We all have those movies, don’t we? They’re the movies where we’ll be going about our day, doing stuff that we’ve planned out and intended to get done…but then we’ll see that one of those movies is on teevee or something, and that’s that, screw the To Do List, we’re watching that movie again!
One of those movies for me is The Hunt for Red October, that wonderful submarine thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel. (I never read that particular Clancy book. I read a couple other ones and honestly, I wasn’t super-impressed beyond an appreciation for his plotting. My drug-of-choice for late-80s-early-90s spy fiction was Robert Ludlum.) Hunt came out in spring 1990, and I remember a bunch of friends and I in college going to see it. The movie rocked my world even then, and it has never declined in my estimation. It really is a masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned; it sets up every single plot twist in advance but doesn’t do so in such an obvious way that you can see the foreshadowing as it happens. It’s incredibly well-acted and superbly paced, and for an action adventure thriller, it has some absolutely crackling dialog. I just love it.
The music is also great, by the wonderful Basil Poledouris. Its main melodic material is distinctly Russian, and he makes extensive use of choir throughout, along with some techno material in the tense parts of the film. Here is a suite culled together from the soundtrack.
Mad About You is a sitcom that aired in the 1990s for seven seasons. It was about the day-to-day life of a young couple in New York City, Paul and Jamie Buchman, played by Paul Reiser* and Helen Hunt. The show tended to be very down-to-earth in its concerns, almost mundane; in a way, Mad About You was better at being a “show about nothing” than Seinfeld was. We loved Mad About You when it first aired. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) discovered it before I did, but it quickly became a bonding thing for us during the ten or so months after I graduated college that we were doing a long-distance thing. Mad About You, at its best, had a lot of wonderful things to say about love and marriage…and I’ll have done there, as I want to write a longer piece about the show and What It Meant To Me, probably for the upcoming newsletter relaunch.
So, instead of a music selection, here’s a comedic sequence from Mad About You. This is from the show’s second season, when it really hit its stride; its best seasons were probably its second and third. To understand what’s happening here, all you need know is that Paul Buchman is a documentary filmmaker by trade who often finds himself doing film work he finds “beneath” himself (but he grits his teeth and does it because he knows he has to eat). Here he’s been working on a film called A Day At the Zoo. The rest of this should be easy to understand. This scene never comes out and says what’s on “the tape”, but we know, don’t we? And the comedic timing here is just amazing. Reiser and Hunt had the kind of chemistry together that many actors playing parts of fictional partnerships dream of achieving.
(Oh, and this scene ends at the episode’s first commercial break. The complications pile up after this.)
* By the way, what was up with sitcoms in the 90s featuring standup comedians in the lead playing dudes with the same first name as themselves? In Mad About You Paul Reiser plays Paul Buchman. In Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld plays…another version of Jerry Seinfeld. Jonathan Silverman starred in The Single Guy, as Jonathan Eliot.
This has been on my mind of late, which means it’s probably time to track down the movie and rewatch it: “Building the Barn”, from Witness. Music by Maurice Jarre.
I’ve been thinking about reviving my dormant Substack newsletter and one feature I’m thinking about is an occasional (maybe monthly) deep look at an entire album that I love or that has special significance to me, but I have no more thought through on the notion than that, so we’ll see. Meanwhile, here’s my favorite song from a candidate album: Enya’s 1989 record Watermark. The song is “On Your Shore”.
Last weekend we watched the original Jurassic Park, which still holds up amazingly well! Especially for a movie made in the pre-cell phone era. (That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but I have found that lots of times I watch movies in the pre-cell phone era and have to constantly remind myself that the characters don’t have phones and can’t call for help or look up useful information.)
Anyway, since we don’t really need a whole lot of introduction here, let’s just let Mr. Williams do his thing, shall we?
I mean, sure, it’s been autumn, technically, for about two weeks now. But still, it’s autumn!
And sure, “meteorological autumn” started a month ago, but this is different. This is October. So, we have Meteorological Autumn, which starts September 1; we have Astronomical Autumn (the traditional Autumn), which starts roughly September 20 or 21, depending on when exactly the Autumnal Equinox happens; and then I would posit we have Emotional Autumn, which for me starts either October 1 or whenever the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival happens, whichever comes first. So now we’re really into Emotional Autumn, when the leaves start turning and the football season is heating up as teams shake off the preseason jitters and as baseball is getting exciting (unless you’re a Pirates fan, in which case you’re annually shocked to learn that they let the good teams keep playing baseball after the season ends) and as hockey is doing…whatever it is that hockey does, I guess.
