When feeling demotivated or simply in need of a gentle kick in the ass, watching a good inspirational/feel-good movie can never hurt. Which movies did you find inspirational? Bonus point for business related movies.
Sneakers (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/8710). The film's aged a little, but it's nice to watch a fairly funny hacking film that doesn't dress up hacking into 3D flying GUIs, Hack the Planet or hacking a TLA with a gun put to your head, while getting head.
Brewster's Millions always cheers me up around Christmas, as does Trading Places (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/9749), both of which are slightly business related (although not exactly real-world related).
Someone else posted the pursuit of happyness (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/7605), when I stick that on it comes across as a bit schmaltzy for me but has a good message.
A beautiful mind (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/1112) is another great film about an incredibly smart but tortured genius who makes a massive contribution to economics.
Catch me if you can (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/1798) is based on the true story of a fraudster who ripped off banks for tons of money and did all kinds of amazing things with it. It's a great romp and I'd highly recommend a first watch.
Life is beautiful (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/5583) is hardly an uplifting film but is incredible and if it doesn't make you thankful for what you have, then I'd question whether or not you have a soul.
I think you mis-parsed my Sneakers comment. Sneakers is an awesome film. Swordfish, while ok to watch if there's nothing else on can't hold a candle to Sneakers.
I'm pretty sure Swordfish was one of the films he was slamming. The movie is rife with "hacking the TLA with a gun to one's head". Not to mention, the visual programming bit was pretty ludicrous.
I don't think Scarface is a strange choice for the same reason I like the fraud trilogy. Stories of meteoric success followed by tragic failure are hella inspiring, because you get to see where they went wrong. So while your watching your brain is telling you: 'All we have to do is follow The 10 Crack Commandments and we'll make it!'
Apart from those already mentioned by others, some challenging classics:
Zorba the Greek
Ikiru (Living), by Akira Kurosawa
Babette's Feast
La Strada
La double vie de Véronique
Lawrence of Arabia
It's a Wonderful Life
Jakob the Liar
Citizen Kane
Deliverance
Dogville
Worth noting that none of these are "feel-good" american movies. They're "kick you in the balls and get you busy living" movies. I much prefer those to simple feel-good movies. If you want feel-good, just go watch some reruns of Friends (I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing; I do it quite often; but those are not the best inspirational movies by a long shot).
I would say the appeal of Iron Man in that sense is the montage effect. I love montage sequences in movies, and movies that use them right are totally energizing. There's nothing like seeing the trip from obscurity to success without coffee breaks, writers block, tooth-brushing etc.
I couldn't agree more. It's the only movie I've ever seen that references "wget", and the entire time as I sat there watching the early Facebook geeks write code, I kept thinking about how I should be at home working on my startup instead of sitting at the movies.
Am I the only one who found the film a bit disappointing given all the hype? While the first half was pretty cool and I really enjoyed the Facemash hacking scene, the second half felt like it was just endless squabbling over who owns what. Not exactly inspiring.
I've found that it's generally best to ignore hype for any film. If you go into a reasonably good film with low expectations, you'll like it. Walk into an incredible film with low expectations and you'll love it.
Yes you can. If you see reviews you should take them with a pinch of salt - there's a world of difference between Mark Kermode saying something's good and Nuts Magazine saying something's good.
You can avoid reviews, get a rough idea based on the actors and crew members' other work and a synopsis then decide if it warrants a visit to the cinema. You can go out and read the book the film might be based on.
For example, Black Swan is a film coming out by Darren Aronofsky that's coming out later this year. It stars Natalie Portman as a promising young ballet dancer that's slowly turning into a swan. It's an interesting premise, Aronofsky did Requiem for a Dream, the Fountain and more recently The Wrestler.
As well as Natalie Portman it has Vincent Cassel, both of whom I've loved in films before. This tells me that the film is probably worth seeing at the cinema - it may or may not be good but I can go in regardless of expectations. Unless I hear it's pretty awful then that's what I'm likely to do.
sound like an idea for a movie site.gives relatively negative reviews to sites , but still recommends you movies according to your taste , that you'll probably like.
we don't now 'what it is' or 'what it will be' or 'whether is makes any business at all', we are sure of just one thing that 'it is cool to use', lets code,test and enhance it - Inspired by The Social Network
I'd agree with two here, while adding one of my own.
