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Six Geek Movies on your Holiday Gift Guide
- 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?
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.
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.
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
.
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?
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.
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. 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!
Comments
26
Subscribe to commentsJamesNov 25th 2008 10:58AM
They did a pretty good job with the recent Hitchhiker's Guide movie. Or you could be really hardcore and buy the old BBC mini-series version...
MalcolmNov 25th 2008 11:06AM
spell check??
AbdoNov 26th 2008 11:13AM
It's Dan Aykroyd, not Dan Ackroid. You can even see it on the DVD cover.
orangemazeNov 26th 2008 3:59PM
One of my fav movies of all time, and it has uber-geekness all over it is 'Brazil'. The backwards tech, the complete imcompetance of all people, and the utter rediculousness of the entire movie around a printing error or Tuttle vs Buttle.
HeyCrabmanNov 27th 2008 4:30AM
Calm down godless, don't be such a nerf herder. Remember, the galaxy is in a recession (official or not). All of us Jedi can't afford the best lightsabers nowadays (mine has duck tape on the handle and it flickers between red and green, so either I have bi-force disorder or a wicked Christmas lightsaber!). So DVDs aren't the worst thing in the world. Take me for instance. I am without employment right now...sigh....and I have the mynock flu....double sigh....what was all this about again?
P.S. If anyone wants to hire a writer (wink wink nudge nudge) or a nerf herder, I'm willing to be trained.
P.P.S. Good (Sith) Lord, I wish I was joking......sigh.........(end Oscar scene).
P.P.S.S. I forgot to mention my vote for the GOOD Star Wars Trilogy. You know the one with all of the good acting.......which reminds me....that stupid mynock never did call me.
LucasDec 2nd 2008 12:38PM
this article should have been more about geek guilty pleasures, ie the movies we mock but secretly adore for a certain geek delight (they all tried, but failed and I think we can relate to that after spending 17 hours trying to code the tiniest thing).
cause every one of these movies is not a box office smash by any stretch and they are all movies that only geeks would remember or take note of. as opposed to Blade Runner which shows up in film schools and the Matrix which anyone over 10 knows.
and that's why I saw Pirates does NOT belong on the list. okay the acting sucked in places but it's really a history lesson in a movie. However I will agree with the Last Starfighter, Weird Science and Electric Dreams. they all suck, but with that geek goodness.