This is an adaptation of Mosley’s first novel starring Denzel Washington as unlicensed Private Detective Easy Rawlins and co-stars: Don Cheadle and Jennifer Beals. 

Ezekiel “EASY” Rawlins is a WWII veteran who lives in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Down on his luck and unemployed, Easy decides to take on the case of a missing woman as an unlicensed P.I.

In my opinion this is the best companion film to L.A. Confidential (1997, Directed by Curtis Hansen); a true Neo-noir in all the right ways. The film is gritty, nihilistic and grounded in its setting. The performances especially from Washington and Cheadle are justification enough to watch this movie. Devil in a Blue Dress was shot on location and has one hell of a film score by Elmer Bernstein.

The perfect movie to chill out with and immerse yourself into the era of its setting.

I highly recommend this film and will not waste anymore time to summarize it and possibly spoil anything.

So stay cool, light up a few and drink some brew. But, above all else – Never take your finger of that REWIND BUTTON.

Movie Link –

I was still in co-ed catholic school at the time this movie was released. I can’t remember if it was successful in the theaters. I do, however, remember it staring that really attractive chick from CYBORG 2 before we all knew her as Angelina Jolie. It also starred Johnny Lee Miller who was sickboy from the classic film Trainspotting.

The concept of the film was completely foreign to me, as i said before – not too many people had home computers and majority of us even bothered to use them outside of homework, chat rooms, Mech-Warrior or DOOM and its fps offspring. However, this wasn’t the first movie featuring Hollywoods interest in the hacker subculture. The first and very successful hacker from from Hollyweird was the 80’s classic War Games. The only other film I can recall off the top of my head would be SNEAKERS which was a very very good movie also featuring the act of ‘Phreaking’ as it was called.

Phreaking is a slang term for hacking into secure telecommunication networks. The term phreaking originally referred to exploring and exploiting the phone networks by mimicking dialing tones to trigger the automatic switches using whistles or custom blue boxes designed for that purpose. Generally speaking, it was curiosity about how phone networks operated that motivated phreaks, rather than a desire to defraud telecommunications companies.

Phreaking has become synonymous with hacking now that networks have gone cellular and cracking them requires more clearly illegal methods.

So 1995 was the year that Hollyweird decided to give it another crack.

Now HACKERS is not a top-tier film. But through the avenue of Home Video and bootlegs in some of our neighborhoods it has become somewhat of a cherished classic by my generation. It featured realistic concepts (I say that loosely) but for the sake of entertainment used some unrealistic methods. The hacking is done using visual graphics and 3-D dioramas, instead of the real world program coding and displays. There are actual corporations and companies that hire security techs that were or are hackers and there are communities and groups of hackers that socialize and engage in friendly (mostly legal) competitions. We didn’t know this then because, well it was mainstream news except for very large hacks. These days the term is synonymous with treason, whistleblowing and anonymous cyber-vigilantes like Edward Snowden and Julian Asange (Wiki-leaks).

I’ve always said the hacking subculture is very similar to graffiti subculture. I love that. People going out of there way to get a rep. ‘Destroy N Build’ as i head once as a child. Using esoteric coding and monikers to get a name for themselves either for legal or illegal reasons or just for the sake of fun. Going where people aren’t supposed to go and raiding the nest.

The film follows Johnny Lee Millers character of Zero Cool as he moves with his mother to New York City and starts school in a pretty lit public school. There he meets other hackers Joey, Lord Nikon, The Phantom Phreak and Cereal Killer and becomes friends with them. Experiencing the fun NYC of the 1990’s, some of the fashion may be tragic but the decade was fabulous for house parties, indie record labels, dance music and subculture in general.

After a hacking into a GIBSON, Joey becomes entangled in a FBI investigation targeting hackers. When the corporate security tech The Plague gets involved, Zero Cool and his friends find themselves backed up against the wall being chased by the FBI and blackmailed by THE PLAGUE with the threat of a massive environmental disaster approaching.

The hacking itself may be fantastical and unrealistic but, the film is so much fun and innocent to its bone. However, there is a great Jolie nip-slip in the movie if you can spot it.

The locations were very low-budget and mostly on location all throughout Manhattan. The actors definitely look way older than they are supposed to be. But, meh – things happen that way in Hollyweird. If you can expect me to suspend disbelief enough to accept that teenagers are flying through cyberspace like the friggin Lawnmower Man then, I can look past an actor in his mid-twenties playing a teenager.

The music in this film is fantastic and date the movie very well. If you were like me and haunted TOWER RECORDS whenever, you cut class to either purchase or shoplift cd’s then you remember that the 90’s was the decade of the film soundtrack.. Soundtracks were everything. And Hackers had one of the best damn soundtracks ever; so good that it spawned three additional volumes of additional music= EPIC.

