Of course!

Can you give me a link to the "Dude" discussion thread? Now I'm intrigued.

I'm still not convinced on "Legally Blonde", despite Elle's potential as an uber-Face ("Election" would be a more appropriate choice if we're talking Reese Witherspoon movies ). Really, any movie about a slick-talking lawyer/gambler/criminal would fit the bill as a "Face" movie. Glengarry Glenn Ross isn't a Shadowrun movie despite the real-estate salesmen/Faces, rainy nighttime setting and thievery.

Two that come to mind...

...Enemy of the State [Computer based subterfuge, SINless (invisible) lifestyle, covert ops]
...The Net [Computer based subterfuge, Hackers, Internet (matrix) terrorism]

Silver Streak [Pretty good Face example, getting through security checkpoints, motivation for running, racism]
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man [armored long coats]

No. But it's Mamet, and it's good.

If your group can't take away the inspiration to make your games better, you're out of luck. Every time I've seen it it makes me want to be a better role-player.

Let me be more blunt. If someone can't sit through that movie, they don't sit at my table. I don't want someone who can't "get" Mamet gaming with me. It tends to result in a "black" campaign being interrupted by some jerkoff playing a troll with ADD. And I mean, it's not like I'm asking someone to sit down to an Albee production. This is a guy who worked on Ronin, The Shield, and created The Unit.

Hey, gee, what's that that's a running thread through all of his work? It's the con! What do you know, he writes about complex manipulations and backstabs. Why on Earth would a masterpiece of said peculiarity not be required by any Shadowrun player or GM with standards? It's not like that's a staple of the game.

Oh... Wait. It is.

There are some good movies on that list, but many of them are not the least bit shadowrunny.

• Adept-like action hero.
• Plot driven by government and corporate intrigue.
• Hero living in a slum/barrens.
• High-tech firearms.

As a huge fan of Mamet (and a film snob) I completely agree. You can pull bits and pieces of what would make a good Shadowrun game (or any action/intrigue RPG) from any of his films. Spartan, The Unit, The Spanish Prisoner, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Edge, and Wag the Dog all have elements that you could (and should) pull into any slick-con, tactics and survival based game. There are many, many other good movies that are required-viewing for good story telling GMs. But when it comes to setting and tone none of those films really toes the Shadowrun line, you know? They're gold-standard movies but so is Citizen Kane. Not like it's a Shadowrun movie (it's just noir).

Hmmm... a dying Damien Knight calls out for his cyberdeck "Rosebud". Dibs on this idea!

I guess my baseline standard for a Shadowrun-style setting movie is something like Blade Runner or Strange Days. Your mileage my vary.

Trolls with ADD catch bullets in the brainpan in my games. I don't mess around with gamer stupidity and I run a tight ship when it comes to character creation. So I sympathize there. One of my players hasn't seen Blade Runner all the way through. I have my mental crosshairs on him.

I haven't read through this whole thread, so I apologise if it's already been listed, but if it hasn't I think I've just found a new one.

Haven't actually seen this, but I think the trailer alone is... sufficient.

The Machine Girl

(Warning: Limited character development).

-K.

Wow.... That was just..... wrong. Granted it appears no worse than some of Tarantino's new stuff... but I guess that's the point..

It's better than Tarantino's stuff - it doesn't pretend to be ironic art.

I have not seen the movie and only remember the line you want to buy bullets with food stamps? from the preview. I am reluctant to cite the reasons you give as many action heroes could be described as Adept-like, and I do not know the degree of government/corp intrigue (and since you state both, it sounds wishy-washy.) Is the slum the hero lives in a good representation of the barrens? And just how high tech ae the firearms? Are some of them representative of specific SR firearms or something like a smartlink?

I can not say having not seen the movie, and your short points seem to assume everyone has. There has been too much complaint about including every other movie that is released, that until someone clarifies the SRishness, I am reluctant to include it.

It would be nice if everyone could state why when nominating a movie. It would also be nice if people went through the listed movies, especially the ones with no SR references cited and listed their SR features. Someone at some time said it should be on the list. If enough people say take it off with no one defending it, the title is coming off.

