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"We're more than just dogs on skateboards." YouTube plans to premiere their first * movie, Reuters says (via The Hollywood Reporter), in an apparent bid to increase revenue, reach profitability, and, perhaps, appear more appealing to advertisers. (The opening statement was made by the company's Paris-based partner development manager.) Yann Arthus-Bernard's documentary Home, produced by Luc Besson, will debut simulatenously in theaters and on YouTube, evidently in the near future.

As I'm writing this article, I'm also watching Werner Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly on YouTube. (I have a 19-inch monitor adjacent to my laptop, which makes it easier to watch and work simultaneously.) The quality is good, though the commercial interruptions are jarring, the same as they are with other free, online viewing sites. The ads are played at pre-determined, timed intervals, and so often appear in the middle of a scene.

YouTube gained its fame from user-submitted content, of course, but, as Elisabeth Rappe noted last November, the video site has begun partnering with studios in order to present full-length movies -- MGM was the first. You can still easily find bootleg rips in 10-minute segments, though is quality is often atrocious and, of course, there's the important issues of legality and piracy that shouldn't be easily ignored.

Where do you stand on the subject of watching movies over the Internet on your computer? Have you embraced the concept, eagerly checking new titles added to Netflix's Watch Instantly program (or iTunes or Hulu or SnagFilms or Jaman or Amazon or ...)? Or is the very idea of viewing a film on such a small screen anathema to you?

* UPDATE: Thanks to Eric Kohn for pointing out, via Twitter, that Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska had its world premiere on YouTube last year. I should have remembered, since Eugene Novikov wrote about it for this very site.

My other two San Francisco International Film Festival dispatches focused mostly on mainstream business: popular documentaries, future commercial releases, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But it's a sin to spend a festival only watching – and talking about – commercial fare. So for my farewell SFIFF post, here's a look at two off-the-beaten-track entries I was able to catch.

Sadly, neither indie quite worked for me, which makes me feel like a philistine, I assure you. Ursula Meier's Home, for example, exposed one of my most enduring weaknesses as a cinephile, namely my intolerance for movies that operate entirely on an abstract level – as pure metaphor. Home, a French-Swiss co-production with good arthouse buzz and a wagonload of foreign Oscar equivalents under its belt, tells the "story" of a family that lives peacefully by the side of an abandoned highway, until the highway reopens and all hell breaks loose. The family's response bears no resemblance to the way real human beings would act, and Meier does not make any attempt to render any of it plausible – within the universe of the film or otherwise. And so you're left trying to decipher Meier's big metaphor, which I ultimately decided was either Israel-Palestine or more generally human stubbornness in the face of transformative change (e.g. global warming). It's all very intriguing, even interesting – but deeply unsatisfying as a cinematic experience, at least for me.

Hey, there's nothing like nepotism, right? If your mom is Marcia Gay Harden, you can turn into a movie star with basically no on-screen experience whatsoever! Which is ... cool? Either that, or it will destroy your life, and you'll go down the drug-addled, alcohol-fuel path of humiliation trod by such luminaries as Drew Barrymore, Todd Bridges, and one or two Coreys. The contracts have been signed, though, and there's no turning back: Harden and her seven-year-old daughter Eulala Grace Scheel are starring in Home, an indie drama written and directed by Mary Haverstick.

In the film Harden plays a woman who, in an attempt to "break the cycle of addiction in her family," takes her kid on a summer roadtrip. (So, basically, it's either a lovely, nuanced story about family or a cliched piece of crap.) Marian Seldes, Michael Gaston and Candace Buckley are also in the cast; Home is currently shooting in Pennsylvania.