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Movie star opens up about the accident that nearly killed him
What's new: Adelaide's Georgia Rose Phillips dares to fictionalise the early life of notorious cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne, while Australian journalist John Lyons details the "extraordinary efforts of ordinary Ukrainians" trying to save their country. Jeremy Renner. Simon & Schuster. $34.99. On New Year's Day, 2023, actor Jeremy Renner needed to clear mountains of snow from his Nevada driveway to enable his visiting family to go skiing. So the star of The Hurt Locker fired up a snowcat to bulldoze the road. The accident that followed should have killed him. Renner was run over by the six-tonne machine, and his account of the calamity is bloodcurdling. "I can promise you this much at least: The sounds of being crushed are just as terrifying as the visual," he writes. Renner's injuries were catastrophic. This is the story of his survival and recovery. Candice Chung. Allen & Unwin. $34.99. "A meal is a shape. It is a container into which we pour our cravings." At 35, when a 13-year relationship with her first love ends, food journalist Candice Chung must decide if she wants her retired Cantonese parents to join her as she reviews restaurants. Will they eat together in polite silence as the children of immigrants might traditionally expect? Or will this be her opportunity to finally broach the reasons they have drifted so profoundly apart over the years? This tender, intimate but brave memoir has a meditative tone and structure and should delight lovers of food who treasure its sacred place in family and culture. John Lyons. ABC Books. $34.99. Australian journalist John Lyons has made three trips to wartime Ukraine. The first two were on assignment with the ABC. The third was on his holidays, which allowed him to absorb what was happening in the country without the need to file daily news. It was on this trip that he learned the most, doing what regular Ukrainians do and, most importantly, taking the time to talk to everyday people. He found that resourceful civilians from every walk of life are doing their part. This is a story about the "extraordinary efforts ... of ordinary Ukrainians" trying to save their country. Mark Lilla. Hurst Publishers. $44.99. Humans are driven by the need to know, right? We are curious, we want to discover, look around the corner, explore over the horizon. Or do we? Mark Lilla examines the opposite compulsion: "the will not to know, the will to ignorance". This is not about those who are indifferent to learning, who simply don't want to expend the energy. This is about people who have "developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know". Starting to sound familiar to anyone? Sinead Stubbins. Affirm Press. $34.99. Apparently work doesn't have to define your life and corporate programs to build team bonds and boost employee engagement might not always deliver healthy outcomes - especially for those of us with messy bits in our personalities and our personal lives (you know, the bits that make us individuals). This wicked little satire of white-collar workplace culture follows Edith and a select group of her co-workers at ad agency Winked as they are sent to an elite three-day work retreat in the remote mountains, run by an outfit called Consequi. She hopes to impress her bosses and escape a looming restructure. But so do her, um, work friends. Madeleine Cleary. Affirm Press. $34.99. Inspired by what she has described as her own family's secret, salacious past - "my great-great-great grandmother was a colonial 'common prostitute'" - Melbourne-raised former Canberra diplomat Madeleine Cleary threads fictional mystery and romance into a grim but fascinating chapter of Australia's hardscrabble past, bringing to richly detailed life the women so often overlooked by history. It's 1863 and a serial killer stalks the notorious red-light district of the goldrush-rich city of Melbourne, endangering poor Irishwoman Johanna Callaghan who hopes to make a living at the glamorous Papillon brothel, and respectable journalist Harriett Gardiner who is intent on unmasking the murderer. Cynthia Timoti. Macmillan. $22.99. Think Crazy Rich Asians meets Always Be My Maybe and you'll get the Asian rom-com gist of this sweetly flirty debut novel about Ellie Pang, a young woman fed up with the meddling of her overbearing parents after she is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Ellie sets out on her own to open her dream bakery - selling sugar-free treats, of course - but needs help to renovate. The man for the job is none other than Alec, the childhood crush who broke her heart - and it just so happens he needs a fake girlfriend to seal a business deal. But can they fake that they're in love? Georgia Rose Phillips. Picador. $34.99. Family is everything to Anne. And