I refuse to sign up for instant messaging for the same reason I won t carry a cell phone: Don t call me, I ll call you. The characters in Jed Weintrob s On Line are on call more or less all the time, living their barren lives in cyberspace, where the members of a suicide Webcam chat are bored, as they wait around for someone to overdose. The film s redeeming feature is that it knows how sad these people are, and finds the correct solution to their problems: They meet in the flesh.
The movie stars Josh Hamilton and Harold Perrineau as John and Moe, roommates who run an online sex site named InterconX. It s a little like the real-life iFriends.com; on screens that display simultaneous cybercams, its members flirt, chat, engage in virtual sex and charge for interaction. So mesmerized is John by this process that he follows, on another screen, a 24-hour live cam where Angel (Liz Owens) lives her life in public view.