In 1998, Joseph Park had an idea: What if someone created an Internet-based delivery service in which, after you'd typed a few commands into a web page, you could have videos, snacks, books, or other small items delivered to your door in less than an hour? By January of 1999, Park and his friend and business partner, Yong Kang, had turned their idea into a business proposal for Kozmo.com, and by the end of that year, the company had managed to secure 150 million dollars in financing, with seemingly everyone on board poised to become fabulously wealthy. In April of 2000, the NASDAQ market crash tolled the end of the e-commerce boom, and it soon became evident to Kozmo.com's investors that the company was losing money like water through a sieve; within months, Park's dream was in ruins. E-Dreams is a documentary that examines the rise and fall of Kozmo.com, and by extension the failings and foibles of the Internet commerce explosion of the late '90s. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
The cliché says that hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes situations present themselves during the course of filming a documentary that prove to be not only providential to the film, but also bring a familiarity through the audience's own experiences. Case in point is e-Dreams, a chronicle of the rise and fall of Kozmo.com from it's beginnings as an on-line delivery service, the filing for its IPO, and it's decline when the dot-com bubble bursts. Mostly the film follows Kozmo founder and President Joseph Park, a twenty-something entrepreneur, through his various business wheeling and dealings to build his company into a successful venture. The insights provided are compelling and fascinating, particularly when colored by knowledge of what is to come. That aside, the film very effectively plays up the emotions, both high and low, of the Kozmo employees from the executive board room down to the bike messengers. Director Wonsuk Chin has remarkable access, and from the way Park conducts himself there is a hint of an ego slightly out of control. He's completely likable as a person, but there's a sense that he's more in over his head than he realizes and there's an almost visceral desire to him suffer his inevitable fate. Perhaps this is because the fall of the dot-coms affected almost every level of society, but it could also be due to the innate assumption that no one so young should be so successful. It's a hard stereotype to overcome, and Park himself purposely perpetuates it by trying to play up his own disbelief that he could have come so far so quickly. His co-founder, Yong Kang, is the counterpoint and the voice of reason (to an extent) in that he often tries to balance Park's enthusiasm with doses of realistic possibilities, and he is, in the end, proven correct. Obviously the filmmaker thought he was simply telling the story of an enterprising group of young people about to make good, but fate gave him an ending that couldn't have been written better in terms of dramatic tension. ~ Dan Friedman, All Movie Guide
The movie follows Joseph Park and Yong Kang, 20-something Korean Americaninvestment bankers, whose company started in a warehouse with a small group of employees and grew to 3,000 employees and an 11-city network within a year. Kozmo.com raised $250 million in capital and attracted attention from Amazon.com and Starbucks. However, the lack of a sustainable business plan and the inability to raise additional capital due to the dot-com bust and stock market correction of the early 2000s forced the company out of business by 2001.
Similar films
The film is similar to Startup.com, which also chronicles the market crash's effect on the dot-com sector.
