Peer to Peer Magazine

A POWERFUL BLACK BOX Government agents who know about Bishop's crime and true identity blackmail him into stealing a top-secret black box from its inventor, and the team is dragged into a world of danger, intrigue and snappy one-liners. The guys retrieve the box and then discover its surprising capability: It can decode any existing encryption system in the world (e.g., banks, air traffic controls, stock markets, the Federal Reserve and power grids). The team quickly realizes that the power of this box unleashes enemies from every angle, and they have to fight to survive and keep the box out of the wrong hands (including an especially smarmy villain played by Ben Kingsley). GREAT ENTERTAINMENT WITH REAL (Courtesy of IMDb) • Dan Aykroyd wears a t-shirt bearing the name "Aleka's Attic," a band formed by co-star River Phoenix. He also wears one from a Canadian band, The Tragically Hip, whom the Canadian-born actor loves and promotes (he had them as the musical guests on an episode of SNL he hosted). REFERENCES Like a well-protected security system, SNEAKERS has multiple layers you probably won't crack with just one viewing. This is a really fun movie, not only because of its fast pace, great music, terrific actors and witty dialogue (plus a bit of love interest between Redford and an old flame who helps the team), but also because of all the inside references that any security-trivia lover will appreciate. For example, the black box works because of a fictional "factoring breakthrough on encryption," a reference to a very real RSA algorithm, the most popular public-key encryption algorithm in use today. One of the names mentioned in the movie is Professor Len Adleman. He's a co-inventor of this RSA algorithm, and he provided technical guidance on the film in exchange for his wife getting to meet Robert Redford. Granted, SNEAKERS is 20 years old, and you'll smile at the then-cutting-edge technology and terminology. Yet, how astute, farsighted and relevant to this issue's theme is a script that includes these lines: There's a war out there. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think ... it's all about the information! The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. You might want to keep that in mind when the time comes to review the state of your firm's data security. • The access code entered at the very beginning of the movie ends in 1138, a likely reference to George Lucas's first film, THX 1138. • Robert Redford's jacket is the same one he wears in his film, THE NATURAL. • In another Robert Redford film, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, a CIA building is hit. The list of the casualties includes the names Martin and Bishop, the Redford character's alias in SNEAKERS. • In the room off of Ben Kingsley's office in the PlayTronics building, there's a computer that looks like a circular bench. This is a Cray Y-MP, a multimillion-dollar supercomputer that was one of the world's fastest computers at the time the movie was made. • The recurring, catchy jazz solo was provided by a young Branford Marsalis on sax. • The orange Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible driven by Robert Redford in several scenes is the same one driven by Mike Myers in SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER. • The warehouse set that serves as workspace in SNEAKERS is modeled on that of Gene Hackman's warehouse offices in THE CONVERSATION, an earlier psychological thriller about a secretive surveillance expert. Andy Spiegel is a creative director for a business software company based in Austin, Texas, and he's a freelance writer. An ardent movie watcher, he maintains a blog called "Austinlad's Private Screening Room," which spotlights movie reviews of films from the '30s to today. He can be reached at andysp@att.net. • To prevent the project from being thought of as a movie for kids with a G rating, a smattering of mild profanity was intentionally added to the script. Peer to Peer 93

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