Hacker Cinema
There Will Be Blood
2007 · Film · 158 min
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Ruthless silver miner, turned oil prospector, Daniel Plainview, moves to oil-rich California. Using his son to project a trustworthy, family-man image, Plainview cons local landowners into selling him their valuable properties for a pittance. However, local preacher Eli Sunday suspects Plainview's motives and intentions, starting a slow-burning feud that threatens both their lives.
26 positive1 negative16 neutralfrom 43 commenters
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44 comments on Hacker News
It's not even about quality. I consider films like There Will Be Blood or TV shows like Deadwood to be comparable in quality to the greatest works of world literature. I've also gotten a lot of joy and entertainment out of reading crappy books.
My problem is with statements like "paper is an inferior entertainment platform". To me, this is assuming that these different media are fundamentally providing the same kind of experience, which I disagree with.
I see your point about the cognitive effort of reading, though. I guess it depends on how fluently one can read, which depends on how much exposure to books one got as a kid.
I think it's fine as a metric if you read it correctly.
100% means a film is extremely agreeable with whatever audience it has managed to get to. For major releases this can ultimately mean it's actually lacking anything particularly bold or interesting. This results in things like Frost/Nixon or Knives Out having higher ratings than broadly acclaimed films like Mulholland Drive or even There Will Be Blood; I know which ones I'd be more likely to put on with my extended family even if I don't especially like them.
But yeah, it's amazing how many people still don't grasp it after decades of getting angry about it.
I definitely meant John Cage instead of Philip Glass, for some reason those two share the same headspace if I'm not thinking carefully.
I don't think John Cage agonized over 4'33" (I was thinking about making this an elaborate joke, but I haven't the energy. That piece is 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence. It has been performed in public to sophisticated audiences)
When Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was first performed publicly it nearly caused a riot. There were arrests. It deeply upset people and was accused of not being music.
Penderecki likewise composed much that was aggressively argued was not real music and is featured in several prominent Horror/Thriller kinds of films, Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood was heavily influenced for the score of There Will be Blood (listen and tell me if the sounds are just orchestra noise or real music.
Rock music and Jazz music got heavy, heavy pushback from people that this was just not real music and was garbage noise.
Your response fits the common pattern "I know people have said the same things in the past and were wrong but THIS TIME the same argument is correct"
>mindless button clicking
Sounds like all electronic music since its inception :)
Point is, there has always been garbage music and there have always been people criticizing the new thing as the demise of real art. Yawn.
I was going to bring up Jonny Greenwood's great score for There Will Be Blood and then remembered it was released nearly two decades ago. Still, a tremendous modern score that adds immeasurably to the end result.
I think quite a lot about movies has changed to appeal to a younger audience.
McCabe and Mrs Miller is a great movie about creating a prostitution business in the Wild West.
There Will Be Blood also (for obvious reasons)
This seems like a dubious leap. What is the substance of this argument? In the absence of movies, people would still buy firearms, either because they hunt, seek to arm themselves for protection, or simply to collect them, not unlike how some collect knives, stamps, or Precious Moments figurines. We know this because people have been buying firearms long before there was cinema.
Other than some terrible movies, Hollywood has never actually tortured anyone.
It is important to remember that Hollywood is a reflection of our society. It seeks to entertain and sometimes (wrongly) to exert influence on that society. It has limited effect because humans are more than the entertainment that we consume. That being said, people like to see the bad guy get his fingernails pulled out, we recoil at horror movies while secretly laughing to ourselves, and weep when the hero is put through agony. The film was written purposely for this emotional effect. That doesn't seem like glorification; a gratuitous worship for worship's sake. (Think Stolz der Nation.)
Films and other entertainment exists because it moves us emotionally. Few act on those emotions after the fact. Not many people identify with the two shop keepers and their pet in Pulp Fiction, but everyone cheered when Butch and Wallace dealt with them. And few can relate to Calvin Candie or Steven, but rejoiced when they got theirs.
Is being shot in both knees and dynamited torture?
Is that glorification, or is it catharsis? A closing of a loop that was opened when you were introduced to a well-written villain.
I also don't remember torture being "glorified" in Gone with the Wind, the Wizard of Oz, or There Will Be Blood. Like all topics, there are nuances and details that cannot be ignored. Generalizations are a precipice.
