Film Discussion, post two

[mabfan]

Okay, here we go.

I was able to choose the following films as ones this kid likes:

The Wizard of Oz
War of the Worlds
The Time Machine
2001
Star Wars
The Matrix
Simone
Dark City
Forbidden Planet
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Last Starfighter

As for made up titles, I've got
Ender's Game (zhaneel69 gets a Tuckerization e-coupon; see below)
Neuromancer (the remake)
Lunar Revolt (the title under which Hollywood releases Moon is a Harsh Mistress, so zmook gets a Tuckerization e-coupon)


Here's the thing, though. I'd really like to cut this down to a list of twelve. Six established films, six made-up ones. And while that means I need at least four more made-up titles (and I have to cut a few established ones), I only have two Tuckerizations to offer in this particular story. Both are minor characters who are part of a commission to decide on whether to adopt VR for public education. But both get mentioned a few times.

So here's the deal. If I use your made-up movie title, and I can't put you in this story, you will get a e-coupon to be Tuckerized in a future story. Or, if you're already being Tuckerized (hi zhaneel69!) you can pass the coupon along to someone else.

Titles people offered in the previous post have already been decided against. Also, let's get away from what books or stories you want to see turned into movies. I want original titles, ones that aren't based on known SF stories and ones that the IMDB says don't exist.

And as a further fun exercise, what's the movie you're titling about?

Also, to help you along, know that the kid who likes these films is an isolated geeky kid who gets picked on in school. He's a computer genius who knows how to hack into the VR system, so he loves The Matrix. Given that information, what old films from 2010-2050, say, does he love?

Comments

movies

[-mozo-.livejournal.com]

"HCF", a 2017 thriller about a hacker who figures out how to program a "halt, catch fire" command into the software that runs the world's currency/credit machines. He gets a job at Unisoft and manages to insert the code into an upcoming update of the global system, to demonstrate that it was a mistake to base all of the systems on Unisoft code. Keanu Reeves plays the retired cybercop pulled back into service to try to track down the hacker by following the cryptic clues in the pattern on atm fires before they spread worldwide or cause the Unisoft bank to have to shut the system down.

Ok, that's the best I can do at 8:30 in the morning.

And it did get me to open a LJ account, Michael. :P

-John Reinert Nash

Re: movies

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

If I can retitle it "Halt Catch Fire" as opposed to HCF, it's in.

And welcome to LJ.

Re: movies

[-mozo-.livejournal.com]

Halt Catch Fire it is. :-)

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

The Crimson Tower (billed as a steampunk action thriller, actually a rather philosophical movie. Kind of a flop, but he likes it.)
Dark Fire (a far-future space opera in the Vinge/Banks vein)

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I like both of these...

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

"Cracker" (2023) When a cadre of hackers across the world threaten to bring down access to the internet for everyone except for themselves, Roh Kwontaek, the Korean who created the devastating Balhae virus of 2012, sets his sights on breaking up the ring. Working at his computer and through a variety of avatars, Roh's adventures take him through cyberspace (the fantastic, science-fictional and reality-based) as well as the real world as the countdown approaches. Roh isn't interested in breaking up the ring for the good of the world, but merely so he won't be cut off and finds himself having to face off with the authorities as much as with the hackers.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

You know, Steven, having people come up with future SF movies they'd like to see could be the next ARGENTUS special feature...

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

I had something like that in issue one: film reviews based on books. The next issue will be book reviews of atypical novels (Gene Wolfe's film novelization, Gregory Benford's fantasy, etc).

[lisafeld.livejournal.com]

2010 isn't that far off, I guess it's like figuring out in high school what films are going to be in theaters when you graduate college... Let's see. There's the wacky space station sitcom Off His Axis, there's Glimmering III, which was way better than the original, there's Blood in the Water, a startlingly good independant film about marginalized groups fleeing to Mars for a better life and taking their problems with them, and there's Bluescreen which was a dark technoromp about a black ops team set up by a dying democracy whose mission is to hamstring the hegemony by hacking into the media to outrage citizens with all the skeletons in the closet.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I want to see all of these, but I disagree with you about Glimmering III. The original was excellent, just unappreciated. But don't ger me started about the second one... :-)

[lisafeld.livejournal.com]

*snicker* You're just saying that cause you're sentimental about the original. If you'd seen it as an adult you wouldn't think it was half so cool.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

"Trip the Light"
An independent feature film released solely on the web, taking advantage of the then-new VR sets exploding into the market, which were at first intended purely for the computer gaming set: a full sensory feature film viewed in your own home. It's an adventure/thriller about a researcher who gets sucked into a government cover-up when the President of the United States gets lost through use of new teleportation technology.

Maybe some of your hero's friends have watched the film in, shall we say, an altered state, and especially dig the teleportation experience. Our hero digs it just fine without alteration.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Having just watched (for the first time) Escape From New York and Escape From LA, this story idea resonates...

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

So what did you think of Escape from New York?!

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

There was less of New York in it than I wanted to see. :-) I did enjoy watching it, however. But from today's perspective, seeing him land the plane on the Twin Towers, even though the movie is now set in the past year of 1997, felt odd.