Anne demands everything from her family. That's because Anne knows how devastatingly easy it is to lose your family. The debut novel from Adelaide-based Georgia Rose Phillips dares to fictionalise the early life of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, notorious founder and leader of the cult known as The Family. What formative traumas during her 1920s childhood shaped her later abuse of illegally adopted children through the 1960s and '70s at Lake Eildon in Victoria? Where the author's imagined psychological portrait of Hamilton-Byrne and the disturbing facts of The Family diverge may require further reader research. Love books? Us too! Looking for more reads and recommendations? Browse our books page and bookmark it so you can find our latest books content with ease. What's new: Adelaide's Georgia Rose Phillips dares to fictionalise the early life of notorious cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne, while Australian journalist John Lyons details the "extraordinary efforts of ordinary Ukrainians" trying to save their country. Jeremy Renner. Simon & Schuster. $34.99. On New Year's Day, 2023, actor Jeremy Renner needed to clear mountains of snow from his Nevada driveway to enable his visiting family to go skiing. So the star of The Hurt Locker fired up a snowcat to bulldoze the road. The accident that followed should have killed him. Renner was run over by the six-tonne machine, and his account of the calamity is bloodcurdling. "I can promise you this much at least: The sounds of being crushed are just as terrifying as the visual," he writes. Renner's injuries were catastrophic. This is the story of his survival and recovery. Candice Chung. Allen & Unwin. $34.99. "A meal is a shape. It is a container into which we pour our cravings." At 35, when a 13-year relationship with her first love ends, food journalist Candice Chung must decide if she wants her retired Cantonese parents to join her as she reviews restaurants. Will they eat together in polite silence as the children of immigrants might traditionally expect? Or will this be her opportunity to finally broach the reasons they have drifted so profoundly apart over the years? This tender, intimate but brave memoir has a meditative tone and structure and should delight lovers of food who treasure its sacred place in family and culture. John Lyons. ABC Books. $34.99. Australian journalist John Lyons has made three trips to wartime Ukraine. The first two were on assignment with the ABC. The third was on his holidays, which allowed him to absorb what was happening in the country without the need to file daily news. It was on this trip that he learned the most, doing what regular Ukrainians do and, most importantly, taking the time to talk to everyday people. He found that resourceful civilians from every walk of life are doing their part. This is a story about the "extraordinary efforts ... of ordinary Ukrainians" trying to save their country. Mark Lilla. Hurst Publishers. $44.99. Humans are driven by the need to know, right? We are curious, we want to discover, look around the corner, explore over the horizon. Or do we? Mark Lilla examines the opposite compulsion: "the will not to know, the will to ignorance". This is not about those who are indifferent to learning, who simply don't want to expend the energy. This is about people who have "developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know". Starting to sound familiar to anyone? Sinead Stubbins. Affirm Press. $34.99. Apparently work doesn't have to define your life and corporate programs to build team bonds and boost employee engagement might not always deliver healthy outcomes - especially for those of us with messy bits in our personalities and our personal lives (you know, the bits that make us individuals). This wicked little satire of white-collar workplace culture follows Edith and a select group of her co-workers at ad agency Winked as they are sent to an elite three-day work retreat in the remote mountains, run by an outfit called Consequi. She hopes to impress her bosses and escape a looming restructure. But so do her, um, work friends. Madeleine Cleary. Affirm Press. $34.99. Inspired by what she has described as her own family's secret, salacious past - "my great-great-great grandmother was a colonial 'common prostitute'" - Melbourne-raised former Canberra diplomat Madeleine Cleary threads fictional mystery and romance into a grim but fascinating chapter of Australia's hardscrabble past, bringing to richly detailed life the women so often overlooked by history. It's 1863 and a serial killer stalks the notorious red-light district of the goldrush-rich city of Melbourne, endangering poor Irishwoman Johanna Callaghan who hopes to make a living at the glamorous Papillon brothel, and respectable journalist Harriett Gardiner who is intent on unmasking the murderer. Cynthia