Love "There Will be Blood" (and PTA), but I don't see how it fits. Plainview as a villain was great because his extraordinary, single-minded ambition motivated him to attempt kill his own humanity. But Plainview failed. His humanity was still in there, in long-abused, long-neglected agony and rage, which had its final, full, disgusting eruption in the final scene of the film with Paul Dano's character. It was evidence that Plainview couldn't kill his own humanity. This made him interesting. My spreadsheet villain succeeds in fully killing his own humanity. I don't know if this is even possible, but given the plasticity and variation in the human mind, it probably is. But I still don't think it would be interesting to watch!
Writing isn’t there for Marvel sure. But to me the achievement is reliably producing B grade movies. Entertaining, worth a chuckle, easy on the eyes. None deserve an Oscar, but none (or few) are really very bad. Even if that were easy to do with one movie, and I’ve watched a lot of real garbage, doing it with a string of 20 interconnected films? Culminating in Endgame? That required the steady hand of a few really solid people. It was the first of its kind by an absolute mile, a totally new achievement in cinema. Spielberg and his ilk have been obsessing over all the CGI and sleeping on the real achievements.
For reference my favorite movies would be No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Fury Road. I like The Wire, Breaking Bad, True Detective season one. But I think Marvel is a different sort of thing altogether. The sheer reliability of it is unrivaled. Which is why I say that’s what Rings of Power lacks for me. The writing doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Just keep the thing competent despite all the cooks in the kitchen. Many pieces of media seem to fail at this.
Lately I will say the formula has worn thin. I consider their run to be from Iron Man to Endgame.
> "did we allow passionate, talented people to do work they are now proud of?".
That's what independent movie studios used to do like Miramax, It gave us Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, No country for old men, and dozens of gems. Even Miramax failed in their quest.
Anyway, Netflix has produced solid movies regardless of what you think, well rated by critics and public. Not all or most of them, but no way worse than competitors studios.
I used to be a huge PTA fan a couple of years ago. I've watched all his movies and none have grabbed me as Magnolia and There Will Be Blood.
His more recent stuff is fantastic, from a production and direction perspective, but the scripts and themes... I don't know. It's like 2 hour long poetry. Very beautiful poetry, but no drama going on.
> Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood?
Nope. Have you ever read the article "Facebook is censoring links to competitor social network Tsu and deleting old mentions"?[0]
> There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!
If I drive a Ford then it doesn't inconvenience me if someone else drives a Honda. This is equivalent to a market where messengers use an interoperable protocol, like email. The "less convenient" world you are describing is one where some roads can only be driven on by Ford cars, and others only by Hondas, causing people to choose their destinations based on which make of car they have.
[0] https://boingboing.net/2015/11/06/facebook-is-censoring-links-to.html
It is not worse at all. Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood? The local railroad monopolies were used to drive competitors out of other markets, like oil, by cutting off the ability of those market participants to transport their products. Getting multiple messaging notifications from different apps is not anywhere within the same ballpark as this...
It's really just so insane that the complaint being ascribed to monopoly power is that it's a tad inconvenient to use the many freely available competitive products. Yeah! That's what a market that isn't monopolized is like! There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!
You could say that an extrovert is someone who is more inclined or predisposed to seeing the good in others whereas someone who is "sad, lonely" is more predisposed to seeing the bad.
Reminds me of the film There Will Be Blood, where Daniel Plainview says something like "I can only see the bad in others" (not exact quote). It makes it hard for him to form long lasting relations with anyone, or a successor he can trust.
But as a somewhat neurotic introvert I can often understand that sentiment. It's like I'm preprogrammed to see the bad in people before the good.
I'm a professional colorist.
Color grading is more common now, but the terms are mostly used interchangeably.
Older producers and film workers will still say color timing because they grew up in the industry referring to the purely analog photochemical process (last used on a big film for There Will Be Blood). It's also said on more expensive jobs when they're billing a higher rate for your work.
This reminds me of a piece of local history I recently learned in my hometown (Northeast FL).
In the late 1800s, a number of slave families traveled down-river from Georgia after being emancipated and homesteaded in my area on the St. Johns River. As property values increased and they started being taxed more heavily on their (mostly waterfront) land, many of these families (whose patriarchs were mostly illiterate and not at all business-savvy) ended up selling to (i.e. getting taken advantage of by) housing developers, basically losing their identity and heritage.