The plot of Shoot 'Em Up is that an anti-gun Congressman has an absurd plan to ban firearms that somehow had popular support. A mid-sized family-owned handgun manufacturer notices that if handguns were banned they'd go out of business and thus decides that it would be best if the Congressman died. They couldn't just shoot him because then he'd be a martyr to his cause. However, they discover that he has a terminal illness and will soon die without a transplant and that, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to create a compatible donor he has secretly impregnated several women with his clone offspring.
Thus, the corporation's hit-squad is sent after these women, killing them one-by-one knowing that once all of them are dead their enemy's death is inevitable. However, the the gun manufacturer is eventually able to get into contact with the Congressman about this matter once there is only one baby left and the Congressman decides that he likes living more than he hates handguns agreeing to intentionally tank his bill in exchange for the baby's bone marrow.

The protagonist is the son is a gunsmith who was a military special ops guy until becoming disillusioned with the morality of the government and settling down to a quiet life running his family gun store and then became dissillusioned with gunsmithing and gave up that career after a weapon he sold was used to kill his wife and child. Having no skills other than making guns and killing people and being disillusioned with both, he settles into a upper-squatter-class lifestyle in the loft of an abandoned factory and occasionally does criminal odd jobs (apparent from the backstory but not actually seen in the movie).

As to the protagonist's adept-like abilities.
In the beginning of the movie he sees a bunch of thugs chasing a pregnant woman. The thugs have guns but he does not. He only has carrots. So he kills the thug by stabbing him to death with a carrot and takes his gun, eventually killing all the thugs and helping deliver the woman's child before she herself is killed by the antagonist. He then takes the baby to a playground and leaves it on the merry-go-round on the assumption that it will be found by a good family and taken home. However, he notices just in the nick of time that a corporate sniper is aiming at the baby and, to disrupt the sniper's shot, he shoots one of the merry-go-round's handles, causing the merry-go-round to start spinning. He does this repeatedly, without missing, to make the merry-go-round spin faster and faster and escapes before the sniper can compensate for it.
There is also a scene in which the protagonist is having sex with the female lead (a lactation fetish prostitute who he went to because he needed someone to nurse the baby) and corporate SWAT busts into the room. The protagonist proceeds to single-handedly take out the entire SWAT team while having sex with the female lead, never once pausing the activity during all of the killing.

For high tech firearms, the villains (except for the hired thugs at the beginning) use SOTA guns with biometric locks so that they can only be fired by someone with the correct fingerprint. The protagonist gets around this by simply cutting off a villain's hand.

All in all, it is an extremely violent live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon, with the protagonist taking the role of Bugs Bunny (he even eats carrots and says "what's up, Doc" to drive this home) and the antagonist in the role of a slick semi-competent amoral misogynistic Elmer Fudd.

Don't forget about the gun battle in free-fall.

Basically, it's a budget film by an indie director.

It's also one that drives some people batty, because they can't wrap their head around the fact that it's a tongu in cheek (albeit affectionate) sort of homage flick towards all the existing "Shoot 'Em Up" flicks that came before. The one-liners, the insane gunplay, the stereotypical "Go To Guy" with the long-barrel revolver fetish, all that fun stuff -- it was by no means meant to be a "real" action movie.

Since you include obscure French movie in the list: Les loups entre eux, 1985, released under the title Among wolves in english-speaking countries. A team of deniable assets (that point is clearly stated) comprising mercenaries of various origins, a burglar, a rock climber and a dog handler, is sent to rescue a NATO general held hostage. Not an action movie, as it most of it focuses mostly on how the teammembers with different background relate during the op planning and training.

Les loups entre eux [SR style teamwork and SR style team]

Pretty comprehensive list!

I'd certainly add Jean-Jacques Beineix's "Diva", which has a very Paris "Shadowrun" feel.

And while it's not particularly high-tech, a Thai film called "Bangkok Dangerous" is one of the grittiest assassin flicks I've seen.

There are definite elements of SR in "Shoot 'Em Up" (like the evil fire-arms manufacturer) but I'm bouncing back and forth one whether it's a SR movie or not. The SOTA pistols with the finger-print safeties are starting to enter the mainstream arms market now in the form of holsters (I'll post a link to the article I read shortly). Mr. Smith's abilities, while "adept-like" on screen, are meant to exaggerate the invulnerability of traditional action film protagonists. But, they would be good examples to show a player how a gun slinger adept would look and move. And he just lived in an abandoned building... not really a lawless Barrens. If the movie took place 10+ years in the future, Smith was jacked up on cybertech, and he lived in a burned-out Mad Max urban wasteland I'd be more inclined to agree.

