I am breaking night again. Sleepless and restless yet bored and tired of the hamster wheel of square living; lost in the ether of the surface web again. I’m just here vegetated and binging on information and entertainment to numb the nerves and relax me as I float and drift with spontaneity. It looks like there’s an abundance of skullduggery and cloak & dagger schemes occurring in the world – more than the average citizen or loiterer could fathom. There is just so much information to process, to extrapolate, to synthesis and to summarize with such short time left. Information is more important than necessity; without information you have no access and avenues to proceed in society. You cannot arm yourself mentally and physically without information and the access to it.

That is what compelled me to present 1992’s Sneakers and luckily someone on YouTube was cool enough to have it uploaded.

Sneakers directed by Phil Alden Robinson, screenplay co-written with Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker. Starring Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier and David Strathairn.

A successful movie from the creators of the 80’s classic WARGAMES, and the 20^th highest grossing film of that 1992, Sneakers is a crime thriller that if made nowadays would be considered cyber-noir. It’s another film that Roger Ebert didn’t get and gave a low review when released but, he had a knack for disliking movies before they found their audience.

The films plot revolves around a group of security penetration testers or “Pen Testers” that are recruited by men claiming to be NSA agents to retrieve a Russian black box that they are looking for. After successfully retrieving the item, the team learns that they have walked into something bigger than any of them could have imagined.

Filmed in multiple locations with a really good script and a stacked ensemble cast of heavy hitters, Sneakers has just enough humor and intrigue to keep your attention for the whole journey. A moment in time capsule for real-life cyberpunks of an analog time when things were more hands on. I definitely recommend this film for you the viewer.

Interesting sidenote:

• Leonard Adleman was the mathematical consultant on this movie. The character of “Bernard Abbott” was named after Robert Abbott, the so-called “Father of Information Security,” who was also a consultant for the film. The character “Whistler” was based on Josef “Joybubbles” Engressia and John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper, well-known figures in the phone phreaks and hacking communities.  “Donald Crease” was based on John Strauchs, a former CIA officer who founded the security consulting firm Systech Group.  Dan Ackroyd’s brother Peter supplied conspiracy material on “UFOS, cattle mutilations, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the staged moon landing, JFK, [and] Marilyn Monroe” that was used to “spice up” his character.

• The film’s press kit was accompanied by a floppy disk containing a custom program explaining the movie. Parts of the program were quasi-encrypted, requiring the user to enter an easily guessable password to proceed. It was one of the first electronic press kits by a film studio.

I know you’re probably out there in the wastelands feeling it right now: living check to check, angry, scared, dejected, detached, and trying to find some kind of escapism from reality. I hope my retro movie choice can give you some form of escapism from the madness and noise. Movies are an escape. Movies have a beginning and a definitive conclusion with all the drama and conflict playing out made digestible by the dialogue, characters and exposition, unlike reality. Reality sucks for everyone. But just know that you’re not alone out there in the storm. Stay safe, live reckless, question everything, dress smart and always keep one finger on that Rewind button. Til’ Next time.

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