Actually a movie worth seeing, and definitely one of the MoviesWorthBuying.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0120731
The web has quite a few reviews on it, but for films like this, reviews do not really matter - you have to trust somebody to go out and get it. Actually if you read about the story line you may wonder how can it last almost 2 hours without getting boring. The movie is absolutely captivating from start to finish. Definitely better artistically than any other movie listed so far on wiki, even if the EntertainmentValue? is not comparable to - let's say The Godfather. But most definitely, as an artistic achievement it stands on a category of its own.
If a few buddies have seen the movie and risk their reputation on one more rambling, I wonder if anybody saw parallels to OnTopic issues, you know, things like SoftwareDevelopment.
Well, TimRoth?'s character had a lengthy rant at the end about how you can't take a piano with an infinite set of keys and make decent music with it :) That's almost a rant against trying to use a big, complicated ruleset versus a small, flexible one, eh?
Now let me see. [1] If you observe people you can play their tune - playing the piano is programming and observing is listening to the customer. [2] Writing unsafe code is like unlocking the piano's wheels when the boat is on high seas. Loads of fun but you'll end up shoveling coal for it later. [3] You have to get off the boat to get the girl - the boat is programming. And [4] you have to get off the boat, umm, before the end of the movie. It's a good metaphor; age discrimination is tough among programmers and engineers, you know.
I wonder how a Programmer's Duel would go. Would JohnCarmack stick a cigarette on the graphics card and light it?