Just as an aside, if you liked "Shoot 'Em Up" you should check out "Crank." Same kind of movie but add twenty doses of meth and Jason Statham. It has some SR elements too (and the plot itself would make for a great SR game session).

Zatoichi's been around since forever, I ran into a 5 disc box set over here in Japan. And I was informed that it wasn't complete.

Plus the new one is pure movie goodness, the ending song and dance routine just rounds out a delightfully enjoyable movie.

I'd like to see the list split into movies with a shadowrun setting vs movies with sr elements or feel to it. I think that would make things alot simpler even if some movies might be debatable about which list to end up on.

Zatoichi is like 26 movies + one that came out in 2003. Im only up to like the 11th movie and Ive been watching it hardcore.

BTW, is Machine Girl out yet? That movie looks GREAT! I also must agree that it is better than Tarantino. It makes absolutely no excuse about what it is, Yakuza, Ninja, Decapitator, Tempura, Saw Bra, and hot high school girl with minigun. OH YEAH!

I couldn't see Immortel (Immortal) on the list.

A french film by French Croatian Director Enki Bilal based upon his comic series "nikopol". It's a live action/CG strange amalgam of various styles and themes. A couple of years old, it was either 2005 or 2006. Essentially as French as it gets. It has entries on Imdb.

Visually, a cross between The Fifth Element, and Final Fantasy:the spirits within, by way of "Sky captain".

It's set in New York, 2095 with towering skylines and overhead cableways (cars don't fly through the air, they're more like a scenic skyway kinda thing, but you can fly up to an away from the 'grid').

Awww, man. I can't believe I forgot about Immortel! I highly recommend this one. Switch out the shapeshifting Egyptian gods in their flying pyramid with dragons and the weird-looking bio-engineered people with metahumans and you've got Shadowrun. This comment would be more appropriate for the comics thread but any Enki Bilal comic is worth a read.

I'm all for creating an "Elements of Shadowrun" movie-list and an "Almost-or-Just-Like Shadowrun" movie-list.

Just remembered another one. The Korean film Natural City. Take Blade Runner, add a heaping helping of Asian-style gunfights and there you go. It's actually so much like Blade Runner, visually and story-wise, it's almost funny. But it isn't a bad film. Worth a rent at least.

Not out yet, but coming this year will be The Expendables, a movie about mercenaries in South America. Get this: Sylvester Stallone, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwartzenegger.

AND Jet Li. AND Dolph Lundgren. AND Jason Statham (The Transporter/Transporter 2, you'll recognize him). The cast is studded with more stars than an Astronomy textbook.

Two Anime flicks.

Gunsmith Cats: Assassins, crime syndicates, armored long coats, a gun bunny, an explosives obsessed girl who looks 12, and one sweet ass car.

Riding Bean: The only way I can describe it is that it's like "The Transporter" on steroids.

If it hasn't been mentioned yet, I would add "Ink" as a fair example of the astral plane, assensing, metaplanes, astral quests and astral combat(ish). And the "incubi" that bring nightmares are down-right fucking creepy...

You forgot "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank."

Raul Julia plays Aram Fingal, a very intelligent computer programmer and a very bored man in the employ of Novicorp, a mega-corporation that exists somewhere in the future. When caught watching "Casablanca" at his desk, Fingal is required to undergo rehabilitation therapy called "doppling." Doppled patients find their minds transferred into the bodies of animals for a new outlook on life (and for a number of amusing nature documentary sequences narrated by Julia). However, Fingal's body is misplaced and he is transferred into a computer while the body is located. With the help of Appolonia James, a medical technician played by Linda Griffiths, Fingal manages to reprogram himself into a simulation of Casablanca and eventually gains access to Novicorp's financial computers, bringing the company to its knees. But Fingal's real problem is getting back into his body before his memory patterns are erased.

WOW! That is simultaneously the greatest and worst cast for a movie I've ever heard.

Xchange needs to be on that list! Perhaps the best B movie ever. It even has a monofilament whip, and loads of other cool gadgets.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0242150/

That's exactly what I was thinking! And parts were offered to Jean Claude Van Damme and Kurt Russel (who both turned them down at the time), too.