Songs featured: ‘Voodoo People’ by The Prodigy, ‘Protection’ by Massive Attack, ‘Halcyon+On+On’ by Orbital and songs from Luke Slater, Underworld, Leftfield, Carl Cox, Stereo MC’s and more and more and more.

It gets 4 erect modems out of 4. Watch It.

Hackers stars Johnny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens, Matthew Lillard, Jesse Bradford, Laurence Mason, Lorraine Braco, Renoly Santiago, Marc Anthony and directed by Ian Softley.

Some critics praised the film for its stylish visuals but criticized its unconvincing look at hackers and their subculture. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “The movie is smart and entertaining, then, as long as you don’t take the computer stuff very seriously. I didn’t. I took it approximately as seriously as the archeology in Indiana Jones“.^[17] On the show Siskel & Ebert, Ebert gave the film thumbs up while Gene Siskel gave the film thumbs down, saying, “I didn’t find the characters that interesting and I really didn’t like the villain in this piece. I thought Fisher Stevens was not very threatening… The writing is so arch” – wikipedia

 

In this installment of Console Graveyard, we’ll take a look at a piece of hardware that was just a little ahead of its time. In fact, it was so ahead of its time that it completely sucked. It has since been eclipsed by modern attempts at VR, but it was a brave shot at the concept of virtual reality. However, those familiar with world mythology know that courage and foolishness are separated by the finest of lines. Today we discuss…

It all started with a company called Reflection Technology, Inc. in 1985 they had developed a sort of proto-virtual reality, a red-colored 3D lens technology they called Scanned Linear Array technology. It was decent for its time, but caused motion sickness in most users. Sega, perhaps wisely, had passed on purchasing the use of this technology, as had Mattel and Hasbro. However, Nintendo got wind of it and was thrilled to try it out. They saw it as a way to be more innovative, and thought that the technology would be difficult for competitors to imitate should it catch on. Nintendo made the deal, code named the project “VR32,” and got to work. The project was given to R&D1, as R&D3 was busy during this time developing the N64.

It’s a good thing Nintendo had their eggs in multiple baskets.

I’m not fluent in Japanese, but I sure hope none of that translates to “portable,” “lightweight,” “user-friendly,” “affordable,” or “good idea.”

For reasons of cost effectiveness, Nintendo R&D1 stuck with the original red LED color scheme. They also did away with a part of the initial package from RTI, the head-tracking aspect. This was a major contributor to the motion sickness problem, as well as (it was thought) lazy-eye syndrome. Japan had also passed a law in 1995 holding developers and manufacturers under more liability if their products caused harm to people, so Nintendo had to be especially careful. They decided that the entire setup would be stationary, resembling over-sized goggles on a stand. A familiar style of controller would be connected by cable to the headset. In fact, it was very similar to what we’d see on the N64.

All of this would be powered by either an AC adapter or six AA batteries.

Yep! It’s like a little proton pack for your controller!  Not even that can make it sound cool.

So imagine, if you will, hunching over your dining room table, pressing buttons on a controller you can’t see, to play blurry “3D” games, only to have six more AA batteries burn out on you. Now, you could slide a big AC adapter onto the controller instead, but then you’ve got to be careful not to pull the whole thing out of the wall… while your eyes are plugged into a massive set of goggles that look like someone tried to make binoculars out of a lunchbox.

It shouldn’t be hard to believe the rest of the Virtual Boy’s story.

A familiar chapter in the story of so many failed gaming ideas, not even heavy price cuts could wash the bitter taste from consumers’ palates when it came to the Virtual Boy. Credit to www.vintagecomputing.com for the high quality scan. Every other one was tiny!

When initially released in North America in August 1995, the Virtual Boy sold for $179.95. This, coupled with the unavoidable discomfort of using it, made it a hard sell. So hard, in fact, that it was an astounding commercial failure. It is on record as Nintendo’s biggest flop to date, next to the ill-fated 64DD peripheral for the N64. To rephrase that, it’s the biggest mistake of Nintendo’s that most people have actually heard of. The Virtual Boy was discontinued worldwide in March of 1996, having sold only 770,000 units. Critics trashed it for the aforementioned reasons, as well as its narrow game library (only 22 published games) and what is universally seen as a sub-par marketing campaign for the console. Nintendo has placed the blame on project leader Gunpei Yokoi, and it has been cited as one of the reasons for his early withdrawal from the company… but Yokoi also worked on the successful Game Boy pocket before leaving. No matter whose fault it is or was, the Virtual Boy belongs under the rug where it was swept.

Two animated scenes from one memorable game, Innsmouth no Yakata. And this one didn’t even make it Stateside!

Wasteland seems oddly appropriate, in hindsight… but not the reaction to finding a Virtual Boy. I’d think it was a trap.

Thanks for visiting the Graveyard with me again. Tread lightly on your way out, lest ye disturb the dead consoles.