Timoti. Macmillan. $22.99. Think Crazy Rich Asians meets Always Be My Maybe and you'll get the Asian rom-com gist of this sweetly flirty debut novel about Ellie Pang, a young woman fed up with the meddling of her overbearing parents after she is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Ellie sets out on her own to open her dream bakery - selling sugar-free treats, of course - but needs help to renovate. The man for the job is none other than Alec, the childhood crush who broke her heart - and it just so happens he needs a fake girlfriend to seal a business deal. But can they fake that they're in love? Georgia Rose Phillips. Picador. $34.99. Family is everything to Anne. And Anne demands everything from her family. That's because Anne knows how devastatingly easy it is to lose your family. The debut novel from Adelaide-based Georgia Rose Phillips dares to fictionalise the early life of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, notorious founder and leader of the cult known as The Family. What formative traumas during her 1920s childhood shaped her later abuse of illegally adopted children through the 1960s and '70s at Lake Eildon in Victoria? Where the author's imagined psychological portrait of Hamilton-Byrne and the disturbing facts of The Family diverge may require further reader research. Love books? Us too! Looking for more reads and recommendations? Browse our books page and bookmark it so you can find our latest books content with ease. What's new: Adelaide's Georgia Rose Phillips dares to fictionalise the early life of notorious cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne, while Australian journalist John Lyons details the "extraordinary efforts of ordinary Ukrainians" trying to save their country. Jeremy Renner. Simon & Schuster. $34.99. On New Year's Day, 2023, actor Jeremy Renner needed to clear mountains of snow from his Nevada driveway to enable his visiting family to go skiing. So the star of The Hurt Locker fired up a snowcat to bulldoze the road. The accident that followed should have killed him. Renner was run over by the six-tonne machine, and his account of the calamity is bloodcurdling. "I can promise you this much at least: The sounds of being crushed are just as terrifying as the visual," he writes. Renner's injuries were catastrophic. This is the story of his survival and recovery. Candice Chung. Allen & Unwin. $34.99. "A meal is a shape. It is a container into which we pour our cravings." At 35, when a 13-year relationship with her first love ends, food journalist Candice Chung must decide if she wants her retired Cantonese parents to join her as she reviews restaurants. Will they eat together in polite silence as the children of immigrants might traditionally expect? Or will this be her opportunity to finally broach the reasons they have drifted so profoundly apart over the years? This tender, intimate but brave memoir has a meditative tone and structure and should delight lovers of food who treasure its sacred place in family and culture. John Lyons. ABC Books. $34.99. Australian journalist John Lyons has made three trips to wartime Ukraine. The first two were on assignment with the ABC. The third was on his holidays, which allowed him to absorb what was happening in the country without the need to file daily news. It was on this trip that he learned the most, doing what regular Ukrainians do and, most importantly, taking the time to talk to everyday people. He found that resourceful civilians from every walk of life are doing their part. This is a story about the "extraordinary efforts ... of ordinary Ukrainians" trying to save their country. Mark Lilla. Hurst Publishers. $44.99. Humans are driven by the need to know, right? We are curious, we want to discover, look around the corner, explore over the horizon. Or do we? Mark Lilla examines the opposite compulsion: "the will not to know, the will to ignorance". This is not about those who are indifferent to learning, who simply don't want to expend the energy. This is about people who have "developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know". Starting to sound familiar to anyone? Sinead Stubbins. Affirm Press. $34.99. Apparently work doesn't have to define your life and corporate programs to build team bonds and boost employee engagement might not always deliver healthy outcomes - especially for those of us with messy bits in our personalities and our personal lives (you know, the bits that make us individuals). This wicked little satire of white-collar workplace culture follows Edith and a select group of her co-workers at ad agency Winked as they are sent to an elite three-day work retreat in the remote mountains, run by an outfit called Consequi. She hopes to impress her bosses and escape a looming restructure. But so do her, um, work friends. Madeleine Cleary. Affirm Press. $34.99. Inspired by what she has described