So, let’s spend October listening to autumn songs! And who better to lead off than Nat King Cole?
Regular posting still isn’t resuming (I just finished up an extremely busy work week, and now The Wife and I are getting out of town for a short getaway, and then next week has some other challenges forthcoming but we’ll get to those in good time), but hopefully next week we’ll start to settle down a bit…meantime, today we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of one of America’s greatest musical voices, George Gershwin, who was nice enough to be born exactly 73 years before I was, so that’s cool!
Like I said the other day, there’s a kind of perfect storm of STUFF all coming to a head at once that isn’t leaving me with a ton of time for posting, so posting much, I have not. This is likely to continue for the next week, maybe even two, depending on how things transpire. None of this is bad, by any means: we have a big work event that’s taking up tons of time to prep coming up, and then next weekend is our annual getaway to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and right after that, The Wife has a medical procedure that will occupy a lot of mental cycles and energy.
But, I do need to get something up here at least once in a while, don’t I? And I’m still saddened by the passing earlier this week of Robert Redford, so I’ll discuss my personal favorite Redford movie, to which the title of this post alludes. The film is the 1992 caper film Sneakers.
Here’s the text of a post I wrote some years ago about the film, and then I’ll come back and say a few things more about it:
COSMO: You could have shared this with me.
MARTIN: I know.
COSMO: You could have had the power.
MARTIN: I don’t want it.
COSMO: Don’t you know the places we can go with this?
MARTIN: Yeah, I do. There’s nobody there.
COSMO: Exactly! The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy or money. It’s run by ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons!
MARTIN: I don’t care.
COSMO: I don’t expect other people to understand this, but I do expect you to understand this! We started this journey together!
MARTIN: It wasn’t a ‘journey’, Coz. It was a prank.
COSMO: There’s a war out there, old friend, 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!
MARTIN: If I were you, I’d destroy that thing.
I saw Sneakers when it first came out, back in 1992 or thereabouts. It quickly became one of my favorite movies, and I saw it several more times theatrically before it became a fixture in my rotation of movies to rent on occasion, and later, when I had a sizeable collection of movies on VHS. But for one reason or another – mainly because I just never got around to it – Sneakers never got into my DVD collection, so I haven’t seen it in…holy crap. More than ten years. That seems rather wrong to me now, in retrospect, but never fear – I finally watched it recently, with some fear and trepidation that, like many a techno-thriller made more than a decade ago, it wouldn’t hold up very well.
Surprisingly – and satisfyingly – it does hold up, very well. And more than that: it’s striking to me now, twenty years later, just how eerily prescient this movie was.
Sneakers is one of the most entertaining cyberthriller-espionage movies I’ve ever seen. Robert Redford stars as Martin Bishop, the head of a security firm consisting of a group of men whose backgrounds mostly include shady dealings or outright brushes with the law. Their main job is simply to break into places that are supposedly highly secure, in order to demonstrate the lax areas in the security. They seem to be mostly just eking by: when they complete a job for a bank early in the film, a bank officer fills out the payment check, looks at it, and comments that it’s not a very good living. The team gets hired for another job, this time by two men claiming to be NSA agents, who happen to know who Martin Bishop really is (for which he could go to jail). They are to steal a device that decrypts codes which are supposedly unbreakable, which they do, and then give to the NSA guys – only to learn that they’re not NSA guys at all, and that they’ve murdered the mathematician who invented the device.
In a deeply eerie scene, Bishop’s hacker buddies start probing around with the little black box, just to see what it can do – and they discover that it can allow anyone to hack into extremely sensitive computer systems. The power grid of the entire Northeast…the Federal Reserve…air traffic control. They couldn’t have known it, writing this movie ten years before 9-11, but hearing one of the hackers jokingly say, “Anybody want to crash a few passenger jets?” is deeply chilling.
