Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 186 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

#101

Post by jimbokun »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #37

Okay, I'm insane, I know that. But I have this strange urge to nominate The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in this category. I'm not sure I can explain why. Perhaps it's just to be perverse. ;) There's just something about the character that rings true. He's a famous superhero, but he doesn't wear a costume or come from another planet. He's a mad scientist, but he doesn't cackle or plot or soliloquize. He's an odd guy…

I just saw this recently, and the one problem I had with it is the actor playing Buckaroo (Peter Weller) is maybe the worst actor in the movie.

Having John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Lloyd in secondary roles was amazing; they really go all out to push the intentional corniness over the top. (Lithgow's intentionally bad fake Italian accent is wonderful; Lloyd, as usual, really does seem like someone not of Earth; and I still don't understand why Jeff Goldblum spends most of the movie dressed like a cowboy from a 1940s serial.)

Having so much great acting around him made watching Peter Weller kind of painful to watch.

Re: Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

#102

Post by rokhayakebe »

thomasswift wrote: post #84
rokhayakebe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

August was pretty bad. I just watched it Friday. What did LandShark do?

E-everything

"E is the highway, not the vehicle, we do not need traction." Well I would assume a highway is definitely built for vehicles, hence needs the traction to justify the investment.

Re: Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

#104

Post by bd »

imp wrote: post #72

Slightly off topic, but a good hacker TV show is "Big Bang Theory" on Monday nights on ABC. It's about 4 physics PhD students at Cal Tech. The best part is that they don't water down the physics at all. One guy got dumped by his girlfriend because of their differing opinions on string theory. I just got the season 1 DVD and it's great.

They are not PhD students, more something like postdocs. The only one of them without PhD is a target of jokes because of this.

Re: Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

#106

Post by Retric »

greendestiny wrote: post #93
mschwar99 wrote: post #2

Fan of: The headache inducing blue ribbon winner: Pi - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/ The slightly corny but worthwhile: Sneakers - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

Sneakers is my favourite film. I don't find it particularly corny, but it's very deliberately paced and most of the acting is understated (I guess apart from Dan Ackroyd) which is why I think it never got the recognition it deserved.

As a funny aside I know the guy who actually built the little dog that does the back flip. The guy is a fun loving hacker type who loves to go caving around the world is really into http://www.wfmu.org/ etc. Basically the direct opposite of the supporting charter.

Re: Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

#107

Post by brandnewlow »

hernan7 wrote: post #61
scott_s wrote: post #30

Apollo 13 has some great hacker scenes. It has, in fact, my favorite hacker moment from any movie. "We gotta find a way to make this [holds up square peg] fit into the hole for this [holds up round peg] using nothing but that [points to random assortment of crap that they know is on board].": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNDuGuerpf8

The square peg/round hole sequence is of course the embodiment of the hacker spirit (not an original thought of mine, but I can't seem to find the original URL at the moment). Another space/hackish movie would be "The Dish" about the Australian engineers in charge of one the (of course) dishes used to communicate with Apollo 11. Cliffhanger scene: the dish goes out of alignment for some reason and they need to scramb…

Q: How do you know if you're a hacker? A: If you get chills during that scene.

I did, but I didn't know what it meant at the time.

My dad on the other hand wouldn't stop talking about it during the drive home afterward. He was a mechanical engineer at West Point and it got him going on the laws of thermodynamics and the time he calculated the condensation point of a drop of water on a steel pipe and realized that engineering is no different from magic at a certain point.

Re: Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

#108

Post by narag »

DaniFong wrote: post #28
mechanical_fish wrote: post #3

My Caltech friend assured me that Real Genius perfectly captured the spirit of Caltech. (It borrows a lot of legendary Caltech hacks.) It certainly is the best fictional depiction of grad school I've ever seen, though it's kind of confused about the distinction between undergrad and grad school. On the other hand, perhaps that's normal at Caltech as well.

It's supposed to be undergrad, which is like that at Caltech (and for that matter, many physics departments). Real Genius is a terrific movie, and it leapt to mind as being definitive. :-)

But it can't beat "Young Einstein" in number of geniuses: Edison, Darwin, Marie Curie, Rutherford, Freud and Einstein himself.

Re: Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

#110

Post by twopoint718 »

bd wrote: post #82

The Prestige (competing magicians inventing new tricks, cameo by Nikola Tesla): http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/prestige Iron Man (fun movie where the main character is hacker/inventor): http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/ironman There Will Be Blood (not a hacker movie per se, but still kind of startup-relevant, it's about creation of the oil empire from scratch): http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/therew…

I second "Odyssey 5", great TV show.
Post reply on HN