The story isn't necessarily a direct parallel, but the pattern reminds me of the "milkshake" scene from the movie There Will Be Blood. People shouldn't have to worry about their basic livelihood and property being stripped away by anything other than perhaps a natural disaster of some kind.
The syncing is done automatically, at least mostly.
TL;DR: ScreenplaySubs fetches the subtitles from Netflix, parses the PDF-formatted screenplays into JSON, and syncs by calculating the sentence similarities between subtitle and screenplay dialogue.
In particular, we use the Universal Sentence Encoder for deciding whether a subtitle matches with a screenplay dialogue. If a screenplay dialogue is similar enough with the subtitles, the former will be tagged with the timestamp provided by the latter.
A lot of the underlying problems presented with each step sounds deceptively simple at first, but turns out to be quite challenging and fun to research. E.g. Parsing PDFs in general are not straightforward (https://filingdb.com/b/pdf-text-extraction), and there’s only a handful of resources on parsing PDF screenplays beside a handful of research papers (https://github.com/drwiner/ScreenPy/blob/master/INT17_screenplays.pdf), which lead us to create our own open source repo for this (https://github.com/SMASH-CUT/screenplay-pdf-to-json).
Our screenplay-pdf-to-JSON converter is able to contain all dialogues, transitions, actions within a particular screenplay scene. With this, we’re treating scenes as atomic, being able to detect changes in scene ordering based on the tagged scene timestamps. This also means if dialogues are swapped within a scene in the movie, there will be some syncing inconsistencies.
Some scenes do have little to no dialogues, which would pretty much cause the extension to work on a best-effort basis. E.g. The opening scene of There Will Be Blood has very minimal if not no dialogue at all. This is the case where I need to jump in and sync up the screenplay manually. OTOH, the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds will work very well, since there are tons of dialogues in it. This is the reason why I can’t just add movies and instantly upload it to the site.
Would you be interested for me to get into more details? I was thinking of writing a series of technical blog posts if there are enough interests!
Corruption is common in every country, some countries are just better at propaganda.
Have you seen the film “There will be blood”? While not biographical, the gist is people were and are willing to do what it takes to “win”.
I don't buy this article's premise (that there is too much recycled, unoriginal content).
You could make this same argument for all forms of art (music, TV, theater). They can all be explained the same way: the barrier for entry has decreased.
Anyone can upload music to Soundcloud or a video to Youtube. Now there are whole albums/TV series/movies being produced on these content networks as a result of a kind of indie discovery that never existed before. This is wonderful!
The benefit of all of that discovery is the same drawback: that anyone (good or bad) can enter the market. That means in order to capture the "average" audience you have to water down and dilute what is popular to appease everyone. Most pop music is unmemorable. Most pop movies are unmemorable. BUT, they are good enough to capture a wide enough audience to convince them to pay for it.
That doesn't mean there isn't great film to be found. Or music. It just requires a bit more discovery than your local pop Top 40 radio station or whatever they're peddling in the box office.
There have been so many great films in the last 20 years with original stories. Here's a bunch that I just rattled off the top of my head without much thought:
Boyhood, Interstellar, Inception, Spirited Away, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Wall-E, The Intouchables (now called The Upside), Pan's Labyrinth, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Amelie, Slumdog Millionaire
That's a good question. I'm not sure what the other poster had in mind, and I suspect it's not the same, but RT has a bunch of rating problems that would probably become far more egregious for news than they are for movies. (Leaving aside the tricky question of how to translate the formats: is a movie like a news story, or a news source? Does news really have an existing aggregation-worthy source like movie reviews?) RT provides percentage scores for both audience and critic reviews. Those percentages are not averaged scores, but percentage of positive reviews. There's good reason for this in both cases, but it causes a lot of weird side effects.
- For audience reviews, reviewers rate out of 5 stars, and the score is the percentage of reviews at least 3.5 stars.
The goal is to insulate scores from extreme opinions and odd voting patterns. On IMDB, which doesn't do this, a few low scores can destroy a movie's rating, and movies that invite careful analysis are effectively penalized. The Dark Knight ends up rated higher than Schindler's List, but the latter has lots of slightly-imperfect scores with incredibly positive review text.
