Florence Foster Jenkins

The film Florence Foster Jenkins begins with Aida Garifullina, portraying war-era opera star Lily Pons, singing The Bell Song from the opera Lakme’ in Carnegie Hall. Pons’ (Garifullina’s) voice is beautiful, so pure that it’s hard not to cry hearing it. The voice of Florence Foster Jenkins, who is in the audience, is not pure, and sharing it, which she often does, produces a different reaction – laughter usually, and often distress. Thus, director Stephen Frears’ opening scene sets the stage for a well-crafted story about the dualities of life – the purity we humans can possess and demonstrate juxtaposed against our abundant frailties and failures. The fact that Florence Foster Jenkins actually existed makes the telling of it just that much more enjoyable. 

Those unfamiliar with this stranger-than-fiction story will find it hard to fathom.  Florence Foster Jenkins, marvelously portrayed by Meryl Streep, has had a love for music since a young age. A talented pianist as a child, her desire for a career in music was derailed by the will of her father and, finally, a hand injury. We encounter Florence later in life; a significant inheritance has allowed her to pursue her love of music and lifelong passion for public performance through involvement and financial sponsorship of the wealthy New York City art society and social clubs. Along with her husband (sort of) and manager, St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), a failed British Shakespearean actor, Jenkins performs in her own well-attended social club. After a club performance of a tableaux vivant, she reveals to Bayfield her desire to continue voice lessons and expand her singing career. There’s just that one problem – she has no voice… she can’t sing, not a lick. 

It would be easy from here to treat Florence Foster Jenkins as farce – I mean it is, on the surface, just that. But Frears strikes the better balance between joke and poignancy. Florence’s ear-spitting warbles are mingled and matched with the beauty of other sounds and voices. Although whimsy abounds, we are never left too long without a reminder of the charade that is going on. Jenkins is coddled due to her great wealth and allowed her indulgence to perform – even reaching Carnegie Hall – in part, by those who live and thrive from her support. But, as with most lives, there’s context surrounding the foolishness and Frears takes time to reveal pain along side the pomp,  and empathy and selflessness against selfishness. Frears and the script writers walk the thin line masterfully bracketed by the perfectly-pitched performance of Streep and Grant, and a clever take by Simon Helberg (The Big Bang Theory) as Florence’s opportunistic but confused pianist. 

Some may decide that the balance is too one sided in Florence Foster Jenkins - that the film is too soft on its subject. But heck, we’re all fools at some time… in some way. We hope that our remaining substance is still noticeable during those times and that we are lucky enough, like Florence, to have plenty of love to cushion us in our follies. And a little tenderness never hurt anyone. Go see the show, I think you’ll like it - 8 out of 10. 

Star Trek Beyond gets lost in space

Beyond is the third installment in the Star Trek reboot. Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek - Into Darkness (2013) were both good films. The success and quality of the restart stems, in part, from the clever time-travel slide of hand unveiled at the beginning of the first new Star Trek, which left us with all of the beloved characters from of the original but placed them at a new starting point to shoot off from. From that new vertex has come two good stories that have mixed the fresh with the familiar. The Star Trek series now lives in a slightly tangential universe from the one we experienced with Bill Shatner and crew. But the characters’ DNA is the same and J. Abrams and his writers used that concept beautifully in the first two films to weave our old friends through new tales within a slightly twisted Star Trek environment. Star Trek Beyond aims to follow the same path with a story that mirrors, in a distorted way, another time from the original Star Trek – a story of finding ones “first best destiny” amidst fear and doubt – a la The Wrath of Khan (1982). But alas, Beyond lacks the substance and heart of its parallel-predecessor – Beyond’s turning points get lost in a “fast and furious” blur. 

After three years of the “five-year-mission,” James Tiberius Kirk is wondering what it’s all about. He took the Federation gig on a dare. Now, three years in, and dealing with the more mundane tasks of exploring strange new worlds, Kirk is “lost” and on the brink of taking a desk job. Recall that the Shatner-version of Kirk was in a similar fix in the original Star Trek universe until Kahn showed up in the Botany Bay. But with the Kahn character used up by J. Abram’s in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), new director Justin Lin (Fast and the Furious) and a writing team that included Simon Pegg (who also plays Scotty) give us Krall, a lizardy villian who tricks Kirk into putting the Enterprise in harms way but also reignites the Captain’s juices as he fights to save her. If this sounds supremely familiar, it should – it was Kahn, recall, who masqueraded as a Federation star ship to rend the old Enterprise from a spectacled Shatner-Kirk back in 82. Krall is also searching for a super weapon reminiscent of Kahn’s quest for the “Genesis Probe.”But it’s not the familiarity that stymies Beyond – that’s expected with the new Trek universe – we welcome the parallelism and are tantalized wondering how it will be fashioned in each new film. No, it’s not the concept that is the problem, it’s the follow through – there is none.  

