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Comment by sant0sk1 | Hacker News Reader

Hans Reiser's life will make a great movie someday. But who should play Hans? Steve Buscemi?

Yeah, I love movies about guys who commit murder, lie about it, come clean only to try to save their own ass, and leave their two kids without any parents in the process. I'll be first in line for a ticket, for sure.

Ever tried to make an interesting movie about guys who love their wives, are great fathers, and never do anything bad?

The sarcasm is because the body isn't even in the morgue and we're talking about entertainment value.

Yeah but people make Challenger jokes all the time.

Still?

And yet so few Columbia jokes.

Capra did OK at it.

Little House on the Prairie :-P

Not movies, but the premise to a large percentage of all sit-coms ever made.

And wrote a filesystem chose by several distros as the default. He was a seriously smart guy - and thats what make the story relative.

A lot of smart people have mental illness.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -Hemmingway

>A lot of smart people have mental illness.

How can you question his sanity? Just because he does something unusual doesn't mean he's crazy. I don't question the sanity of really smart people (say, Bobby Fischer or James Watson) because I can't fathom what goes on in their minds. Sure, I'd find Hans Reiser guilty if the evidence warranted it, but accuse him of being insane? That would be arrogant.

Mental illness does mean insanity or crazy.

It could be a deep bout of depression that caused him to bury his wife. Regardless of circumstances, it is not a reasonable thing to do.

Best movie of '07 according to the Academy was No Country For Old Men, a story of a man who goes about flipping coins and killing people with an air gun.

Yes, morbid stories make for good movies. Even true ones.

I liked There Will Be Blood a lot more -- my favorite movie of the last few years, plus it had a soundtrack by the great Johnny Greenwood.

Was I the only one that identified with the main character? I think that's why most people found it a difficult movie.

You weren't. Running through my head practically every day: "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed." I like to think it's mostly cautionary, but, you know.

Also, if you can still edit that post, I'd advise taking the "h" out of Jonny Greenwood's name before one of those annoying Radiohead fanatics points out the mistake. :)

Too late, can't believe I missed that, I am indeed one of those Radiohead fanatics.

I actually have extra tickets for the Seattle show (I got my tickets for DC+Cleveland+Philly and Seattle was still available so I got them to ebay) that I would sell for what I paid. Section 101, row 10.

That was a fictional movie.

The movie was unpredictable with stunning visuals. I found the representation of death and violence in the movie fantastic. It was portrayed as sudden and uneventful, only lasting a split second.

/end rant - but to claim the movie was about flipping coins and killing people doesn't do it justice.

An older movie by the same authors--"Fargo"--was based on facts and was even better than "No Country for Old Men."

This sure made me think of the recent "Don't talk to police" thread. I'm not saying he's innocent or anything, and clearly murder is a bad thing (which sounds trite and insensitive), but it just seems like a really bad move on his part. Maybe it got sold to him as saving his own ass, but it seems like it did the opposite. Being convicted is only part of the process - there's appeals, and appeals, and more appeals.

And again, apologies if I sound insensitive. I don't know any of the individuals belonged, and murders are so often in the news that it's easy to discuss them without any real emotion.

Perhaps the guy really isn't an emotionless robot built entirely of ego -- and, now that his self-defense instinct has exhausted itself, his urge to stop lying, express some entirely authentic and long-suppressed remorse, and save his wife's family and his own children from a lifetime of uncertainty has finally won out.

(For further insight into this aspect of the human psyche I recommend Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.)

Or, perhaps he's an emotionless robot playing the role of a remorseful human being. If so, I think it's about time. It's not as if Plan A was working out well for anyone.

Requiescat in Pace

He is getting a second-degree conviction instead of first-degree. From the article:

The maximum sentence Reiser could receive for second-degree murder is 15 years to life. Reiser had faced a term of 25 years to life under his first-degree murder conviction.

Considering his sentencing hearing is in a couple of days, I think it makes logical sense.

Either I skipped right over those 2 paragraphs, or it wasn't there when I read the article. It says "Updated at 20:11 PDT" Either way my point has been invalidated.

The guy is a total scum bag and just about the last person anyone needs to make a movie about, but it might be worth it just for the "you're about to experience chaos" line. Classic.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/oakland-califor.htm...

But this guy also codes a filesystem during the process!

I see this as more of a 1990s-style Law & Order episode. Especially since there were alleged Russian Mob connections to his wife, and they cover that on the show from time to time. (Or did, I have only watched through season 5 ;)

I imagine Ben Stone and Reiser wouldn't really get along, which could be amusing.

I swear Law & Order: Criminal Intent had an episode where a computer programmer murders his wife, but I can't find it right now (and Wikipedia's listing makes it hard to browse by subject).

I'd see it w/ Steve Buscemi.

Doesn't matter much, most important is to have David Lynch direct it.

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