Hackers Tagged Articles at Cinematical

We often tie our Tuesday Cinematical Seven picks with DVD releases, and this time, I was torn. On the one side, there was the out-to-lunch Hollywood science that allowed there to be identical cousins in The Patty Duke Show. But aside from the wonder of creating a girl with a crappy computer, a barbie, and some David Lee Roth personality, there wasn't much I felt could battle with cousins who look exactly alike. But then there's also the DVD release of the first two seasons of Felicia Day's famous web series, The Guild. Sold -- The Best Big-Screen Geek Girls.

Elisabeth's Geek Beat recently discussed what it means to be geek, and for the purposes of this list: It's on-screen characters who have smarts and delight in things that usual characters don't. They might love learnin', comics, computers, geek flicks, or even following around freaky people and collecting warped memorabilia. They're a little bit different, all sorts of kickass, and all sorts of worthy for the Best Big Screen Geek Girls. Check out the rundown after the jump and weigh in with your own picks!

If there's anyone who has pulled off a wickedly impressive image transformation, it's Angelina Jolie. She used to be the wild child who'd wear bloody tees to her wedding (with Jonny Lee), or bloody vials around her neck (as she did with Billy Bob). Then she did a 180, becoming a goodwill ambassador and starting her own multicultural Brady Bunch with Brad Pitt.

I'm happy for her, but I can't help but miss the good ol' days. She might have been wild, and she might have shocked many -- but she had a great spark, one that seems to have disappeared inside the current carefully manufactured icon she is today.

The gleam might be hidden these days, but luckily we're living in a world of DVD entertainment. We can head back to the past whenever we want to. What follows are my two favorite Jolie gigs. They're far from the best movies, but they definitely embody both the old Angelina, and a certain period of '90s rebellion. I give you: Hackers and Foxfire.

Perhaps desperately needing an influx of star power, The Santa Barbara Film Festival, which is going on right now, put together a big celebration of Angelina Jolie's work and persuaded the star to appear the other night. I know nothing about these SBIFF events, but according to the NY Post they seem to be half honorarium, half roast, as the honoree is asked to watch old clips of their bad movies and then acknowledge them. The problem, of course, is that this comes on the heels of Jolie being snubbed for an Oscar nomination for her performance as Marianne Pearl in A Mighty Heart, so the ribbing seems to have been toned down considerably. (I wouldn't go so far as to say Jolie's was a great performance in that film, but considering that the academy tapped Cate Blanchett for a noticeably bad performance in an exceptionally awful film, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Jolie would have every right to be upset.)

So a planned montage of clips from Jolie's old movies was shelved at the last minute. The actress did speak about the old days, though, calling her earliest movies "cheesy" and saying of Cyborg 2, "The first one was Jean-Claude Van Damme, the second was me at 17." In other words, 'not my fault.' She also had the following to say about Hackers: "As Brad knows, he's in the audience, I really don't know how to turn on a computer." Jolie also seemed to take a halfway-swipe at Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which isn't a bad movie in any sense. "It's one of those that I think Brad and I both tried to get out of," Jolie said. "Obviously I'm grateful I did [the movie] because it changed my life," apparently referring to meeting the afore-mentioned Brad.

Just the other night, I was drinking a beer, surfing the channels and IMing with our resident horror guy, Scott Weinberg. We were chatting about films like Alien and Brazil when I broke into the conversation with my happiness upon finding Hackers on television. I was greeted with "ugh, yer killin' me, dear sweet lord." I can't help it. I love the film. It's a welcome change to the normal high school-centric fare out there, and while they might wear ultra-strange get-ups, at least they aren't trying to hide behind glasses and ponytails to geek themselves up. And you know, you can't resist geek talk like: "RISC architecture is gonna change everything," and "Check this out guys -- this is insanely great! It's got a 28.8 BPS modem!"

LinuxHaxor.Net has put up a list of the Top 20 Movies about Computer Hacking and Geeks. While I know that I'm not standing on a super-solid pillar to say this next bit, there's bad, and then there's BAD. They've got The Net on the list -- definitely one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and I hated back when I wasn't too picky about movies. Sandra Bullock as some computer whiz? Yeah, no. Even if the science behind Hackers isn't secure, at least they've got some pre-sanity Angelina Jolie and catchy tunes. That being said, the list also includes some classics like Sneakers, War Games and TRON, as well as some realistic fare like Revolution OS, which tackles the whole Open Source explosion. And yes, we can't forget The Matrix films.

What geek and hacker films do you love?

It's not unusual to see toy lines adapted for the big screen. When I was a kid, there were plenty of these commercials-in-disguise, though most of them were animated features and they were typically spun-off from already successful television programs. But now with the live-action Transformers, Hot Wheels and Bratz coming our way, not to mention a second live-action He-Man movie, it makes sense for newer toys to just bypass the small screen and go directly to the multiplex. One of the producers of Bratz, former Toy Biz CEO (and current Marvel Studios exec) Avi Arad, apparently believes the logic; he has announced that he and producer Steven Paul are now developing a live-action feature based on the popular Robosapien toys.

The movie, which will be simply titled Robosapien, already has a script by Arad and Max Botkin (fitting name), and it is set to begin shooting this November with Bratz director Sean McNamara at the helm. As far as I know, the Robosapien toys do not have any narrative text or mythology, as many toys do, but Arad seems to have had no problem creating one. Of course, the concept he's come up with isn't too original. According to Variety, Arad has based the movie's story on the tale of Pinocchio, which was also the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's recent robot film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Both ideas feature an inventor who creates a substitute child, and both feature the adventures of a boy and a robot (well, A.I. had a robot boy and a robot teddy bear), so it will be interesting to see just how similar Arad's creation actually is to the earlier pic. Even if there are enough differences between Robosapien and A.I., though, considering a master filmmaker like Spielberg couldn't please audiences with his movie, it is hard to imagine that McNamara will have greater success. Anyway, aren't most fans of the Robosapien hackers who will just end up pirating the movie off the internet rather than going to see it in theaters?