Yesterday (S.Korean movie) [Drones, genetic experiments, augmented reality, commlinks, SR style teamwork, Rainy near-future setting, Barrens, suitcase smg]

Korean Techno-thriller. Not necessarily an amazing film, but the setting feels like it is pulled right out of a cyberpunk story. Even the police special investigative team is a bit pink mo-hawk.
http://www.dvdvisionjapan.com/yesterday.htm

In the interest of clarifying what elements seem SR like, I'll try to help the format of a few of the films that I own a DVD of (feel free to debate and/or pare down if I get too lengthy):

Bourne Identity, The and sequels
--> The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum [Assasin: Parkour, Infiltration, Firearms, Unarmed, Memory Loss Neg Quality, Pilot Vehicle, Explosives, Lockpick, Information Gathering, Conspiracy and Black Ops] Note: Inspired by a novel series of similar names.

Face/Off [Explosive gun slinging "Terrorist" vs FBI with black ops, identity replacement surgery, contacts, con, pilot boat, secret prison]

The Fast & The Furious [Go Gangs?, undercover agent, pilot groundcraft]

Ferris Beuler's Day Off [Face Con Artist takes a "sick day"]

Foolproof [Professional Team Work "Puzzles" out criminal activities]

Gone In 60 Seconds [Professional Criminal Team Work takes Mr. J job to steal cars, pilot groundcraft, police task force]

Hudson Hawk [Humorous and entertaining take on professional thievery]

Hunted, The [Very intense infiltration, blades, unarmed, tracking, survival, stealth, disguise in black ops in a dark and back to nature world]

Inside Man [Professional Shadow Team out smarts the police and local established business elite in a bank heist with a conspiratorial twist]

Man on Fire [Ex-Professional boozing Assassin takes a job as a bodyguard of rich man's daughter, ends up writing his "masterpiece" to get her back when she is taken for ransom in down trodden Mexico]

Mr. and Mrs. Smith [Professional veteran Assassins fall in love then are assigned by their opposing employers to take each other out of the picture and it all goes sideways]

Payback [Cheer on the professional criminal as he goes through the who's who in the underworld to get "payback"]

... oh man, the list is huge and I just don't think I am doing these short descriptions justice and my eyes are going a bit square. I should come back to this later but there are few more there on the list...

Running Scared [Deep undercover cop's kid and their neighbor ends up sending him on an perilous adventure through the spooky grim's tale like horrors of the underworld of their community]

Saint, The [A face con artist, infiltration, disguise, stealth, thieving specialist with a heart of gold out smarts a conspiratorial rich man and his shadow ops]

True Lies [Secret Agent man in a black ops unit has to save his family and America from terrorists]

Ack, I know there are some other movies I would suggest for the list given what is there but they flew from my brain, maybe they will come back to me later as I browse my movies for something to watch. Hmm, I know I was thinking of Stark Raving Mad, Collateral, and Cradle 2 The Grave but I just can't seem to wrap my brain around composing anymore of this post at the moment.

I would also like to note Babylon 5 is a tv series, yes? In that case, please include Dark Angel: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204993/ which in the interests of trying not to confuse it with the other if you don't split the tv series off from the movies:

James Cameron's Dark Angel (2 seasons) [Bioware, Cyberware, High Tech, Low Tech, Dystopian Future, Seatle, Criminal Orginizations, "Robin Hood" Hacker, Corporate Control, "Surge" variants, Assassins, Drones, Thieves, Corporate, Cults, Adepts?]

- there may even be more things that seem like they are SRish in that tv series but that is all that is coming to mind at the moment

Surrogates - Big Corp, Drone/Jar-head

Denno Coil - Augmented Reality, Interaction between the Matrix and the Real

I'm surprised Strange Days isn't highlighted either. That's a definitive cyberpunk movie if I ever saw one.

Watchmen.

A new film for the list, actually only released in theaters two months ago. But it has a lot of action elements, woman with a giant gun with underbarrel grenade launcher, a plot involving lots of money in diamonds, and swords.

Bitch Slap

Bean throws a knife hard enough to punch through a drivers side window, and have the impact of the knife rip the passenger door off it's hinges and pin the door to the next car. He then tears the drivers side door off with his bare hands.

He also stops a car from ramming him in the face a second time by grabbing the bumper as it comes at him and lifting it so the front drive wheels leave the ground. Presumably because getting his face rammed hard enough to embed his head into anoher car annoyed him the first time.