as her own family's secret, salacious past - "my great-great-great grandmother was a colonial 'common prostitute'" - Melbourne-raised former Canberra diplomat Madeleine Cleary threads fictional mystery and romance into a grim but fascinating chapter of Australia's hardscrabble past, bringing to richly detailed life the women so often overlooked by history. It's 1863 and a serial killer stalks the notorious red-light district of the goldrush-rich city of Melbourne, endangering poor Irishwoman Johanna Callaghan who hopes to make a living at the glamorous Papillon brothel, and respectable journalist Harriett Gardiner who is intent on unmasking the murderer. Cynthia Timoti. Macmillan. $22.99. Think Crazy Rich Asians meets Always Be My Maybe and you'll get the Asian rom-com gist of this sweetly flirty debut novel about Ellie Pang, a young woman fed up with the meddling of her overbearing parents after she is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Ellie sets out on her own to open her dream bakery - selling sugar-free treats, of course - but needs help to renovate. The man for the job is none other than Alec, the childhood crush who broke her heart - and it just so happens he needs a fake girlfriend to seal a business deal. But can they fake that they're in love? Georgia Rose Phillips. Picador. $34.99. Family is everything to Anne. And Anne demands everything from her family. That's because Anne knows how devastatingly easy it is to lose your family. The debut novel from Adelaide-based Georgia Rose Phillips dares to fictionalise the early life of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, notorious founder and leader of the cult known as The Family. What formative traumas during her 1920s childhood shaped her later abuse of illegally adopted children through the 1960s and '70s at Lake Eildon in Victoria? Where the author's imagined psychological portrait of Hamilton-Byrne and the disturbing facts of The Family diverge may require further reader research. Love books? Us too! Looking for more reads and recommendations? Browse our books page and bookmark it so you can find our latest books content with ease. What's new: Adelaide's Georgia Rose Phillips dares to fictionalise the early life of notorious cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne, while Australian journalist John Lyons details the "extraordinary efforts of ordinary Ukrainians" trying to save their country. Jeremy Renner. Simon & Schuster. $34.99. On New Year's Day, 2023, actor Jeremy Renner needed to clear mountains of snow from his Nevada driveway to enable his visiting family to go skiing. So the star of The Hurt Locker fired up a snowcat to bulldoze the road. The accident that followed should have killed him. Renner was run over by the six-tonne machine, and his account of the calamity is bloodcurdling. "I can promise you this much at least: The sounds of being crushed are just as terrifying as the visual," he writes. Renner's injuries were catastrophic. This is the story of his survival and recovery. Candice Chung. Allen & Unwin. $34.99. "A meal is a shape. It is a container into which we pour our cravings." At 35, when a 13-year relationship with her first love ends, food journalist Candice Chung must decide if she wants her retired Cantonese parents to join her as she reviews restaurants. Will they eat together in polite silence as the children of immigrants might traditionally expect? Or will this be her opportunity to finally broach the reasons they have drifted so profoundly apart over the years? This tender, intimate but brave memoir has a meditative tone and structure and should delight lovers of food who treasure its sacred place in family and culture. John Lyons. ABC Books. $34.99. Australian journalist John Lyons has made three trips to wartime Ukraine. The first two were on assignment with the ABC. The third was on his holidays, which allowed him to absorb what was happening in the country without the need to file daily news. It was on this trip that he learned the most, doing what regular Ukrainians do and, most importantly, taking the time to talk to everyday people. He found that resourceful civilians from every walk of life are doing their part. This is a story about the "extraordinary efforts ... of ordinary Ukrainians" trying to save their country. Mark Lilla. Hurst Publishers. $44.99. Humans are driven by the need to know, right? We are curious, we want to discover, look around the corner, explore over the horizon. Or do we? Mark Lilla examines the opposite compulsion: "the will not to know, the will to ignorance". This is not about those who are indifferent to learning, who simply don't want to expend the energy. This is about people who have "developed a particular antipathy toward the search for knowledge, whose inner doors are fastened tight against anything that might cast doubt on what they believe they already