In a Screen Testing first, we take a guest's love for a movie and weaponise it against them. It's no holds barred as (alongside Mark Winteringham) we unravel the film which gathers everything that you love about hacker culture, and adds Vinnie Jones and blowjobs.
There's explicit language from the start, as we wonder why John Travolta's character loves to spoil the ends of movies, we compare Gabriel to a demanding product owner, we crowdfund an interesting (but potentially libelous) reboot, and listen to a disturbing number of candid remarks from the director's commentary.
We find a surprising amount of testing-related content, as we discuss chains of command, deadlines, battles with recruiters, bad interview experiences, user interfaces and flow.
In our desperation to avoid talking about the film, we get sidetracked by whether a cashpoint is a computer, how compound interest works and vehicle emissions standards, all of which are far more entertaining than Swordfish.
YouTube clips of notable Swordfish scenes:
Other References:
Next up, we're going back to the nineties with Matt Bretten, to see how HACKERS (mostly) managed to get it right. We hope you'll join us in a fortnight!
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Intro music: Swordfish Intro
Outro music: Paul Oakenfold feat. Amoebassassin - Get Out Of My Life Now
Are you a watcher or a player? We're joined by Gem Hill to discuss last year's teen psychological thriller, Nerve. It's a deadly (and somewhat cheesy) technological game of truth or dare, available to stream now on Netflix.
We discuss the game within the movie, the weird pockets of fame within social media, teen cliques, and how effectively the film manages its portrayal of hackers, the dark web and open-source software.
We also deal with our usual array of distractions, including the unusual pricing/prize structure of Nerve, whether the game could truly run without servers, teenagers' password security, Neil's unlikely crush on Dave Franco, the difference between literal and metaphor, and how not to get a tattoo.
Also, we forget to mention that Dave Franco's character is named Ian, so when we suddenly start talking about Ian halfway through, that's what's going on!
References:
Songs from the soundtrack featured in the episode (in order of appearance):
In our next episode we'll be continuing our dive into the world of hacking in movies, as we discuss 2001's SWORDFISH with Mark Winteringham!
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