And all this not because he has superpowers or anything. No. He can do this 'cos he's just that badass.

If Bean isn't a poster child for a physical adept I don't know what is.

His car is pretty sweet too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llYCopWMkhA


-np

Watching a movie tonight that is simply titled Ninja http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182921/ and it has some Shadowrun-ish stuff going on here, as things about ninjas seems apt to do.

You missed a great one for Matrix peoples.... Serial Experiments Lain

I had to turn that movie off after my eyes started to bleed when the "evil" ninja starts killing people in the police station... You know... the part when his sword starts looking like a lightsaber. That movie is up there with Dragonball Z live action movie for the worst movies ever made.

Huh, I've seen some pretty terrible movies and it was no where near that bad as the others I have seen. Haven't seen Dragonball Z live action but I did watch Death Warrior http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1144797/ a few months ago, so my standards are pretty low after that. Even despite plenty of soft core porn and titties, I just couldn't sit through the thing and fully recommend anyone considering it for a rental DON'T. My eyes can not unsee what they have seen

Oh well, I didn't exactly go into watching it expecting some amazing piece of cinema anyways, I just thought some of the fight choreography, gadgetry, and methodology was an entertaining few minutes. That light saber thing? I thought that was just related to that the dude had just thrown a smoke/flash bomb, thus fucking with others' vision. Oh well, I suppose if you didn't like those special fx, a lot of straight to dvd B/C/D movies are going to disappoint you these days, virtual (pc generated graphics) sets are becoming more and more common, the 90s tech must have reached their price point now or something.

Hehe, a group of us used to run a site called crappyfilm.com and it was just for reviewing horrible movies. Trust me, Ninja and the DBZ movie have nothing on some of these. There's one I remember called either Pro-Life or Pro-Choice, I forget which, and it's about this girl who becomes pregnant with the child of the devil, and she goes to a clinic to try and get it aborted, but her dad's this radical pro-life person, guns start firing, things go nuts, the baby is born, the devil shows up, someone kills the baby, and the devil looks sad before leaving. It's a HORRIBLE movie. And there were reviews for tons of em.

Yes, ninja is not the worst movie ever made. Nor is DBZ. I was exaggerating for dramatic effect. I will say that they are some of the worst I have seen because I tend to trust my friends when they say that a movie sucks. And have avoided many craptastic movies as a result.
As for the lightsaber effect on the bad guys sword. I know they where trying to do a blur effect so the sword looks wider because it is moving so fast. All it looked like to me was (with the smoke and light) a lightsaber. If they wanted to have a good effect they should of created a wind effect in the smoke (complete with eddies) for the effect.

I would suggest the anime series Black Lagoon. It has adept like gun slingers, SR type smuggling, wetwork, courier and other jobs. Also interactions with Yakuza, Triads, Vory and other criminal elements.

Definitely "Dogs of war". The plot is 200% Shadowrun, just like in "Black Lagoon".

I'd also put anime "Cyber city Oedo 808" on the list.

And "Cyberzone"... No. No, no, no. It's a BAD movie. Z-class, I'd say. Something like homemade cyberpunk with topless women in nearly every scene. The only good thing about this film: it's quite funny .

"Gene Generation" is better. Oh, in one scene You can see what could happen when a glitch is rolled at Intimidation test

It gets the "tone" right but it's still an awful, awful movie.

War Games?

It has an AI and a hacker/decker played by a very young Matthew Broderick.

Hasn't been updated in three years, but Cyberpunk Review is a handy little gem.

From i09.com: Maybe cyberpunk is less of a fad than it used to be. Or maybe because we're now living in a cyberpunk era with virtual worlds, nonstop cybersex and evil corporations, we no longer view those things as elements of science fiction.

From my husband's netflix shopping list I would add:
Smoking aces - what happens when a run gets completely hosed up.
St. Trinians- yes it's a commedy about a girls school gone wrong but they plan a heist to rob the National Gallery. That is pretty much a run.

I just watched "The Gene Generation" and it is absolutely terrible (and I mean really terrible). However, the sets, costumes, etc are very cyberpunk(ish) and it was a great example of how having dependents can complicate a character's life. A devious GM could port this story to SR and make his PC's earn those extra BP.

It also has some ridiculous firearms that knock people off their feet, but thats a topic for another thread...