Confessions of a would-be movie-pirate (cont.)
XS 4_ALL (apparently unrelated to the Dutch ISP XS4ALL) does not store movie files; it gives FTP addresses where you can find movies, MP3s, and games. But after perusing a few FTP archives, I abandoned my dream of finding The Phantom Menace. FTPs are a crapshoot. Sometimes you get MP3s. Sometimes you get software. Sometimes you get Family Guy episodes.
I found The Sixth Day but couldn't download it. I found Unbreakable, but the slow file transfer rate meant a 10-day download. So what could I get?
Bring It On, the cheerleader movie with Kirsten Dunst. Within nine hours, I was watching prancing young girls in pleated skirts. I've had worse times. But the film had been taken from a "screener" tape, so the quality was poorer than VHS, and "You are committing a felony by watching this film" crawled across the screen.
The experience was exciting nonetheless, and before the Bring It On nymphets had reached nationals, I was cruising FTP sites again. I found X-Men, which had an encouraging "DVD" in the file name. This took only four hours to download, and the picture looked great. Two days later I snagged Vertical Limit, then Charlie's Angels....
My FTP adventure was pretty retro in terms of technology. People shared MP3s with FTP sites before Napster, so I decided to try CuteMX, sometimes called "Napster for movies." With CuteMX, you search for the file you want, then download it from another user. Unless you're looking for porn (which you'd never do), you probably won't find what you want. If you do, the size of bootlegged films presents problems. Getting a three-minute song on Napster can be hard; transferring a 450MB movie using CuteMX is a miracle.
Hunting pirated movies online can be fun; the cheap thrill of getting a movie off the Net almost makes up for the probably cruddy image. But Bring It On was not The Phantom Menace. With Napster, you had access to a vast library of music. Searching for bootlegged films is like snooping around someone else's rec room, at least for now. You might find something halfway interesting, but you probably won't find what you're looking for.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
