Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
My Upcoming Bollywood Masterpiece, "Dil Pyaar Kya He," Will Not Suffer From Such Flaws
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2007 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
When I was at Fog Creek, around the time Firewall came out, someone proposed a movie night of films that get the internet hilariously wrong (relevant Penny Arcade cartoon). The air of lunchtime grew light with laughter and we soon saw that one night would not be enough.
After discovering Untraceable, I started compiling a list via memory and IMDB tags for "website" and "internet." Hoo boy.
- Cellular probably belongs on this list for errors in telecom infrastructure, though I haven't seen it.
- Firewall
- The Art of War (I would love to watch the super-sekrit crypto sequence with Bruce Schneier.)
- Sneakers? Brendan?
- Hackers? Brendan?
- FearDotCom
- .com for Murder
- WatchUsDie.com
- The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (I'm just betting here.)
- The Net. If we were masochists we could add the 22 episodes of the TV show and the direct-to-video sequel.
- Antitrust, which I have seen. Possibly the only film ever where a Slashdot submission could have substituted for the denouement.
- All of 24?
For a chaser: the 2001 documentary Startup.com, probably just as agonizing but because it's true.
I feel as though I'm missing some big pre-existing list. So what am I missing? I'm thinking films, usually thrillers, where some implausible feature or missing feature of current technology is a core plot device.
Comments
steve minutillo
http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/
01 Dec 2007, 17:55 p.m.
Halifax
01 Dec 2007, 20:55 p.m.
I'm assuming Swordfish, but I don't remember much from the movie because it's brain poison.
Brendan
http://www.xorph.com/
02 Dec 2007, 14:34 p.m.
Definitely Swordfish, where Hugh Jackman breaks "256-bit encryption" by typing really fast on six keyboards. And very very definitely Hackers. I say Sneakers is defensible because most of the wrongness comes packaged in the maguffin (little black box that breaks all 1992-era crypto; not really that improbable), and there's no 3D flying-through-lightning computer hacking, they just dial some numbers and get ASCII. Others who have viewed it with me disagree.
Oh God, The Net. That came out at the height of my Sandra Bullock crush and pretty much ruined it.
I looked up WarGames to see if it would count and found this:
"In November 2006, the pre-production of a sequel, titled WarGames 2: The Dead Code, began. It will be directed by Stuart Gillard, and star Matt Lanter as a hacker named Will Farmer facing off with a government supercomputer called Ripley."
Future hall-of-famer?
Martin
04 Dec 2007, 6:33 a.m.
Sneakers is actually a remarkably good hacker-caper flick. And it features a ridiculously cool Braille interface.
Ha! When I first watched Startup.com, I didn't know it was a documentary. Partway through, Jenny asked me "Is this real? Or fiction?" I told her that OBVIOUSLY it was fiction, nobody would actually run a company like that. Then after it was over I looked it up on IMDB. Oops.<br/>