One of the joys of being a geek is converting friends and loved ones. It starts innocently enough--listening to "Particle Man" offhandedly in the car, watching the extended LOTR trilogy back to back at a party--but your goal is to swap lines from Mystery Science Theater 3000 and get tickets to ComicCon together.
Which is why we were delighted to learn that Guillaume, our newest codemonkey who happens to be French, was largely ignorant of our favorite American movie and television memes.
He represents the best kind of conversion opportunity: he's already a bonafied geek (a Perl programmer, even), but he's a blank slate. He's Johnny 5 before he discovered televison.
And if we do our jobs right, one day soon Guillaume will get that reference.
So we came up with a long list of our favorite movies, and we need your help, smart masses! Please take a moment and help us plan the screening schedule by picking your five most favoritest movies below:
(Starred items mean he's seen them already but we're keeping them on the list, dangit.)
UPDATE 02/05 11:26am: Top 20 so far
Our Operation Guillaume curators note that they were a little bit ashamed to leave off Real Genius, Heavy Metal, Goonies, 12 Monkeys, Galaxy Quest, Dark City, Shaolin Soccer, Sneakers, UHF, Men In Black, The Wizard, West World, Omega Man, Solaris, V For Vendetta, Terminator 2, Fifth Element, and Andromeda Strain, so thanks for your attacks helpful comments!
We also questioned our dear test subject Guillaume, who has been watching this poll with interest, and he answered thusly below (in occasional third person tense):
Q: Are you excited yet?
"I didn't think I had that much to catch up on, so it's a little
scary. I guess I'll temporarily have to give up my
plans for world domination until I'm up to date on all the geekness
I've missed. Otherwise, "curious" best describes my feelings about the whole movie
operation, as I like to learn about new things in general."
Q: What movies have you seen suggested that you don't want to watch?
"I'm lukewarm on zombie movies--I'm more of a sci-fi geek than a
'bloody and eaten alive' one. But really I'll watch anything provided
that there's pizza handy."
Q: When do we start?
"As soon as we can find the movies? The test subject is usually sitting
in the codemonkey treehouse from 10:30am to 8:00pm or so, so finding
him should be the easiest part."
NOTE: We're not including TV series in the movie list above, but we may show an episode before each movie screening from this list: Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica*, Big Bang Theory, Buck Rogers, Dexter, Dr Who, Farscape, Firefly*, Fringe, Invader Zim, IT Crowd, Lex, LOST, Mythbusters, Quantum Leap, Red Dwarf, School House Rock: Conjunction Junction, Space 1999, Stargate, Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: TOS, Venture Brothers, X-Files.
Did we miss any dead ringers? Leave a comment and maybe we'll add it into the queue!
Once we start screening, Guillaume has promised to write reviews and post them here so we can all bask in his nooby glow. Wish us luck!