[arib.livejournal.com]

"Abort/Retry/Ignore" was a surprisngly brainy summer blockbuster released in 2028 that dealth with an artificial intelligence program run out of UV Berkeley that found an alien signal in the webservers that hosted Seti@Home. Turns out, visiting aliens had sabotaged the S@H project back in the early '00s, so that humans wouldn't be able to use it to intercept communications from the alien warfleet using the solar system as a staging area. Now the AI needs to simultaneously figure out how to bring this to the attention of the authorities, who don't believe it, and try and stop the aliens before they convert the Earth into pure energy to fuel their warships.

Yes, I'm supposed to be writing a paper now, why do you ask?

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Go write your paper. :-)

[arib.livejournal.com]

I *am*

Coming up with that quick movie drabble was just a distraction while my brain multitasked itself.

It's probably the most fiction I've written in years, really. :-)

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Eye of the Storm - After a mission where he lost his sight, agent Marko is given new cybernetic replacements. Thing is, one of them was mistakenly filed originally and has special abilities that can tap into various sources of information, among other things. He finds some very unflattering information this way. After the mistake is figured out, the agency wants the eye back - and they have figured out that he Knows Too Much. Many hijinks ensue.

I have one or two more ideas but have an appointment to go to soon.

I did not see the first post yet, so I don't know if you've considered and discarded; but the kid might have liked (from already-made movies) Wargames and/or Paycheck. I'd think he'd find Paycheck particularly appealing.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Wargames! Paycheck! I should have thought of those.

I'll make sure to add Wargames. I don't think people will consider Paycheck a classic, sadly.

[zmook.livejournal.com]

Is he a fan of these as an expression of rebellious independence, because nobody's ever heard of these forgotten early-media pieces, or are they taught in literature classes in school (I can see this for "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "The Wizard of Oz" for sure), or is liking them a way to be a member of a cult subculture? Is there still SF fandom as we might recognize it?

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

He's the kind of kid who would have benefited from fandom, but fandom as we know it vanished by 2061...

[arib.livejournal.com]

Where did all the fans go? I still plan on attending cons when I'm... 82. :-)

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I can't believe I forgot this one!

2010 was made in 1984, so it shows up in IMDB as "2010 (1984)".
So someone needs to make a 1984 adaptation in 2010, so it'll be "1984 (2010)".
Starring, oh, let's say Nick Cage as Winston Smith.

[bluepapercup]

In 2024 the aging Jerry Bruckheimer franchise attempts to give new commercial life to Bruce Sterling's near-forgotten cyberpunk novel Heavy Weather, releasing it as that summer's blockbuster movie under the title The Weather Hack. However, overestimating the public's interested in vintage '90's speculative wanking, the movie tanks, only to become a cult favorite among sci-fi fans and weather geeks.

[ckd]

There's a web-based series franchise in the 2040s of the "CyberSquadPatrol", which is basically a cross between a cop show and Homestarrunner, which winds up getting a movie made in 2046 which disappears almost without a trace...but he loves it anyway.

[neilfein.livejournal.com]

When gas prices reach $5 a gallon and we still don't have H₂ cars, we'll get movies like the teleport/pirate duplication flick "Property of Libya"; the Grisham thriller about a kidnapped child of an oil exec, "The Alaska File"; and the future with power rationing, implanted computers, and an underground slashdot-style culture will produce the cracker flicks "The Reboot Drill" and "Lights Out in Manhattan".

The legal actions against filesharers might give us a future where it's illegal to record music at all. We'd have an underground culture, with musicians passing music hand-to-hand to other musicians (and implicitly trusted hangers-on, one of which would be the viewpoint character). "File Under I", perhaps, or "Passed On"; or name it partially after a classic song: "Hotel Nevada" or "Down Under" (Australia's laws are even more draconian than the US ones).

The prospect of lunar colonies will produce many films like an adaptation of Heinlein's "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (that's been covered), but also T2-sorts of films like the Crichton-style thriller, "The Clavius Strain", which gives you an homage to Kubrick/Clarke while a swipe at Crichton's later work. (Unless you want Jurassic Park XIV on the far side of the moon...) Lessee, there could be aliens loose in a secret lab somewhere, "Alien Development"; or a moon/earth shuttle with juust enough fuel for the pilot and no more, and a stowaway shows up...

I'm surprised no one's suggested that this list might include movies like "Spaceships" or the "Broken Symmetry" series of stories (with that last bit included, it'd make a dandy screenplay, BTW).

[somehedgehog.livejournal.com]

"Higher Law" is a legal/conspiracy thriller about Delta C-7 ("Del,"), an android created to handle the more repetetive clerical tasks of law enforcement, such as filing and tracking stored evidence or searching for DNA and fingerprint matches. During the course of routine database refiguring, Del discovers a series of anomalies that lead her/it to uncover a disturbing pattern of evidence tampering, corruption, conspiracy, and murder. Del must fight the limitations of her own programming (which does not allow her to harm humans or hack their records) as well as the human conspirators who seek to shut her down permanently.

Unique for portraying a robotic character in a positive light and its flawed human counterparts as villains, "Higher Law" became an instant classic and was widely lauded by serious SF fans and scientists, who were glad to see Hollywood break from the typical evil mad scientist/uncontrollable machine mold common to their science-fiction films.

(You could also call this "First Law" as a nod to Asimov, but I know you want to stay away from adaptations.)