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lifestyle WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2016 MUSIC & MOVIES Review Florence Foster Jenkins: Tone-deaf but adored hen opera lovers ask New York’s Carnegie Hall for souvenir concert programs, they’re not usually inter- Wested in Maria Callas or Joan Sutherland. More often than not, the name they request is Florence Foster Jenkins, an American socialite who only appeared at the legendary venue once, and couldn’t hold a note. “In order for a singer to suc- ceed, they need to have a combination of talent, charisma, and interpretive quality,” Carnegie’s archives director Gino Francesconi wrote in a blogpost commemorating her life. “And, by definition, they need to be able to sing. Florence Foster Jenkins had none of these attributes. In fact, she was considered one of the worst singers of all time.” Jenkins, who craved fame as a diva but gained infamy for her terrible voice, is the subject of “Florence Foster Jenkins,” a bittersweet biopic which hits US theaters this week, starring three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant. “She almost gets it, and that’s what I found delicious in her,” Streep told the audience at a preview screening for the Paramount picture in Beverly Hills last week. “I started listening to the recordings and I could feel her This image released by Disney shows Oakes Fegley in a scene from “Pete’s Dragon.”— AP getting really excited and her thinking ‘This is going very well,’” said the actress. Jenkins, who inherited a fortune from her father in 1909, had to give up her beloved piano due to nerve damage from syphilis contracted from her first husband when she was just a teenager. She used her wealth to indulge her passion for opera singing instead, putting on grand artistic ‘Pete’s Dragon’ (pleasantly) stays earthbound soirees for polite society at the Ritz-Carlton, the Waldorf and other upscale Manhattan venues. fter an exhausting summer buffet of set pieces, super- motion, the gravity of the car’s interior is upended. The car Zealand, again, subbing for North America) reigns over “Pete’s ‘Vanity’ heroes and whatever s-word you might use for “Suicide flips off the road and Pete staggers from the crash. Dragon,” a tale scored with soft bluegrass and exuding an Those who heard her-often acquaintances rather than pay- Squad,” the gentle “Pete’s Dragon” is a welcome palate Flashing forward six years, Pete (Oakes Fegley) is a wild 10- environment-friendly love for the beautiful and exotic splen- A ing members of the public-knew she was a terrible singer but cleanser. Where other summer movies are chest-thumping, it’s year-old orphan living in the woods alone except for his magi- dors of nature. When competing interests come for Elliott, none ever felt inclined to tell her. “It became a thing to do. You quiet; where others are brashly cynical, it’s sweetly sincere; cal companion, the dragon Elliott. As far as CGI creatures go, they are really fighting for the soul of the forest. had to go and listen to Florence Foster screw up every song where others are lacking in giant cuddly dragons, “Pete’s Elliott is an irresistible one. Furry as a fairway, he’s like an enor- There are Spielbergian gestures here of magic and family she attempted to sing,” says Francesconi. She was persuaded Dragon” has one. Few may remember the 1977 Disney origi- mous emerald-green puppy. Far from the “Game of Thrones” and faith, perhaps better orchestrated than Spielberg’s own to make her Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 76 on October nal, in which a young boy’s best friend was a bubbly dragon dragon variety, he’s more adept at chasing his own tail than recent try at a Disney film, “The BFG.” But it’s missing a spark, a 25, 1944 and walked onstage in flamboyant homemade cos- invisible to others. As part of Disney’s continuing effort to breathing fire. He’s also the subject of local folklore, mostly as sense of danger and maybe a little humor. The lean simplicity tumes, throwing roses into the sell-out crowd. The concert remake its animated classics in live-action, “Pete’s Dragon” has told by Robert Redford’s wood-carving storyteller. of “Pete’s Dragon” is its greatest attribute and its weakness. It went as poorly as had every other recital, but this time Jenkins been confidently reborn as an earnest tale of green-winged doesn’t quite achieve liftoff until the film’s final moments. But was not among friends. wonder. Magic and family and faith it does at last catch flight, finally soaring beyond its humble Henry Simon of the daily newspaper PM described the David Lowery, a veteran of the