know". Starting to sound familiar to anyone? Sinead Stubbins. Affirm Press. $34.99. Apparently work doesn't have to define your life and corporate programs to build team bonds and boost employee engagement might not always deliver healthy outcomes - especially for those of us with messy bits in our personalities and our personal lives (you know, the bits that make us individuals). This wicked little satire of white-collar workplace culture follows Edith and a select group of her co-workers at ad agency Winked as they are sent to an elite three-day work retreat in the remote mountains, run by an outfit called Consequi. She hopes to impress her bosses and escape a looming restructure. But so do her, um, work friends. Madeleine Cleary. Affirm Press. $34.99. Inspired by what she has described as her own family's secret, salacious past - "my great-great-great grandmother was a colonial 'common prostitute'" - Melbourne-raised former Canberra diplomat Madeleine Cleary threads fictional mystery and romance into a grim but fascinating chapter of Australia's hardscrabble past, bringing to richly detailed life the women so often overlooked by history. It's 1863 and a serial killer stalks the notorious red-light district of the goldrush-rich city of Melbourne, endangering poor Irishwoman Johanna Callaghan who hopes to make a living at the glamorous Papillon brothel, and respectable journalist Harriett Gardiner who is intent on unmasking the murderer. Cynthia Timoti. Macmillan. $22.99. Think Crazy Rich Asians meets Always Be My Maybe and you'll get the Asian rom-com gist of this sweetly flirty debut novel about Ellie Pang, a young woman fed up with the meddling of her overbearing parents after she is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Ellie sets out on her own to open her dream bakery - selling sugar-free treats, of course - but needs help to renovate. The man for the job is none other than Alec, the childhood crush who broke her heart - and it just so happens he needs a fake girlfriend to seal a business deal. But can they fake that they're in love? Georgia Rose Phillips. Picador. $34.99. Family is everything to Anne. And Anne demands everything from her family. That's because Anne knows how devastatingly easy it is to lose your family. The debut novel from Adelaide-based Georgia Rose Phillips dares to fictionalise the early life of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, notorious founder and leader of the cult known as The Family. What formative traumas during her 1920s childhood shaped her later abuse of illegally adopted children through the 1960s and '70s at Lake Eildon in Victoria? Where the author's imagined psychological portrait of Hamilton-Byrne and the disturbing facts of The Family diverge may require further reader research. Love books? Us too! Looking for more reads and recommendations? Browse our books page and bookmark it so you can find our latest books content with ease.
India Today
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Actor Jeremy Renner on 'exhilarating' near-death moment: Didn't want to come back
Actor Jeremy Renner recently recalled his experience following a near-fatal accident at his Nevada home in 2023. While speaking about being revived from the near-death encounter, he said that he "didn't want to come back." Renner described the experience as peaceful, calling it "the highest adrenaline rush."The actor, in a recent episode of Kelly Ripa's Let's Talk podcast, said, "It's a great relief is all I can say. It's a wonderful, wonderful relief to be removed from your body. It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel. You don't see anything but what's in your mind's eye. Like, you're the atom of who you are, the DNA, your spirit. It's the highest adrenaline rush, but the peace that comes with it, it's magnificent. It's so magical."advertisementHe further said, "It was so all-encompassing that it was hard to part ways with it when he was resuscitated. And I didn't want to come back. I remember, and I was brought back, and I was so pissed off. I came back, I'm like, 'Aww!'" Renner concluded, "I saw the eyeball again. I'm like, 'Oh, s---, I'm back.' Saw my legs. I'm like, 'Yeah, that's gonna hurt later.' I'm like, 'All right, let me continue to breathe.'"The Hawkeye actor was run over by a snowplough at his Reno, Nevada home during a holiday. He was trying to prevent the vehicle from hitting his nephew on New Year's Day 2023. Renner was airlifted to the hospital and suffered severe injuries which included over 30-plus broken bones, a lacerated liver, and a collapsed actor is known for his roles in films such as The Hurt Locker (2008), Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), The Bource Legacy (2012), The Avengers franchise and its spin-off show Hawkeye (2021).Renner's new film Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is currently under production.