The basic side effect is the loss of all meaningful score data. That punishes daring movies: 100 4-star reviews equals 100% while 50 3-star and 50 5-star reviews equals 50%, but I would much rather see the second movie. It also hides deep flaws: The Boondock Saints outscores 2001, but a look at the reviews shows that its "rotten" ratings are often 1 and 2-star reviews calling it garbage, while 2001 is full of 3-star reviews like "slow and confusing, but fascinating". Another problem here is that naive binary scores suffer from reviewer skew and vote-bombing campaigns. It's less bad than IMDB because extreme scores are 'softened', but still worse than systems which relate individual scores to the reviewer's other opinions. BeerAdvocate, of all things, takes on this problem with interesting meta-info like "reviewer's average distance from consensus".
- For critical reviews, each review is reduced to a binary opinion and the score is a weighted average of positive review count.
The goal there is to condense varied or absent rating schemes into an aggregation-friendly score and avoid reviewer skew. Metacritic, which doesn't do this, ends up systematically distorted by which outlets review things. Unscored reviews like Ars Technica's (on video games) are skipped, while sites with extremely skewed scores are included by some unspecified weighting system. As a result, Metacritic lists game reviews averaging 75-89 as "generally favorable", but there's a widespread understanding that any major-release product below 85 is terrible. (GameSpot once infamously fired a reviewer for scoring a game 6/10.) It's largely the same problem as Uber and Amazon ratings: does a perfect score mean "exceptional" or "nothing wrong"? RT tries to dodge the problem by saying "good" or "bad", with a weighting to accommodate a reviewer's 'signal strength'.
The side effect here is, again, the total loss of secondary data. RT sometimes gets reviews actively wrong; something like "despite lovely action sequences, this movie is a meandering waste of time" will get parsed as "lovely action sequences". That's probably an automation error, but lots of other reviews can't be clearly declared positive or negative even by humans. And within a categorization, there's a great deal more lost data. Ebert produces 'fresh' for The Avengers because "It provides its fans with exactly what they desire," but he produces 'fresh' for There Will Be Blood by declaring it "A force beyond categories."
- The reason all of this works alright for Rotten Tomatoes is that it's fundamentally answering one question: "will I enjoy watching this?" The Avengers isn't on par with There Will Be Blood, but if you like the description and it's rated fresh, you'll enjoy either one. If you see that critics hate The Boondock Saints and audiences don't, well, you probably know whether you're somebody who likes that kind of cult classic.
But what of news? People already shred Snopes whenever it tries to deal with assessments like "factually correct but misleading" or "incorrect statistic but the real number also supports the same thesis". The entire point of news reviews is to not rely on "will I enjoy this story?", so all the things RT quietly glosses over will become critical problems.
Saw "There Will Be Blood" the other day. Thought I recognized Tehachapi and looked it up. Turns out that movie was based in California and not in Texas as I assumed. Excellent movie btw.
"The wealthy-and-mobile 20 percent are causing most of the environmental damage in the world."
I watched "There Will Be Blood" again recently, and it is such a powerful film to me because it is all about the onset of this relatively "free" energy era. It used to take more effort to go from A to B, so we carefully calculated our reasons to go.
His stories are often lazy, too. The notion of a magic machine that lets everyone wifi and have dreams inside dreams inside dreams together is fun but absurd. The same with the end of Interstellar. Too conveniently we've got a magic wormhole which saves him and drops him a few feet away from a ship around the ring of Saturn. The first half of TDK is incredible, the second is very anti-climatic (maybe not his fault).
Check out anything by Roger Deakins for world class cinematography. Nolan is just good. If you are looking for a director who people might one day consider in the realm of Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson might fit it, but he's got a lot of "weird" movies (even his masterpieces) which don't give him the same wide appeal. [0]
Williams was great in just about anything he was ever in, I wouldn't attribute that to Nolan. The greatest directors elevate their actors (see the crazy stories about Kubrick and The Shining). Nolan works with great talent, but the performances often leave a lot to be desired, this is uncontested even by fans.
