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The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sneakers: the cult ‘feelgood heist film' with a hefty cast and a byzantine plot
Picture this. It's 1969. Two young hackers, Martin and Cosmo, have broken into a government facility. They're cocky little idealists but they're principled, too; they are using a computer to redistribute wealth from evil to worthwhile causes. But they're feeling peckish. Martin ducks out for pizza but as he comes back the police arrive … so he runs, leaving Cosmo to his fate. We then jump forward several decades. Martin (Robert Redford) has changed his name and now works as a specialist helping corporations test their readiness against security breaches, having turned his law-breaking habits into a viable career. He's also assembled a crack squad of intelligence industry leftovers and lawbreaking ne'er-do-wells. And, within minutes, this group of misfits is thrust into a conspiracy bigger than they ever dreamed was possible. Sneakers has developed a justifiable cult following since its release in 1992. Those who love it speak of it less as a film and more as a place – somewhere they visit whenever they need an escapist pick-me-up. It has a hefty cast: Redford's old-school Hollywood cool works so well for Martin, a roguish, haunted do-gooder. (He's not dissimilar to Redford's Bob Woodward, with a dash of Danny Ocean thrown in.) Sidney Poitier plays Donald Crease, an ex-CIA operative and wary foil to Martin's swashbuckling tendencies. Dan Aykroyd plays Mother, a conspiracy nut who excels at electronics. River Phoenix sings as Carl, a young, brash hacking savant, and David Strathairn (in a career-beating performance) is Whistler, their blind sound guy. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning You'd be hard-pressed to find a more likable ensemble. They strike the perfect point between believability and likability; we're so in love with them as people that we can't help buying into Sneakers' byzantine plot. There are secret passwords, hidden clues, disguises – and none of it seems ridiculous, because the cast and characters all take it seriously enough while having fun every step of the way. The plot gives our heroes somewhere magical to play. Once we've met the crew, Martin is approached by two National Security Agency officers, who promptly inform him the jig is up. After decades of anonymity, he's been sprung: they know about the 1969 job. They know his true identity. And they'll keep it a secret … provided he and his team undertake a job for them: stealing a black box, developed by a mathematics genius. This box is dangerous, and it's going to help the Russians, the spooks say – and they won't say much more. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion With that, we're off. Phil Alden Robinson, who also directed Field of Dreams, helps keep the tone of Sneakers perfectly in check. It's often described as a feelgood heist film, and not without good reason: the gang's pursuit of the black box has Martin forced to get back in touch with his ex, Liz (Mary McDonnell), at which point a real Hepburn and Tracy screwball dynamic springs up. Sneakers also has one of the best film scores of all time. No, really: James Horner, whose signature sounds brought Aliens, Apollo 13, Titanic and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to life, teams up with saxophonist Branford Marsalis to create a haunting and energising sound. Watching Redford tapping away slowly as Horner's score punctuates every tenuous keystroke will have you holding your breath – like the cast, Horner understood the brief. The stakes in Sneakers get very high, very fast, which makes for an utterly compelling, yet profoundly comforting film. Everyone on Martin's crew has a romantic, idealistic worldview, which the film itself shares: speak truth to power and help the little guy. And isn't that just the kind of cinematic vibe we need right now? Sneakers is available to stream on Apple TV+ and Prime in Australia, US and the UK. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- General
- The Guardian
I was a evangelical Christian for 35 years – until my transgressive big sister gave me the courage to break free
I spent most of my adult life as an evangelical Christian, learning to accept a whole-body compliance to a regimented way of living and submission to the Bible as God-breathed and infallible. For me, this became a rigid and tortured way to live, the opposite to the freedom it initially promised. I followed in the footsteps of my big sister, the trailblazing poet Dorothy Porter, and attended a church camp when I was 10. But unlike Dorothy (or Dod as I called her) who fell in love with a sequence of beautiful and beatific female Christian leaders at the camp, I charted my own path and invited Jesus into my life and was born again. Dod was horrified, but I think quietly set about trying to deconvert me from that time. It took 35 years. While Dod, in her bohemian life as a poet of rabble-rousing, sexually charged verse novels, ran towards delicious worldliness, I took the other fork in the road, towards asceticism and self-sacrifice. I believed I knew all the answers, so chose a different type of zealous life to my dazzling sister – and clung to it with equal tenacity. She died in 2008 aged 54, living passionately to the end. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Despite our radically different life choices, we both felt like outsiders in the family: me because of my intense religiosity and sense of invisibility, and she because she lived the closeted life of a gay woman until her early 30s. We became confidantes for each other, sharing our recent dramas with our father, the prominent Sydney barrister Chester Porter, reassuring each other of complete discretion. She became my reliable drinking companion in the Chester Porter Survival Club, as we navigated our father's volatile temper and terrifying rages. Dod then wrote books that challenged my entire worldview, startling me out of my stupor and dogged adherence to what had been fed to me as the 'Only Truth'. Her verse novel Akhenaten tells the tale of the monotheistic Pharaoh and his desperate attempt to secure a male heir through his daughters, while he also has a passionate love affair with his brother. My exterior evangelical self was shocked, but always lurking beneath the surface was my other buried self, who delighted in Dod's rule-breaking, her subversiveness and her galloping fame. My transgressive big sister cracked the door open for me to start seeing the world differently, beyond the narrow ideological compliance I felt subjected to. Her work gave me a place to hide, to know and feel the world as wild and varied, while on the outside I appeared as a respectable church handmaiden and matron. