Sean's Blog

I was going through my DVD collection the other day, and I came across two great cult-classics from the 80s (Real Genius and WarGames), which got me thinking about more recent “geeky” films. Hackers (circa 1995) has been on HBO and Cinemax a lot lately, and my abundance of unemployment has given me the opportunity to watch it many times, outside of my normal Dice/Monster time, of course. That said, it still sucks, and like many technology-oriented movies, it lacks any measure of realism whatsoever. Oh, and Fisher Stevens should have just quit after Short Circuit. And then I got to thinking about Masterminds (circa 1997), which I actually still have on Beta (hint: Beta didn’t pick up Macrovision). Despite appealing to my then 12-year-old self, it sucks in retrospect. And lets not forget the disaster that was Swordfish (2001).

Aside from Swordfish, I saw all of these movies for the first time at about the same time. As a keen observer might note, if I was 12 in 1997, I’m 24 now, and out of all of the movies I mentioned, Real Genius and WarGames are the only ones I want to own and watch on a semi-regular basis. Maybe it’s just me and the late hour, but I can’t think of any geeky movie made after those two that was all that good. And no, the Matrix series does not count.