The Social Network - have seen it twice, both times eager to get out of the cinema and rush home to continue working on my own projects. We all know it's possible to create something and have the world take notice, but to see the journey and the all too familiar scenarios was hugely inspiring. As much as the lead character may come across as an unemotional awkward individual - you can't help but want his sharpness and drive. Oh, and success.
Good Will Hunting - Maybe I happened to watch this at the right time, during a period where I had met someone special and certain obstacles had me holding back. This movie had me book a flight the second the credits began rolling. There's similarities with The Social Network too, a special yet flawed individual, whose mistakes pale in comparison to his potential. Every line in the film is a quotable.
Hangover - This will be the first and only mention I expect of this film, but in terms of leaving a cinema and feeling inspired, this is up there for me. Would happily have left on the road trip of a lifetime if my groups of friends were to join me. Sure I'd have broken down 2 miles into the journey, broke and a little homesick but I'd have given it a go.
One of my all time favorites. It's not computer nerd, it's rocket nerd -- but it feels similar to stories of Woz building his own computers from cheap chips.
The best movie on startups I've ever seen. I've watched it at least 20 times and appreciate it more each time. Woz has said that it's fairly accurate, which makes it that much more awesome.
This was my favorite startup/silicon valley-based movie until The Social Network came out. Great acting, very accurate storytelling (considering it's a made-for-tv movie from 1999), and pretty damn motivational.
I went looking for the exact Walt Disney quote at the end of the movie, and discovered "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walt_Disney which includes quite a few quotes that can relate to entrepreneurship.
Breaking Away (1979) "They're gonna keep callin' us "cutters." To them, it's just a dirty word. To me, it's just somethin' else I never got a chance to be." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078902/
- I Heart Huckabees
- You, Me And Everyone We Know
- Juno
- The Straight Story
- My Neighbour Totoro
Are all straight forward feel good movies.
- Caché
- The Lives Of Others
- The White Ribbon
- The Fountain
- Amores Perros
- City Of God
- Fargo
- Dune
- Castle In The Sky
- Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Festen
Make you feel good simply by the presence of their across the board brilliance.
Dune the film. It's different to the book. It is flawed. It's also one of the most atmospheric and convincing SF worlds ever realised on film, on a par with Blade Runner. It's got plenty of cool bits and a wicked Brian Eno soundtrack.
What you have to remember about Nausicaä is that it's 26 years old. Miyazaki was hitting wonderfully balanced deep green themes and using ambiguous villains whilst Disney was churning out 'Mickey's Christmas Carol'. There's lot's of truly wonderful space and silence in Nausicaä's 'forest' scenes.
One of my favorite movies that I watch quite often and belongs in that category is "The Shawshank Redemption" from 1994. Persist in adverse environments, make lifetime friends, resist to cruel authorities, develop side projects ;), use your skills in a good and moral way.
"Small Time Crooks" 2000 by Woody Allen.
A movie about naive accidental lovable millionaires. Funny and sometimes bitter.
- The Social Network.
- Black Hawk Down.
- Catch Me If You Can.
- The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum.
- Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Eleven.
- Remember the Titans.
- The Blind Side.
uh, its a great movie, but I don't remember it being very feel good. I mostly remember it being depressing. That scene toward the end where one of the kids is playing ball with his father is heartbreaking.
This is a novelette, not a movie: The Djinn's Wife, by Ian McDonald. Hard AIs, cybernetic brain interfacing, AI diplomats, AI negociators, AI cyber- and real war, a trans-human love story, it's incredible. Setting is "near future India".
I was impressed with Die Hard (1988) when I first saw it; so well engineered, as a movie and story and visual spectacle. Now that's the way action movies should be made, I thought, and hoped there'd be more like it -- even while wary of formulaic recombinations, like 'Die Hard on a boat', etc.
Years later, I saw The General (1927), and it blew my mind. There, 60+ years earlier, was 'Die Hard on rails'. There were so many action-movie scenes and stunts and plot points that have been repeated over and over in the decades since.
But: when Keaton did it, he wasn't cribbing anyone else. These weren't old familiar cliches (yet). He was risking his health with dangerous stunts. He didn't have the help of later special effects. He didn't even have sound or spoken dialogue. But still it all worked: the humor, the story, the stunts, the tension.
It was like discovering the common ancestor of hundreds of later movie and TV tropes, the very first action flick that crawled out of the oceans of text and imagination to walk on the dry land of motion pictures.
To have created that, with the limited tools of the era, prefiguring so much of what came later -- well, we can only hope to do something similar with the still-young digital and network media of our age.