Daily Mail
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
My Next Breath by Jeremy Renner: I died ... and now I know death is nothing to fear
My Next Breath by Jeremy Renner (Gallery Books £22, 210pp) He has played some very tough guys in his glittering Hollywood career has Jeremy Renner; men like the adrenaline-fuelled bomb disposal expert in the Oscar-laden The Hurt Locker or the tough but deeply loyal bank robber in The Town, for which he was Oscar nominated again. He was even heir to the Jason Bourne franchise in the The Bourne Legacy. But it's not just on the big screen. Renner is the toughest of men in real life too. And as he recounts in this remarkable, profound memoir he even has a brush with eternity, an encounter that will be one of the most moving passages you will read anywhere this year. On New Year's Day 2023 a large gathering of the Renner clan – his siblings, family and friends – had assembled at his mountain lodge in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, to celebrate the Christmas holidays. Hemmed in by an enormous storm, finally the weather clears and Renner, accompanied by his nephew Alex, age 27 at the time, sets out on this crisp-blue mountain morning to clear the terrain with his 14,000lb industrial snow-clearing machine. He makes one mistake – he fails to press the handbrake – and watches as the massive vehicle slides towards Alex. He leaps on board to try to stop it, but slips and falls, to be crushed under the huge tracks of the snow plough as it passes over him. It is this horrific, unimaginable accident and its aftermath that form the core of this extraordinary, deeply affecting book. The scale of his injuries is mind-boggling. He had broken more than 38 bones, including six ribs in 14 places, and lost several litres of blood. His face and head were brutalised, and he could see his left eye with his right eye. But it is below freezing out on the ice and Renner, close to death, his body in shock, has to keep breathing. Two neighbours, Rich and Barb, come to help and call for helicopter rescue. But lying broken out on the ice, Renner knows that without breathing he will die. Each breath is harder and harder, each broken bone screaming out in agony. He knows he mustn't stop, or pass out. He has to keep breathing. Anybody who has just cracked one rib knows how painful each and every breath can be. Imagine that with six broken ribs. As the killing cold begins to dangerously bite, Barb is holding his head and talking constantly. 'Just keep breathing,' she says. 'Take shallow breaths. Stay with us. Keep your eyes open,' rubbing his forehead and his hands just trying to keep him alert. But then she notices the colour of his skin begin to change and Renner closes his eyes. Later Barb is to say, 'I wouldn't take my eyes off him because I didn't want him to drift off. Then he turned this grey-green colour. I lost him for a second. He closed his eyes. I really feel he did pass away for a couple of seconds.' It is here that we find the mystical heart of this wonderful, gripping story. For most of us the edge of our own lives will come only once. Will we be terrified, glad, guilty? Jeremy Renner is in the unique position of knowing. This is what he says. 'I know I died – in fact I'm sure of it.' When the paramedics arrived they noted his heart rate had bottomed out at 18 beats a minute – at that rate, as he puts it, 'you're basically dead.' So what was it like? What follows is just a small flavour of what Renner experienced. 'When I died, what I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy. There was no time, place, or space and nothing to see, except a kind of electric two-way vision made from strands of that inconceivable energy, like the whipping lines of cars' tail lights photographed by a time lapse camera. 'I was in space: no sound, no wind, nothing save this extraordinary electricity by which I am connected to everybody and anything, anyone and everything. I am in every given moment, in one instant, magnified to a number ungovernable by math. 'What came to me on that ice was an exhilarating peace, the most profound adrenaline rush, yet an entirely tranquil one at the same time... It was an entirely beautiful place filled with knowable magic. It pulses, it floats; it is beyond language, beyond thought, beyond reason, a place of pure feeling... I knew then as I know now to this day and will always know: Death is not something to be afraid of.' As he slowly returns to Barb and Alex on the ice he realises: 'Love, here on earth, is our only currency; it is our energy and our existence and we take that energy with us into perpetuity... Something else; dying has left me with this simple but imperative thought – live your life now...' He goes on: 'What I'd just been through – my death – proved to me something I'd always intuited, which is that whatever we are goes beyond our galaxies, and it keeps going, repeating to the nth degree. Love. That's what lasts. That's what wins. Always.' Then, Renner hears the helicopter blades of the air ambulance and as he takes each agonising breath he knows the burden of staying alive will be borne by others, not just Barb, her husband Rich and Alex. Renner takes us with characteristic gusto through his recovery, recuperation and rehabilitation. And it is astonishingly rapid, though he admits he is the world's worst patient. After multiple surgeries and two blood transfusions, he was discharged from the Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles on January 13, 2023, after 12 days in hospital. 'I haven't spent a single night in a hospital since,' he says with some pride. The Jeremy Renner who emerges from this book is funny, generous, highly admirable, and widely liked. He's a talented sportsman and musician, and clearly a very good writer. His Rennervation project acquires and rehabilitates old trucks, ambulances, buses and other large decommissioned vehicles, repurposing them and giving them to communities that need them: a dance studio in Mexico, a water treatment centre in India. He is devoted to his vast family – he is one of seven children – and especially his daughter Ava, to whom this compelling, and deeply inspiring book is dedicated. She must be very honoured. It is a magnificent story.