independent film world and But it’s his forest ranger daughter Grace (Bryce Dallas folksiness. “Pete’s Dragon,” a Walt Disney Co release, is rated PG audience’s laughter as “the cruelest and least civilized behav- the director of the lyrical crime drama “Ain’t Them Bodies Howard) that first encounters Elliott and ultimately leads to by the Motion Picture Association of America for “action, peril ior I have ever witnessed in Carnegie Hall.” But a less charitable Saints,” inherits a far bigger film. But his “Pete’s Dragon” still the dragon’s discovery. Grace coaxes Elliott back into society and brief language.” Running time: 103 minutes. Three stars write-up in the Los Angeles Times described the performance maintains the homespun feel of an American fable. Spielberg- and into the fold of her family. She has a daughter, Natalie out of four. — AP as the “most pathetic exhibition of vanity I have ever seen.” The light, you might call it. The film begins, in the “Bambi” tradi- (Oona Laurence) and lumber mill-running husband Jack (Wes singer’s common-law husband, failed Shakespearean actor St tion, in parental tragedy. Pete’s family is driving through a Bentley). It’s the push by a logging company - where Jack’s Clair Bayfield hadn’t approved of the concert, and wrote after remote Pacific Northwest forest with Pete nestled in the back- brother, Gavin (Karl Urban) is a gun-totting lumberjack - into her death that it had “turned out the fiasco I expected.” seat of the station wagon, reading a children’s book about a the forest that simultaneously begins flushing out Pete and “Afterward, when we went home, Florence was upset-and dog named Elliott. A deer sprints out and, in poetic slow- Elliott from their home in the trees. The lush forest (New when she read the reviews, crushed. She had not known, you see,” he added. Diagnosed with heart strain, she died a month later. Directed by Stephen Frears (“Philomena,” “The Queen”), the A Minute With: Robert Redford movie was shot in London and Liverpool, a city in northwest- ern England whose architecture is said to resemble that of on magical childhood stories 1940s Manhattan. ollywood veteran Robert Redford returns A: This was about a chance to return to my ‘Funny and moving’ to his childhood love of fantasy stories in own childhood experience and remember times “I thought it was a very special kind of gift, an adventure, H“Pete’s Dragon,” a new Disney film about when I was a kid ... I loved stories that had magic to look into the life of someone who had no understanding of an orphaned boy living in a forest and his friend- in them. Then you grow out of that as you get how she presented, except to hope that it went well,” said ship with one such creature. The fantasy adven- older and you miss it. So this was a chance to Streep, 67. Grant-whose acting had taken a back seat to cam- ture is a remake of the 1977 movie of the same play a role in a film that allowed me to step back paigning in Britain for tighter regulation of the country’s name and this time movie features a realistic into that time. famously rowdy tabloid press-was in semi-retirement, “having green-furred computer-generated creation of Q: How did you imagine the dragon? Did a baby a week, basically,” when he was asked to play Bayfield. the dragon named Elliot. anyone give you any cues? “Stephen, who I knew a bit through the politics, started to Redford, 79, known for films such as “Butch A: No, you really had to imagine the dragon make noises about a film. I thought he was joking and then Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Out of because all you got when you were working was suddenly this script appeared on my desk from him,” said the Africa”, plays Meacham, the father of forest a pole with a tennis ball at the end and that was actor, who has fathered four children since turning 50. “Not ranger Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) and the only the dragon ... You had to imagine what the drag- only was it funny and moving, but it was also directed by him- one other than Pete (Oakes Fegley) to encounter on would look like because it hadn’t been devel- he’s quite classy-and Meryl bloody Streep was going to be in it the dragon. oped yet. so I absolutely had to say yes.”—AFP Q: You’re seen as this champion of inde- Q: What do you think this film says about pendent cinema, so what was it that made the environment? you decide to go into this? A: If we keep cutting down trees, if we keep cutting things away and taking things away, pretty soon there will be nothing left to take ‘The Exorcist’ TV producers explain away.

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