One one level, it's something kind of simple: Buster's character is under-qualified & frequently failing, but he's also determined, unrelenting, and ultimately gets the job done.
He's taken the title job, but he doesn't really know how to operate a camera, so he accidentally double and quadruple exposes the film. He's ridiculed, since he obviously failed to do what he was trying to do (gather news footage), but the images he does create seem on another level sublime, magical.
I'm reluctant to map it directly to startups/HN, but let me try anyway: People talk about failing frequently, learning from failure; they say that startupers need to allow specific projects/ideas/initiatives to fail. That's correct, but failures still can hurt and sometimes demotivate; it's tempting also to move on before we've learned from the failure so as to put the failure as far behind as possible. These movies remind me that there can be great stuff to see and learn during a failure; I think they make failures less taxing emotionally and sometimes joyful.
Law Abiding Citizen. It's a bit dark, but extremely powerful. The first time I saw it, I watched it twice more within a week to share it with a bunch of my friends.
I have a project motorcycle right now, and I just watched this last week. Amazing movie. In the vernacular of HN, it's about an old Kiwi who's bootstrapped, ramen profitable and hacking his way to making the worlds fastest motorcycle.
Ken Burns's Frank Lloyd Wright documentary is one of my favorites. The guy went through so many ups and downs in his career and created some of his most amazing works well and age when most would have retired. Leaves you feeling like it's never too late to accomplish something amazing if you stick to your convictions.
I found it quite the opposite. He valued his genius above anything else, honored no inconvenient personal obligations, and was chronically dishonest when promoting new projects, and without those qualities, his accomplishments would have been much more limited. I don't feel inspired by that at all -- I could perhaps convince myself I was a genius and do anything to further my creative output, but I can't morally do that, because the odds are overwhelming that I would not create beautiful and enduring works of art that eclipsed the personal damage to people around me the way Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture does.
Lemonade Movie (http://www.lemonademovie.com) - It's a short, beautifully shot documentary that tracks a handful of people who got fired in 2008 and took that as an opportunity to do amazing things with their next careers
Also, gotta love the classics - Rudy and Good Will Hunting
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Classic story of the underdog battling the perennial favorite told through the real-life struggle for the world's highest Donkey Kong score. Seriously, watch it now.
For inspiration, I tend to prefer movies rooted in a real life story. A couple of movies already mentioned that fall into that category: The Pursuit of Happyness and October Sky. I also really like Shine, Cool Runnings, and Take the Lead.
Star Trek, the first movie with Shatner, Nimoy, etc. Also Wrath of Khan.
The Matrix
300 probably will become one
The Social Network was surprisingly motivational. Fairly realistic portrayal of programming and programmers and startup life, and I loved many of Sean Parker's motivational speeches, and some of the Zuckerberg character's speeches as well.
Echo Glengarry Glen Ross (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/). The tagline, "A story for everyone who works for a living" pretty much sums it up. For me, no other movie has done such a good job of capturing the horror of the workaday grind. The acting is also amazing (Pacino, Jack Lemon, Alec Baldwin).
Also in the spirit of quit your day job movies, Joe vs. The Volcano (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099892/)is pretty great. Not as masterful a film as Glengarry, but much more upbeat.
The Godfather: makes you feel everything is possible
A Good Year: feel-good movie, but I think it really shows why we really struggle. I mean what's the point in having millions if you don't know what to do with them.
The world looked slightly different after I watched that movie. There are many things that I blindly refused to believe without any means of disproving them.
I'll second Man on Wire. Artist-hacker decides to tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center without permission. Such a great story, and a true one.
The "Poor Jack" song in Nightmare before Christmas is one of the best songs for this purpose ever written, in my opinion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXXOO3Wd_5Q. The basic message is: I'm klbarry, I can do whatever the fuck I want.
Brewster's Millions always cheers me up around Christmas, as does Trading Places (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/9749), both of which are slightly business related (although not exactly real-world related).
Someone else posted the pursuit of happyness (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/7605), when I stick that on it comes across as a bit schmaltzy for me but has a good message.
A beautiful mind (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/1112) is another great film about an incredibly smart but tortured genius who makes a massive contribution to economics.
Catch me if you can (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/1798) is based on the true story of a fraudster who ripped off banks for tons of money and did all kinds of amazing things with it. It's a great romp and I'd highly recommend a first watch.
Life is beautiful (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/5583) is hardly an uplifting film but is incredible and if it doesn't make you thankful for what you have, then I'd question whether or not you have a soul.