Big Fish gave me the perspective that you can move around in small ponds and still be a great person; you don't have to start a company and change the world to accomplish this.
Don Hertzfeldt's It's Such A Beautiful Day is wonderful, capable of teaching you new things about mortality and how you think about yourself and others, and is available on Netflix. It might also make you cry.
I feel like "The Fountain" left an imprint on my soul. It's weird, but probably the most beautiful movie I've ever seen (especially its music and filmography).
Same here. One of the few movies that really stuck. Explores the philosophy of human vs mortality, and how time may not cure all wounds. I will now try to watch it again this weekend.
Hackers is a movie that I thought was terrible when it came out (even as a youngster!), but now seems like a wonderful 90s period piece. It snapshots the whole hacker/raver/"burner" techno-counterculture axis of the 1990s really well, and the schmaltz and cheeze is actually pretty clever and entertaining. It sort of makes fun of itself in an also very 'period' way.
I sort of like movies that start bad and then age well.
Sneakers is also incredible. It's far more objectively cinematically good than Hackers, and it snapshots a slightly earlier era in hackerdom. Sneakers is about the time immediately before Hackers, basically before the youngsters flooded in and started hacking web apps and doing 'E'.
I saw Grave of the Fireflies last night for the first time, and it has helped me realize how vital it is for everyone to eat healthy food every day. People take this for granted and eat horribly, and you wonder why so many people are bipolar or depressed or crazy.
When I was a kid: Hackers (watched it around 30-40 times when I was a kid), War Games, Matrix, Sneakers pushed me into being developer, but the most impact on my current life had American Beauty as it made me thinking about working less. Another movie that I can think of is Social Network - It motivated me to on my side projects harder.
I have too many to list. Here are some of the highlights that come to mind.
2001: A Space Odyssey -- had a profound effect on me as a child. It both reinforced my interest in science and opened my mind to the sheer size and scale and mystery of the universe. The original Cosmos series did likewise, and I think it's far better than the remake with Tyson. Sagan just communicates the sense of awe and wonder a lot better.
Wargames -- definitely made an impression on my pre-teen self and helped get me into "hacking" (sense #2), which led here through a long and winding road.
Stand By Me -- a profound film about the end of childhood. (The Stephen King novella 'The Body' is good too, probably almost his best work.)
Primer -- the best sci-fi of the past decade. When you don't have a big budget to plaster FX all over the screen, it's got to be in the writing. Big budgets do sometimes ruin cinema.
Enter the Void -- this is a weird recent one that stuck with me. This is definitely a binary reaction film. I loved it, others hate it. It communicated the profound sense of loss that comes when you're forced to leave a thing unfinished and move on, followed by the sense of hope that comes with a new beginning. It was also just the visual aesthetic of that film. It haunts me. The artistic ethos of this film felt as if someone lifted dreams directly from my soul and rendered them on screen. Night flights over neon cities is probably what I'll dream about as I die.
Primer is awesome, one of the few (if not the only) time-travel movies worth watching. It's the only movie I ever watched in entirety the very next day after seeing it the first time.
If you 'fully' understand it after 5 times, you're doing pretty good. I thought I read somewhere that the writer intentionally obfuscated parts of it to stress that time travel is complicated business.
The knights tale is my personal favorite. Not sure, how many in hacker community would like this movie, but this movie taught me very early the power of hope and dreams.
EDIT : I would love to add Lions king (animation )
Howard Hawks The Big Sleep. It provides a window into how America perceived itself in 1946 and it is quite different from the post-war narrative that was established over the following decades.
Not a movie, but Star Trek: The Next Generation had a profound impact on my life.
Captain Picard's level of human ethics is something most of us can only strive for. I think everyone (including Earth politicians) should take note of his supreme leadership skills, and the will become a better place.
Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek was really that Enterprise was a metaphor for "starship earth", so even if you're not into sci-fi, it's still highly worth watching. It's not really about space per se, it's about people.
Jurassic Park, its not the movie in the literal sense, but the fact that it was my first move I ever saw with my family in a big theatre. So every frame of it "wow" experience for me at that time.
Also "Man from Earth", It was my first movie that made me realize sci-fi genre is lot more than fancy cgi.
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. It showed me that our surroundings can be almost completely different from one another's with only a minimal subset of common characteristics.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadhttp://nation.time.com/2011/09/28/no-idle-boast-a-soldiers-t...
I sort of like movies that start bad and then age well.
Sneakers is also incredible. It's far more objectively cinematically good than Hackers, and it snapshots a slightly earlier era in hackerdom. Sneakers is about the time immediately before Hackers, basically before the youngsters flooded in and started hacking web apps and doing 'E'.
Another one which I regularly watch is Shawshank Redemption. A choice quote from the movie:
Hope is a good thing, may be the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/miyazaki-s-beautiful-antiwar-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10037010
"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
It is funny to think about it now, but I can remember clearly how this movie got me so excited at the time. I shifted all my focus to computers.
2001: A Space Odyssey -- had a profound effect on me as a child. It both reinforced my interest in science and opened my mind to the sheer size and scale and mystery of the universe. The original Cosmos series did likewise, and I think it's far better than the remake with Tyson. Sagan just communicates the sense of awe and wonder a lot better.
Wargames -- definitely made an impression on my pre-teen self and helped get me into "hacking" (sense #2), which led here through a long and winding road.
Stand By Me -- a profound film about the end of childhood. (The Stephen King novella 'The Body' is good too, probably almost his best work.)
Primer -- the best sci-fi of the past decade. When you don't have a big budget to plaster FX all over the screen, it's got to be in the writing. Big budgets do sometimes ruin cinema.
Enter the Void -- this is a weird recent one that stuck with me. This is definitely a binary reaction film. I loved it, others hate it. It communicated the profound sense of loss that comes when you're forced to leave a thing unfinished and move on, followed by the sense of hope that comes with a new beginning. It was also just the visual aesthetic of that film. It haunts me. The artistic ethos of this film felt as if someone lifted dreams directly from my soul and rendered them on screen. Night flights over neon cities is probably what I'll dream about as I die.
Maybe mix it with this:
http://www.amazon.com/Parasite-Rex-Bizarre-Dangerous-Creatur...
EDIT : I would love to add Lions king (animation )
Captain Picard's level of human ethics is something most of us can only strive for. I think everyone (including Earth politicians) should take note of his supreme leadership skills, and the will become a better place.
Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek was really that Enterprise was a metaphor for "starship earth", so even if you're not into sci-fi, it's still highly worth watching. It's not really about space per se, it's about people.
Also "Man from Earth", It was my first movie that made me realize sci-fi genre is lot more than fancy cgi.
Its important to watch movies that make you blind mad occasionally
Its important to watch movies that make you blind mad occasionally
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Space-Suit-Heinleins-Juveniles-eb...
http://www.amazon.com/Starman-Jones-Robert-A-Heinlein/dp/145...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_of_the_Galaxy
That's the set I remember most at least. "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" has some good stuff on getting where you want to be in life.