dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA (08/11/85)
From: dave mankins <dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA> or, Tom Swift and his electric shadows or, The Technology Hacking Society, their adventures in Hollywood, and what they found there. Movie: Real Genius pico-review: !!!!! nano-review: Go see it! Go see it! review: ``Real Genius'' is the story of a couple of Very Bright students at ``Pacific Tech'', the sort of school that attracts fifteen year-old prodigies who win science fairs by building molecular-Iodine lasers from things you can find in your own basement and closets. It details the travails of tooling and exploitation by an unscrupulous professor who has enlisted two prodigies (Chris Knight, senior, and former star of the National High-School Student Physics Club and Mitch Taylor the afore-mentioned 15-year-old freshman) to complete a special laser project wanted by the CIA (no spoiler, you find this out in the first two minutes of the movie). We first see Mitch at the science fair, where Professor Hathaway arrives to tell him he's been accepted to Pacific Tech, and that Hathaway wants him for his research project. You learn right away that Hathaway is a baddie, as he despises anyone with an IQ less than 150 (``Compared to you and me, Mitch, most other people have the mentality of carrots.'') and that he hates popcorn. When Mitch arrives at college, he finds the hallway covered with ice (``You've gone too far Vic! Who's going to clean up this mess?'' ``Don't worry, it's taken care of--the ice will just sublime directly into gas!''), the walls covered with grafitti (my god, I'm considering going back to this movie just to concentrate on the graffiti alone!), and his room-mate flying a radio-controlled cross between a fan and a gyroscope around the room. His room-mate, Chris Knight, is Prof. Hathaway's other star student. Chris is suffering from severe burn-out and is rebelling against everything Hathaway stands for. Every exhalation is accompanied by a witty remark, a lunatic sequitur, a zinging effrontery. Chris has seen the other side of the tooling and has become a clown out of fear of becoming a robot. This movie really gets inside the mind of the engineering school student: it portrays the atmosphere of the dorms, the hacks, the classes, the humor. All that was missing was a ``Sport Death'' T-shirt (although ``I (heart) Toxic Waste'' isn't bad). It also captures the taste of technical sweetness that lets people blind themselves to the applications of their work in pursuit of Making It Better. You can feel their excitement at making that laser more powerful. And my god! They got REAL TECHNICAL CONSULTANTS TO MAKE SURE THEY DIDN'T SAY STUPID THINGS!!! REALLY! It even listed a hacking consultant in the credits. This movie has a number of good things to be said for it
allison@mitre.ARPA (08/16/85)
From: Burgess Allison <allison@mitre.ARPA> >[details of the movie "Real Genius] >(no spoiler, you find this out in the first two minutes of the movie). > >[then right after that] >"Compared to you and me, Mitch, most other people have the mentality >of carrots." [...] "You've gone too far Vic! Who's going to clean >up this mess?" [...and so on.] Hello? Is anyone home? I don't really mind spoiler reviews that don't label themselves as such. (I skip over 'em on the assumption that they probably do have spoilers.) But when you go out of your way to say it's *not* a spoiler ... C'mon. GWTP. Let's discuss carrots. Burgess "I'm looking for a few good carrots." Allison <allison@mitre> (GWTP: Get With The Program!)