isn't all that compelling. The main founders of the company seem more concerned with building something they can cash out for a large sum in a hurry for themselves, and less concerned with the people around them and working for them and with believing in actually trying to build something that really works. Ultimately, I have to say you won't be missing much, if anything, by not watching this film.

The DVD:

On the technical side of things, it was strictly amateur hour. The entire thing was shot home video style mostly with auto-focus and auto-exposure on, making for many visual distractions as the focus would drift in and out. The look of the video was only made worse by the attempt to use post-processing to give it a "film look". Film look can be effective if you start with well-produced video, but if the video you start out with looks like your uncle's home video, it's not gonna end up looking like a big budget motion picture just because you apply some processing to the look of it.

The sound appeared to be mostly, if not completely recorded with on-camera mics which resulted with speech that was often extremely difficult to hear, particularly on things shot outdoors or in crowded areas.

I guess in the end it was really the amateurish production of the film itself, and not the DVD production that brought on the terrible viewing experience, so maybe all of these complaints should be up there in the "The Movie" section, I don't know. At any rate, the content of the film wasn't really worth my time anyway, and it certainly wasn't worth suffering through the poor production quality to get to it either so I'm just gonna have to say steer clear from this DVD unless you are some kind of crazy Kozmo.com fan or something. If you want to experience what it was like to be in the middle of the whole dot-com frenzy of the late 90's, I suggest you pick up that other movie, Startup.com instead. Even though the production quality wasn't really a whole lot better than this film, at least the underlying content is more worthwhile.