Ask HN: Best movie about work/business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best movie about work/business?

9 pointsdevmonk17 comments

What do you think is the best movie about work/business?

(imo it's "Gung Ho". It's motivational, funny, and educational. "Office Space" is awesome, though.)

Pirates of Silicon Valley is set in offices and workplaces to a great extent and covers the early life of Apple and Microsoft. I've watched it a few times and always enjoyed it.

I also thought Boiler Room was pretty good. Some interesting work pep talks (one potentially being Ben Affleck's best scene ever), office scenes, sales calls, and insights into how empty the lives of the traders/scammers were outside of work.

If you liked the recruiter's scenes from BR (as did I), be sure and watch Glengarry Glen Ross.

Whoa, I will. I seriously wrote that movie off in the past just based on the title, thought it was some Scottish "Braveheart" type movie..

That's funny, as I also avoided it for years based on the title (and Alec Baldwin's presence).

The Wall Street Journal pointed out that Ghostbusters is great for entrepreneurs.

Blow. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0221027/

It looks more into the underlying psychology behind why we pursue things, though.

The movie does look into these topics, albeit not directly on the surface, I am extrapolating from my own experience from viewing it:

- How partnerships are formed and broken

- Why we pursue money, and the costs associated with it (depending on the path we take)

- The fact that there are no set rules when it comes to business, you create your path

- It's not only what you know, but who you know

- What happens when the haters be hatin' (Feds and Colombians in this case) ... on a more serious note, I'm saying that you will always have opposition when you start creating ripples

- All business is arbitrage

- Don't keep all your eggs in one basket

- Your organization may take shape like a house of cards: if one card (an employee, a certain contact, an investor, a certain code, etc) is not taken care of, it could topple the whole operation

- If the house of cards does topple, you can pick up some cards for your next venture

I can go on and on. It's a great movie, and it's on Netflix Instant. Watch it.

Seems like a circular question. Office Space is a movie about work because it specifically defines itself as a movie about work. But when I nominate (as I now will) Apocalypse Now as a great movie about the experience of being a soldier in Vietnam, everybody will look at me funny. As if soldiers weren't professionals being paid to go to work.

Of course, I might be wrong about Apocalypse Now, as I've never actually been an infantryman in the Vietnam War. I have been a science grad student, however, and I can say without hesitation that Real Genius is the Apocalypse Now of graduate school. Even the physically-impossible hacker tall tales in that movie are note-perfect.

EDIT: More examples. Adaptation is very much a movie about being a professional screenwriter. And there are dozens of movies about being a professional cop, musician, athlete, reporter, or artist.

And Swordfish is a great movie about being a hacker... specifically the common recruiting process.

On a more serious note, I do agree with you. Some decent movies with a office environment/work theme: Boiler Room (2000), Duplicity (2009), Glengarry Glen Ross, Other People's Money (1991), Swimming with Sharks and Wall Street (1987).

I've also enjoyed the dramatized real-life stories in Rogue Trader and Barbarians at The Gate.

Given the framing of the question, I suspect they mean movies about office-based work and "workplaces"?

Office Space for humor. Wall Street for drama.

Seconded on both. I also enjoyed The Social Network.

On documentaries, I highly recommend Code Rush, a story of Netscape. It's actually in full here (scroll down to The Film): http://clickmovement.org/coderush

It's a bit dated now but Startup.com: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/ Pretty good documentary on what it was like to be inside a high flying late nineties venture funded startup before the balloon burst

Yeah, it was an interesting film. Specially insightful if you weren't around the scene when the bubble burst, but want to know how things were like from an insider's perspective.

the new Social Network movie is pretty damn good. Doesn't exactly focus on the work side, but it has some good cues on business strategies and the social side related to SV.

"Extract" is a great manufacturing/blue collar work movie. It's also a Mike Judge (Office Space) movie, so it is quite hilarious.

Glengarry Glen Ross ABC Always Be Closing!

I'm dating my self here but Risky Business.

I tend to be fond of movies based on true stories. For true stories about people who set an impossible-sounding goal and accomplished it, I will nominate "October Sky" and "Cool Runnings". Neither has an office setting. The first is about a young man who did not want to end up a coal miner, like his father. He and some friends began making rockets and managed to parley that into college scholarships. IIRC, he ultimately ended up working for NASA. The second is about the origin of the first Jamaican bobsled team (that went to the Olympics).

Hopefully, people will see how this might be relevant to folks wanting to found a new business. Office Space is a good movie but is now kind of disturbing to me as someone who currently works in cubicleville. I think of it as "dire warning" rather than "inspiration".

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