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

Re:Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies? by jimbokun on Monday January 26, 2009 @06:46PM (#451289)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies? by mechanical_fish on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @12:41AM (#451714)

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

See, I think that Peter Weller's take on the character is one of the movie's charms. The guy plays Buckaroo Banzai as a perpetually preoccupied, frighteningly odd physics professor with a slight amount of Asperger's. A person who is sometimes painful to watch. [1] In other words, he's the kind of character whom you normally meet only in real life, not in the movies.

Without picking on any individuals by name, let me assure you that many real-world geniuses are even more painful to watch.

And the last thing the movie needed was more corniness. The central character is kind of deadpan, but that provides a valuable contrast with the silly antics going on around him.

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Re:Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies? by mechanical_fish on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @10:44AM (#452237)

Hey, I've got a dangling footnote that I can't fix! Ah, the mistakes you make at 2am.

Let's tie it up:

[1] This is the famous recursive footnote. [1]

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