Nolan makes movies with interesting themes and he never really does anything bad. But for him to be even be discussed in the same thread as Kubrick shows how overrated he is. I say this owning Interstellar (the teaser gives me chills) and I thought Dunkirk was great simply because he toned it down and worked within something realistic. Given 20 years and a Jurassic Park, we might see Nolan the same way we do Spielberg today, but Kubrick? Forget about it!
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/12/22/16809404/there-will-be-blood-paul-thomas-anderson-10-years-daniel-day-lewis
But there is a continuum even within 'loved it' territory. I 'love' Die hard. But I 'love' There will be Blood more. The latter may be my favourite movie ever. What should Netflix recommend to me first? A loud action movie, or an unsettling character piece with an unlikable protagonist?
I thought about creating a syllabus of essential biz/capitalism/media movies for new grads tonight. "Network", "There Will Be Blood", "Office Space", etc.
Let's build this thing...
And of these 31 remaining almost half are missing in the Swedish Netflix:
5. Back to the Future 6. Gladiator 7. Sunset Boulevard 8. Cinema Paradiso 9. Django Unchained 12. Reservoir Dogs 13. Braveheart 17. Amadeus 21. Trainspotting 24. There Will Be Blood 25. Spotlight 26. The Princess Bride 27. Zootopia 29. Jaws 31. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
And yet Netflix want the same monthly cost for less of a service. Why?
Pity that the title "There will be blood" has already been used for a 2007 movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0469494/
Hmm. He seemed to me like a dreadful guy. I experience this quite a bit with American films. The "hero" is a dreadful person and I'm hoping they get what's coming to them ASAP.
I couldn't shake this on watching The Sopranos. Too often really disgusting behavior was made to humorous in a way that left a bad taste.
It's not that I'm squeamish. Off the top of my head the last US film I watched where I quite liked the "anti-hero" was "There will be blood". I particularly enjoyed him bludgeoning the preacher with a bowling pin.
I remember watching "There Will Be Blood", and some person kept laughing and making jokes out loud. It's like one of the most tense movies I've seen, and they ruined it.
I appreciate your comment, but I prefer well paced shows and movies, and good writing. Slow pacing is bad, deliberate pacing is good. "There will be blood" is a deliberately paced movie. "Django Unchained" is a deliberately paced movie. "Fargo" is a deliberately paced TV show, they're all good. Slow is when the audience is looking at their watches wondering when the end will come.
In the movie There Will Be Blood a stranger shows up to Daniel Plainview's doorstep pretending to be his half-brother. The stranger relates some story about their childhood together and that's enough to convince Plainview of the stranger's identity(which isn't his actual identity) and relation(half-brother) to Plainview. It's false of course, and Daniel isn't happy when he finds out. But it's interesting comment on the times they lived in. There was no LinkedIn or FB or even a Driver's License for that matter to verify someone was who they said they were.
Regardless, I really don't know how you actually identify someone. Likely, as you say, physically being present(retina scan, fingerprinting, both?). You raise an interesting philosophical question; that is, what is identity?
Completely irrelevant but I can't help myself given the milkshake example provided in the article.
Milkshake scene from the movie "There Will be Blood": http://youtu.be/s_hFTR6qyEo?t=1m20s
I like that you ask for mindfck movies. They definitely hold a special place in my heart. A lot of the entries here have been very sci-fi. I tend to like more historical or present-day dramas with great acting that expose some sort of undesirable human behavior, but I snuck a sci-fi movie on the list ;). You can't take the nerd out of the cinephile!
There Will Be Blood - No "great movie" list is complete without a movie that stars Daniel Day Lewis. Go watch all his movies if you want to see what it's like to take acting to the extreme.
(M) The Spanish Prisoner - Probably my favorite suspense movie, along with a Hitchcock or two like Vertigo or Rear Window. This is one of David Mamet's best, in my opinion. All these random things happen in the beginning of the movie that make you question why they bothered mentioning them, and then the catalytic action ties it all together expertly.
Pirates of Silicon Valley - This is the lightest contribution on the list, but probably the most relevant to HN. For what it's worth, both Woz and Bill Gates have described their portrayals as fairly accurate.
Alien - Definitely plays out more like a space horror film than an action movie like the sequels, the acting and suspense is fantastic, not to mention the costume work that went into the alien on the part of HR Giger (if you want a true mindfck, skip the movies and go read his website--terrifying).