This was all foreshadowed of course. I mean, with the director of the Fast and the Furious mega-series and the author of the scripts for Hot Fuzz and Sean of the Dead at the helm (or conn), you can’t expect anything too profound – and this team certainly met my lowered expectations. The finding of Kirk’s best self, it turns out, is a very minor side story attached to a very forgettable core. Lin and his team are much more about the visual than the visceral. But his relentless action scenes trend from frantic to incomprehensible. They are long things, narrated by the crew’s rapid fire, nonsensical, MacGyver escape ideas. And poor Krall is a hot mess – his villainous motivations are feeble and the explanation for his existence – extremely questionable. Even the Kirk-Spock-Bones interplay, which I thought might be highlighted by Pegg’s comedic talents, seem strained, as if the writer has worked to hard to get them into the same elevator or transporter. It’s not that the buddy scenes are bad because there not – they’re easily the best part of the film. But they’re not enough to keep Star Trek Beyond from ranking third of three in the new Star Trek enterprise. 5.5 out of 10.

Jason Bourne

They just ran out of nouns I guess. That’s what happens when you make more than three… you start running out of nouns. Imagine the pressure to come up with a really good noun after the likes of “Identify”, “Supremacy”, and “Ultimatum” – those are all great nouns. You might get four nouns maybe (“Legacy” is not bad I guess), but five… give it up. And so they did… just called it Jason Bourne. Oh, they also gave up on finding anything new to wrap this fifth Bourne film around – they ran out of story for Bourne to act on. Just used the same stuff – warped CIA directors, foreign assets living in small hotel rooms (who takes these jobs?), and Jason Bourne’s fractured psyche. It’s all kind of the same. In fact, some of it is exactly the same… but it still sort of works.

We left Jason Bourne a couple of films ago after he discovered his true identity and faced down his creators. He said that it “ended there”, back in Ultimatum, but it didn’t. He says he remembers everything now. But it turns out he still doesn’t have the whole story, so we need Universal to keep making these movies – it’s about closure I guess… and millions of dollars in profits. We now find Bourne off the grid in Greece – a traveling fist fighter, beating and allowing himself to be beaten on – a sort of self-imposed punishment, we suppose, for all of the damage he’s done. Bourne’s wracked with guilt for the lives he’s taken as Treadstone’s super assassin and unclear about his true nature – is he a killer at his core or a brain-washed victim of an off-track security machine? Enter former colleague and Moped partner Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) who has continued to monitor the CIA’s nasty doings via the cyber-underground since she went on the run in Ultimatum.  She has information about a new and even more insidious CIA program and has also stumbled onto some troubling news about Bourne’s father Darth Vader… errr, I mean Richard Webb and his role in Treadstone. And Bang! Bourne has something to do again – it’s tired motivation, but it’s something. 

The first thing to do of course is to get out the old passports and start Bourne Carmen San Diego-ing around the globe – check. On the other side, the CIA still has access to every camera everywhere (including in space) and they pick up Bourne’s re-entry – check. Some of them get that “we’re in deep stuff” look on their faces and plot to take out Bourne because he knows too much – check. While others raise one eyebrow guessing that something is amiss here – check, check, check, and… check, check. It’s like setting up for a game of Clue for the umpteenth time – same suspects, same rooms. But we keep playing Clue don’t we? And you’ll keep watching Jason Bourne. Because despite the familiarity, the film is still able to create significant tension. Writer-director Paul Greengrass’ action is consistently crisp. Although not as good as those in Ultimatum, Bourne’s confrontations and chase scenes are still exciting and all pulled off without the over-the-top CGI bombast that most blockbusters fall back on. Still, the hub-bub seems less important this time. Even a new out-of-the-headlines subplot that has the CIA secretly embedding a massive surveillance program within a popular social media platform fails to generate the energy of the original trilogy. The lack of an intriguing story line puts it all back on an older, thicker Bourne to carry the film home – quick-walking, almost reluctantly this time, in search of himself. Jason Bourne is still frenetic and fun, but its path is worn and has lost a step or two. 6 out of 10.