A Dozen (Or So) Films to Celebrate Your Geekness

Time to celebrate Embrace your Geekness Day on Monday July 13. This worldwide event celebrates the geekness in all of us. Whether you are a math geek, science geek, fantasy geek, comic book geek, computer geek, social media geek or any other type of geek, this is your day to enjoy your standing in the world.

You might want to celebrate by checking out some famous movie geeks.

A fictionalized story of Facebook creators Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin is told in the movie The Social Network. The academically brilliant but social inept Zuckerberg is one of the creators behind the social network but his success online comes at a cost in his personal relationships.

Steve Jobs may be one of the most famous and wealthiest geeks to ever grace the cover of Time magazine. Something he did eight times. In the movie jOBS, which released 18 months after Jobs’ death, Ashton Kutcher plays the ingenious inventor who created the beginnings of his Apple empire in his garage. The bio-drama follows the entrepreneur through his amazing career.

Although he’s on the fringe of the social circle and anything but rich, Napoleon Dynamite may be more relatable to most high school students. This unconventional Preston, Idaho teen lives with his grandmother and his unemployed brother. But like most teens, he just wants to get through high school.

Don’t expect to navigate the night sky with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This movie, based on the quirky novels of Douglas Adams, chronicles the misadventures of Arthur Dent who is snatched from certain death and flung into the nether parts of the universe.

In the 1960s, a young Kurt Russell played one of the very first computer geeks in the movie The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes. He plays a college student who undergoes a mind-altering experience after he accidentally crosses wires with the school’s new gigantic computer. A few years later he reprises his role as Dexter Riley and attempts to saving his financially ailing school by inventing an invisiblity serum in the movie Now You See Him, Now You Don’t.

In the 1982 movie Tron, a computer hacker is digitized and then reassembled inside a computer mainframe while trying to look for evidence of software theft. Thirty years later Jeff Bridges is back in Tron: Legacy. But this time his son Sam is the one who is pulled inside the digital world while trying to retrieve his father.

Peter Parker may be the amazing Spider-Man who keeps New York City safe from a plethora of evils. But underneath the spandex suit he is really just a geek. Lucky for viewers they can take their pick of their favorite Spider-Man actor: Toby Maguire or Andrew Garfield. Or they can wait to see Tom Holland don the suit in the 2017 reboot of the franchise.

He’s calm, cool, collected and the perfect alien geek. Spock is the kind of character you want standing beside you in a crisis. Leonard Nimoy played the role of the logical Vulcan for years. In 2009 Zachary Quinto took over the role in the franchise’s reboot of Star Trek.

Tony Stark has a way of making technology look oh so cool in the Marvel Comic movie series Iron Man. Stark doesn’t come with any natural superhero powers but he doesn’t need them when he can create is own flying suit.

Actor Rick Moranis has made a career for himself playing geeks in the movies. In the 1989 movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids, he plays an overzealous scientist who is consumed with his latest invention. Unfortunately he discovers his Amazing Shrinking Ray works all too well when all four of his children get zapped with the ray and end up the size of lint. Moranis also plays the nerdy neighbor of Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters.

The cult classic The Princess Bride tells the story of a common girl named Buttercup who is chosen by the Prince to be his new bride. This nerdy fairytale for movie geeks is full of spoofs, tongue-in-cheek humor and some memorable character actors.

The Harry Potter movies prove that girls can be geeky as well. Hermione Granger might be a Muggle among wizards but she is also an academic brainiac who uses her smarts to get Harry, Ron and herself out of trouble more than once.