Grave of the Fireflies - I wanted to include an animated film on my list, but I really had trouble deciding between Interstella 5555 (Daft Punk's Discovery set to an anime with no talking whatsoever. Great concept) and a Pixar movie (personal favorite: Up). I went with this because I figured you've probably seen Pixar movies. Grave of the Fireflies is a super depressing Ghibli film about the aftermath of the Kobe fire bombings in WW2. The way the movie shows the horrible living conditions and bleak outcomes of the two main characters (the boy is in his early teens and his sister must be around 4 or 5--I can't recall). The movie manipulates your emotions more than any other film I've included on this list. I don't think I've ever had as strong an emotional reaction to a movie as when I saw this one.
> but I'd be more interested in developing a metric of how much people disagree on a movie
That's actually a really interesting idea. Some of my favorite movies do not have universal appeal, in fact, they fall under that polarising category. An example of this is There Will be Blood. To me, it is quite possibly the most interesting piece of film I've ever seen. But it exists as one of those love or hate movies. Just about everyone I know found the movie insufferable, while I've happily watched it at least 10- 15 times. A way of of sorting that favored love it or hate it movies could probably yield some really interesting results.
Crowd-sourced recommendations are inherently flawed. People just aren't the same. My favorite movie of all time is There Will Be Blood and no matter how smart an application may be, it will never connect the dots to realize that my second-favorite movie of all time is Lost In Translation. People are strange and recommendations are an educated guess at best.
"So what have they done lately?"
Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:
Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
Agreed; maybe the point is that Hollywood seems disproportionately interested in explaining the urge to create (especially when the ambitions are grand) as sublimated need for intimacy.
This may be in part because Citizen Kane casts a long shadow on Hollywood film, e.g. over The Social Network & There Will Be Blood.
I do appreciate the rarer films where ambition seems substantially driven by a person's interest in problems, tools, and intrinsic desire to create or innovate: e.g. The Fountainhead (better than the book), Ratatouille.
"There Will Be Blood" isn't exactly a good example, I think.
That movie was horrible.
braces for downvotes
The common iFart example isn't a reflection of the store, it's a reflection of culture.
In 2007, "Pirates of the Caribbean 3" grossed nearly a billion dollars while "There Will Be Blood" never even got to 100 million. "Two and a Half Men" is a hit TV show and Arrested Development is off the air. The Arcade Fire were lucky to go gold with "Neon Bible" while Fall Out Boy went multi-platinum the same year.
Given your logic, nobody should bother creating anything of quality. Sometimes quality is successful, sometimes its not. But it's always regarded.
Even if you didn't care about learning business through film, I would recommend these. Most are classics and highly enjoyable. I left out the great ones already mentioned.
Risky Business - going from idea to execution in a very short time
High Fidelity - small business, vertical expansion, labor relations
There Will Be Blood - "I have a competition in me."
Office Space - process reengineering, efficiency, employee motivation
It's A Wonderful Life - customer service, community building, ethics
The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit - work life balance
The Player - handling office and industry politics
Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room - ethics (and the catastrophe that befalls those without them)
The Prestige (competing magicians inventing new tricks, cameo by Nikola Tesla):
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/prestige
Iron Man (fun movie where the main character is hacker/inventor):
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/ironman
There Will Be Blood (not a hacker movie per se, but still kind of startup-relevant, it's about creation of the oil empire from scratch):
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/therewillbeblood
Odyssey 5 (TV series about a group of astronauts sent back in time to prevent destruction of Earth, AI plays a significant role):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318236/
Few Japanese cyberpunk animated classics:
Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347246/
Akira:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/
Bonus: if you liked Primer, you may like also Timecrimes (even though it's not a hacker movie):
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/timecrimes
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.
The soundtracks to Batman Begins and the Battlestar Galactica mini-series are not dissimilar to that for There Will Be Blood (which I've just been to see).
Just about every movie that got an Oscar nod is a worth a trip to The Pirate Bay. My favorites this year were Diving Bell and the Butterfly, There Will be Blood, and War/Dance.
I've scientifically confirmed that The Talking Heads made the best hacking music known to man.
Aside from that, I listen to a lot of Of Montreal, other indie pop, some electronic and movie soundtracks (There Will Be Blood and The Fountain OSTs are both great).