Thursday, September 18, 2008

Ripped from the headlines

I don't wish to get into politics, but I noticed one of this morning's news stories was the hacking of the email account of one of our vice-presidential candidates. I couldn't help but think about computer hacking in the movies, and how unrealistic it is. How often have we seen in the movies and TV somebody being prompted to enter a password, with a giant entry box that pops up in the middle of the screen and is in some font we've never seen on any computer before?

I would like to have written a full-length post about Sneakers, but I haven't seen the movie in 15 years, since I was in college and it first came out on VHS. This, of course, was in the days before the DVD, when the 'prestige' format was the 12-inch laserdisc; it was also in the bad old days of no-def TV. Speaking of TVs, I wonder how many of the under-30s remember TVs that had to warm up before they displayed an image, and shut off to a tiny dot. That, and vertical control. But I digress; getting back to Sneakers, my memory of it was the climactic heist, involving voice recognition technology, and a heat-sensing alarm system that required the protagonists to raise the temperature of the office they wanted to hack to body temperature, along with a motion sensor that forced them to move very slowly. What I didn't realize is how many famous names were in the cast of Sneakers. I remembered James Earl Jones, and the late River Phoenix; I had forgotten that Sidney Poitier and Robert Redford were also in it.

I'm not much into hacking, so I don't know how realistic Sneakers is, and would rather think of movies taking stories straight out of real life instead. Biographies are common, of course, but those aren't the fun ones. I recently mentioned one that occurred in Picture Snatcher; I've also recommended He Walked By Night and The Hitch-Hiker. Another such movie that I haven't yet recommended is I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.

Probably the most fun for the classic movie fan, though are a series of shorts called Crime Does Not Pay. MGM released about four dozen of these from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, in which a hypothetical police chief from a hypothetical large Middle American city talks about some category of crime that's the new scourge of America, leading to a two-reel short depicting one example of this crime and how detectives would go about solving it. It's interesting to see some of the crimes that got covered in the series. Some are obvious, like the hit-and-run driver, but others are less obvious: fraudulent used car salesmen, or even crooked hospitals for young pregnant women who don't want their parents to know they're pregnant. Sadly, TCM doesn't program the shorts as far in advance as the feature movies, and I don't see any of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts in the schedule for the next week.

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