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"I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley"

You can never go home again, an indie film warns, especially if your town's been overrun by techies.

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By Katharine Mieszkowski

July 14, 2000 | Picture the place where you grew up. Now, imagine it trampled by an avalanche of capital and the stampede of lucre-crazed hordes chasing after it. The picnic tables of your favorite hometown burger joint buzz with the incessant tapping of laptop keys and cellphone chatter. Slickie-slick guys in wraparound sunglasses compare the size of their option grants, gossip about who "got in early" and strategize when to "jump ship." Even ordering a basic burger isn't what it used to be: "Would you like a turkey burger or a hamburger?"

And forget about catching a nostalgic glimpse of the Hells Angels -- badass and mustachioed -- whom you feared and idolized from a distance as a kid. Their supremacy on the local roads has been usurped by colorful packs of fey, clean-shaven cyclists poured into too-tight Lycra shorts, with pagers clipped to their belts. These nouveau "bikers" wield $2,000 21-speeds, and yell self-righteously at all passing cars: "Share the road!" The only motorcycles you'll see in these parts today aren't hogs, but Ducatis.




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This is what Rob Logan goes home to find in "I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley" -- a caustic, independent film now making the film-festival rounds, which sends up the dot-commers who have overrun Silicon Valley. Yes, you can never go home again -- especially if the suburban house where you grew up is now worth tens, if not hundreds, of times what your parents paid for it.

It might seem hard to muster a lot of sympathy for Rob, a character who's not yet 30 and has just come into what used to be considered a fortune. But this movie makes us see what Silicon Valley looks like through a local-turned-stranger's eyes. With his father's death, Rob has returned to his old stomping grounds to sell his childhood home -- asking price: $2.5 million -- and to search for his long-lost high school girlfriend. (Get it? He's in search of the past.) "I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley" gently makes the case that with all the creation of absurd wealth in these parts, something else has been lost that can't be brought back or bought. And it may be enough of a loss to drive a native son to violence.

The film is a moody hommage to the pre-Net gold rush days of the rolling hills south of San Francisco, far from the current morass of cubicles, servers and deal-making. There are sun-dappled scenes of tie-dyed hippie girls dancing to the mellow tunes of local bands and lots of shots of the mesmerizing winding roads of the Coastal Range, which dot-commers don't traverse unless they're in search of real estate or engaged in "extreme," stress-relieving athletic pursuits.

But "I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley" is also a dead-on parody of what's obliterating the region's laid-back past. In one scene, Rob impassively looks on as a techno-yuppie couple bicker about whether they should buy his childhood home. Are there enough phone lines? What about the commute? "There are no other houses available in this area," reasons the cold-hearted she-dot-commer. "The only reason why this one came up is because that guy died. We have hit the jackpot!"

Another potential buyer is an insufferably arrogant 28-year-old millionaire, who can't resist bragging to Rob about how he's struck it rich. He reflects: "Your dad must have done pretty well." Rob: "Well, he never really talked about it." It gets so bad Rob can't even gaze down on the office parks near Highway 101 without hearing, in his head, the irritating sound of a modem connecting.

Our displaced hero does find new, romantic possibilities in Avy, a recent transplant, who works (inevitably) for a software company. It's local guy meets computer girl. Will he be able to embrace the future? But they're clearly moving at different speeds; she has to excuse herself every few minutes on their first date to respond to urgent pages from the office.

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