The entire movie is about security in an increasingly digital world, and at the end of the film, the exchange quoted above takes place, between Bishop and his onetime college buddy Cosmo, who has become a villain since doing time in prison for a crime that he committed with Martin at his side (but who eluded capture by the police simply by going out for pizza when they showed up with the guns). The idea of the world become increasingly governed by, and even defined by, the processing of data was a pretty bold one back in 1992. When I saw this movie, I had not yet even heard of the Internet, and the digital infrastructure that Sneakers portrays – with dial-up modems and not a cell phone in sight – seems utterly quaint. And yet, the movie is somehow fresh, despite all that, largely owing to the charm of the cast, the sparkling dialogue, the engaging direction, the brisk pacing, and – in terms of the technology – the nicely non-specific way the technology is depicted.
There are a lot of very clever touches in Sneakers: the reverse ‘race against time’, for example, in which Martin Bishop has to get a job done and yet literally can only do it at a very slow pace, lest the motion detectors notice his presence. Also the way they enlist Martin’s former (and yet still friendly) girlfriend to help with the problem of recording a particular scientist’s voice for use against the voice-print ID gizmo. (If the phrase “My name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” is in your geek lexicon, then you are my kind of people.) I also like how vague the movie is about Cosmo’s villainy. We never learn who he works for, or if he is the main ringleader; we never learn what exactly it is that he wants to accomplish with the little black codebreaking box. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Cosmo doesn’t even have a specific plan in mind at all, and that he just wants the codebreaker because it will give him power that he as yet doesn’t really know how he intends to use it. He’s almost purely a theoretical villain, which is what makes him even scarier — as well as the sheer optimism of his villainy, which is what makes the quote above so memorable. It’s not about making threats or committing crimes or any of that dirty stuff. It’s about the possibilities inherent in controlling the world’s data.
And that is really makes this twenty-year-old film stay relevant.
OK, that’s the old post. I notice that I didn’t mention the film’s acting much in my original post, so I’m addressing that now, because Sneakers is one of the best-cast movies ever made, in my opinion. If they handed out Oscars for casting, Sneakers would have won it that year. You have River Phoenix as a young hacker, and Dan Aykroyd as an old hacker who is deeply invested in paranoid conspiracy theories. (This was a considerably more charming and entertaining character trait thirty years ago. Now, not so much.) You have Sidney Poitier as a retired CIA spook who hasn’t given up the game just yet, and David Strathairn as a blind hacker. Leading them all is Mr. Redford, a hacker with a past that has led him to assume a false identity. Joining them is Redford’s old girlfriend, played by Mary McDonnell, and the villain is Ben Kingsley as an old friend of Redford’s who went to jail for their escapades while Redford did not.
It’s really something to watch this movie and note the complete chemistry among the cast. At no point is there any break in the illusion; we really believe that this motley crew of hackers and law-benders has spent years working with one another at the weird intersection of legality and morality and…neither of those things. And they really do seem to enjoy doing it; they’re having fun, up until the moment when they realize that they have somehow become embroiled in something very real and very dangerous. But even then, once they sense that the winds have shifted in their direction again…the sense of fun returns.
Speaking specifically of Mr. Redford’s performance, he is doing more than having fun. There’s a sense right from the start that he’s been at this longer than anyone else, and that he’s starting to get a bit weary of the whole business. Redford shows us a Martin Bishop who is genuinely sorry for what happened to his old friend back in college, and who does want to move past the hackery part of his life. He’s also skeptical of what is to come and what Cosmo seems to be embracing, as shown in the exchange quoted above; Bishop’s hesitance to embrace a world where everything is determined by information and who controls it is notable, and in Redford’s hands, very, very real. Redford does things in this film with simple facial expressions that are just wonderful: a rolling of his eyes when he’s told to hurry up when doing a job where moving as slowly as possible is required, or a sudden snarl when he decides to punch out the thug who has been inconveniencing him all movie long. Or his mischievous smile that lets us know he’s pulled a fast one on somebody.
Most of all, though, Redford captures that Bishop is the brains and the heart of this whole operation. He’s the one who suspects first that this whole business with the code-breaking machine is more than he bargained for and that he and his team are involved in something more deep and sinister than they have ever dealt with before. This is something that Robert Redford was always great at, something that made him one of the best. He was always able to suggest, often without even saying anything, the emotional and intellectual lives his characters were leading.
And he was just so damned cool about it. Who wouldn’t want to be Robert Redford, after all?
Oh, this is a delayed Something for Thursday post as well, so here’s a nice suite culled together from the soundtrack to Sneakers, with music composed by the late, great James Horner. This is one of the great “caper film” scores of all time.
