Six Geek Movies on your Holiday Gift Guide

Face it, the geek in your life is a terribly difficult person to holiday shop for.

• First, they have everything.
• Second, the things they don't have, you've never even heard of.
• And, third, if you've heard of it, they probably don't want it anymore!

So what is a Geek Gift Buyer to do? Buy DVDs!

Every geek has a favorite movie or two, and often it's easy to quickly scan their shelves to find out if they already own them.

So what movies would we suggest buying your geek?

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This year's only geek movie was a massive box office success. As well it should have been, it's adorable. Even the coldest heart -- or the most emotionally detached kernel hacker -- would find something to love about WALL-E. Better still, WALL-E is cute enough to watch with your significant other, and tame enough to watch with the kids. A copy should be under the tree, menorah or Flying Spaghetti Monster effigy of every single geek, regardless of gender, age or orientation.

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Shall we play a game? Grown up geeks who spent their hours at the arcade in the 80s love this movie. Younger geeks who don't remember a time before CD-ROM will revel in its naivety. We just love it because Ally Sheedy and Mathew Broderick are the 80s power couple that never happened.

Unbelievably durable, and endlessly quotable, I think Wargames belongs on the DVD shelf of every geek in America.

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I'll let you in on a secret; geeks make fun of this movie -- but deep down they love it. Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller put on convincing performances in the world's least realistic "hacker" movie evar. It's awful, it's inaccurate, and geeks secretly love it.

Bonus points if given with a bottle of booze, for a rollicking Christmas afternoon drinking game. The only rule? Drink when this movie is inaccurate. You'll be hammered in no time, and you won't remember how it ends. All the more reason to watch it again
.

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A star-studded cast makes this a must see, even without the geek cred. Dan Ackroid, River Phoenix, Sydney Poitier and Robert Redford make their living as a band of highly paid rouges who break into banks and find security flaws. It's got intrigue, it's got extortion, it's got government plots... the entire plot is based around encryption schemes... What is there not to love about this?

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I'll admit, TRON hasn't aged well. Our own Christina Warren put it best when she said, "Pixar movies make inanimate objects loveable.. TRON makes live characters into inanimate objects." TRON is a giant pile of FAIL as a movie, but it's a programmers parable and their just aren't many of those. If your geek's day job is writing code, TRON is at the least a great stocking stuffer.

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If you were a slacker-doofus computer lover in the late 80s, you secretly wanted to be Val Kilmer in this movie. A brilliant kid with a charmed and seemingly effortless existence at MIT, this flick gave over-inflated expectations and under-achieving tendencies to a legion of wanna-be engineers. It's goofy, it's campy, and after all these years it still manages to be a whole lot of fun to watch.

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What are *your* favorite geek movies? We'd love to hear about the cinematic gems we certainly missed and why they should be under your tree this year!

Tags: hgg