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Perhaps it was her later book, Crete, that changed me the most. I was stuck in an evangelical church where women were permanently subordinated to men, but Dod celebrated women's power with explosive poems of bold Minoan femaleness. 'In what other time / has the breast been mightier / than the sword?' she wrote in The Power and the Glory. But it was her sublime verse novel Wild Surmise that sealed the deal for me. There would be no more conventionality and misogyny for me, as I immersed myself in her words and found courage: 'You're standing on a raft / of thick alien ice / but you're moving – / floating like a berg / on the deepest ocean / in the unknown world / A new world / where you might learn / colder lessons / than nothing' (Europa). Dod had an unerring belief in her creative voice, the power of a poem to blow a room or someone's life apart. While she may have felt fear and anxiety in her private life (as I have, a legacy of some of the worst times with our father), she never felt it in her work, nor did it deter her from speaking out on things that matter: Indigenous massacres, nationalistic jingoism, the incarceration of refugees, homophobia. She showed me how to find my voice in the fog of cognitive dissonance and internal fury that characterised my former Christian life. It took me many years to apologise to her for my preachy Pharisaic self-righteousness, particularly of her sexuality. I never managed to tell her, except at her funeral, that she had become the impetus and example for me to be brave and speak the truth, to be subversive and challenge orthodoxy in its many guises, and to always be suspicious of fakes. I was never going to be silent again, and maybe I too could be dangerous and transgressive by unmasking the hidden networks of power within churches and help other people with the trauma they experience. I am now a psychotherapist and advocate for those who have been harmed by high demand religious communities. As I found my voice, I try to help others find theirs. My bold and lionhearted big sister showed me how. 'I stand my ground / in the undaunted spray / and company / of my own words' (The Ninth Hour from The Bee Hut). Gutsy Girls by Josie McSkimming is out now (A$34.99, UQP)
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson review – a beautiful, terrifying portrait of dementia
Sean Wilson's short but searching exploration of dementia opens as Grace, an elderly widow, walks down the middle of a busy road. This episode reveals the ways in which Grace's world can be both deeply disorienting and uncannily beautiful: she mistakes the headlights of cars for torches carried by 'children, hand in hand, running at an impossible speed'. This near miss leads her daughter Liz to place her mother in a nursing home, where Grace struggles to come to terms with her new living circumstances. Wilson's decision to show us Grace in many forms and moments of time is what sets You Must Remember This apart: we see her not only as an elderly woman, but also as a girl, a daughter, a teenager, a mother and a wife. It's a detailed portrait, made all the more complex by Wilson's use of flashbacks; every part of Grace's life we see comes in the form of a memory that she experiences as the present. These past and present threads weave together melancholy, longing, regret, sadness – but also happiness and joy: 'The things she remembers seem to find her more than she finds them. They come to her in pieces, like pages cut from a book and scattered in the wind.' The access we get to Grace's interior state is beautiful, intimate and terrifying. The daily symptoms of her disease allow Wilson to use flashbacks in a way that isn't intrusive, for the past is also Grace's present. You Must Remember This is at once a novel about dementia, but also memory. Grace's state of being frustrates and alienates Liz, who constantly battles to get through to her mother. Only rarely do they connect. 'We've got to look on the bright side, Mum. We've got to keep moving forward, that's the important thing. Keep our spirits up,' she tells Grace, who muses: 'What a strange word. Spirits. The word seems to ring in her mind, repeating over and over, crowding her thoughts and pushing out all others until it's replaced by a sound.' Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning I've never read a novel entirely focused on dementia. To his credit, Wilson doesn't look away from the reality of something that affects the lives of millions around the world and it makes for a harrowing read. We feel Grace's frustration, her disorientation. Sounds, in particular, seem to create confusion in her. Time and again, different contexts clash – something someone says to Grace in the present links with something she is thinking about the past. At first, I found the discontinuous numbering of the chapters to be a kind of challenge to the reader – starting with chapter 10, then seven, 11, 12, eight, one, and so on. Was I supposed to reorder a fractured, scattered collection of memories? As the novel progressed, I gave up on trying. But Wilson is showing us Grace's confusion – the order of events isn't important. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Much of the book touches on Grace's difficult childhood and adolescence, particularly the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. Initially, I struggled to understand the significance of Grace's early life in shaping her present. There's also an uneasy balance between the two major 'scenes' of this story; Grace's dementia defines her present, but she's also deeply troubled by the past, and I wanted to know more about it. Wilson's writing is often hauntingly beautiful and at its best when he deploys metaphors to immerse us in Grace's experience. 'Some days, yesterday is bright and full of colour, a picture in detail, tiny brushstrokes laid one beside the other. On other days, yesterday is like […] Big canvases with splashes of colour moving in all directions.' Despite the sadness at the core of You Must Remember This, there are moments of tenderness in this novel. Wilson has taken on a challenging subject and, while not a resounding success, this book is a valuable, eye-opening contribution to the literature of dementia. You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson is published by Affirm Press ($24.99)
