A Web-love Mockumentary

With satire-lovers going to the dogs to catch the art- house hit Best in Show, the mockumentary is flourishing, and you can try an even meaner exercise in faux filmmaking in Gordon Eriksen's The Love Machine.

The movie, which played the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival earlier this year, is well worth a trip to Moore College of Art and Design.

A fake documentary lives or dies by its cast. If the actors don't play their parts straight and don't hit the right pitch, things tend to fall apart.

The performances in The Love Machine, a withering look at love on the Internet and vanishing notions of privacy in our culture, are dead-on. The framework is an investigation carried out by journalist Becca Campbell into the people who go looking for love, or just sex, on the Web.

She's a mixture of sleaziness and aggression as she exposes an NYU professor who is cheating on his wife, a gay Japanese photographer who insists he's straight, and others. The creator of the Web site that lures these lost souls says, "The Internet is a bore." The Love Machine, which is both absorbing and appalling, proves it's a web of intrigue.

The Love Machine will be shown at Moore College of Art and Design's Secret Cinema.