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Woman in uniform: Jamie Lee Curtis plays a troubled, morally murky cop in Blue Steel
When Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break was released in 1991, it marked the arrival of a radical new voice in action cinema. Here was an adrenalised film about cops and robbers, centred on the intensely emotional bond between two men on either side of the law, that so happened to be directed by a woman. 'It's not just about breaking gender roles,' the film-maker said in a 2009 interview. 'It's to explore and push the medium.' Throughout her career, Bigelow has routinely operated in genres primarily occupied by men – perhaps most famously with her Iraq war film The Hurt Locker, which made her the first woman to win a directing Oscar. But just a few years before the macho melodrama of Point Break, Bigelow had already taken a scalpel to the action film in her wonderfully sleazy Blue Steel, a deceptively subversive, female-fronted thriller that investigates the thorny conflation of power and gender in the male-dominated cop genre. Jamie Lee Curtis stars as Megan Turner, a rookie NYPD officer fresh out of the academy who miraculously thwarts an armed robbery on her first night out on patrol. When the suspect's weapon mysteriously vanishes from the crime scene, however, she's shunned by her colleagues and suspended by the force for allegedly killing an unarmed man. To make matters worse, one of the hostages she rescues that evening, Wall Street money man Eugene (a perfectly slimy Ron Silver), becomes dangerously obsessed with his saviour and starts to commit his own murders, with Megan soon trapped in a cat-and-mouse game against a psychotic killer. Against the grimy surfaces of New York City, the film tracks the frustrating ways that Megan's efforts to apprehend Eugene are hindered by the very same systems she's taken an oath to uphold and protect. Her male superiors and fellow officers dismiss her claims of both personal abuse and professional innocence at every turn. It's not until she takes advantage of the liberties afforded her by her badge – much like Dirty Harry did back in 1971 – that Megan wrests justice into her own hands. The film's gaze is thrillingly romantic: its opening credits, for example, are overlaid on top of slow-motion footage of a service revolver being cleaned and reloaded, ingeniously shot with all the hazy festishisation of a softcore porno that transforms the barrel of a gun into a phallic object. The same principle applies to the many scenes of Megan donning her deep-blue police attire; Bigelow's camera leers at every buckle fastened, every button done, as if its subject were a masked vigilante triumphantly suiting up for a night of extrajudicial vengeance. All these images form Blue Steel's central concern: the disruption of a woman dressed in a uniform that so frequently signifies masculine authority. When we first meet Megan's parents, it's clear that her brutish father, Frank (Phillip Bosco), detests the profession his daughter has chosen. But what initially seems like a baby boomer-era misalignment of gender expectations soon reveals itself to be the result of something much more sinister, as an abusive misogynist now realises there's one fewer person in his life he can victimise. The point is only further accentuated by the savvy casting of Curtis: cinema's most recognisable final girl once again forced to rely on no one but herself in order to survive. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning What could have easily been a simplistic 'girls can be cops too' tale is instead complicated by Bigelow's clever manipulation of genre cliches. In its blaring climax, her protagonist engages in a reckless and chaotic gunfight across crowded streets and subway platforms, bending the troubling politics of state-sanctioned power to her own personal interests regardless of how morally justified they may be. 'Why would you want to become a cop?' one of Megan's male partners bluntly asks her early in the film. 'You're a good looking woman – beautiful, in fact.' She turns to him and drily responds. 'I wanted to shoot people.' Blue Steel is streaming on Stan in Australia, Starz in the US, and available to rent in the UK. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
Washington Post
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In ‘Warfare,' a tautly effective portrait of tedium and sheer terror
For the past 20 years, the modern American war movie has become enthralled with the cult of the operator. From 'The Hurt Locker' and 'Zero Dark Thirty' to 'American Sniper,' the traditions valorized in classic Hollywood battle films — camaraderie, physical courage, honor, sacrifice — are expressed, not with jingoistic triumph or misty sentimentalism, but through the more distancing lens of professionalism, competence and laconic, square-jawed hyper-focus.
