Meryl Streep as Florence Foster Jenkins

Meryl Streep walks the finest of fine lines between send-up and sincerity in her inspired portrait of the socialite and patron of the arts, Florence Foster Jenkins (Toscanini was a beneficiary and friend), in this nuanced and enjoyable biopic directed by Stephen Frears: a bon mot here, a visual joke there. For 25 years, the matronly Jenkins promoted classical music through her Verdi Club with annual presentations of vivid tableaux set to the likes of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, in which she would invariably appear, for example, as “the angel of inspiration sent from on high to inspire.”

“We’d rather go without bread than Mozart,” she said.

Finally able to realize her childhood dream of singing after her father’s death, she began performing before her society friends and “music lovers,” ultimately making a record and playing a legendary Carnegie Hall concert in 1944 at age 76. It’s quickly apparent that the voice she heard in her head was not the one that came out of her mouth; it was excruciating and inimitable. The notoriety of her high coloratura soprano is marvellously captured by Streep and Frears in the film which unfolds over the months leading up to the infamous recital.

Meryl Streep, Simon Helberg and Hugh Grant

The Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute from that evening was gleefully depicted in the film, brazenly off key. Yet by this point, Frears and screenwriter Nicholas Martin had humanized Jenkins, her husband St. Clair Bayfield (wittily underplayed by Hugh Grant) and piano accompanist Cosmé McMoon (Simon Helberg, an adept comic actor whose musical training enabled him to actually play as Streep sang, upping the verisimilitude quotient immensely).

Considering the amount of music that was inherently part of the narrative – Adele’s Laughing Song from Die Fledermaus and The Bell Song from Lak (both enthusiastically and lovingly massacred by Streep and Helberg); Respighi’s Valse Caressante (surprisingly sung sweetly and straight by Streep and Helberg); Brahms’ Lullaby serenely done by Anne Sofie von Otter and Bengt Forsberg; Take It Easy by Fats Waller wisely used as an instrumental bridge – Alexandre Desplat’s discreet score was the model of support, lightly orchestrated contemporaneous jazz-based, even riffing on Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony at a crucial plot point.

Florence Foster Jenkins is currently playing at Cineplex Varsity & VIP and 14 other cinemas in the GTA.

Frank Zappa and Steve Allen 1963Frank Zappa

When Frank Zappa was a young teenager in high school he bought an Edgard Varèse album (The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One) that spoke to him; the Rite of Spring excited him, too, as did an album by Webern. From the age of 14 he wrote chamber music; he was 22 before he wrote a lyric. Indeed, the influence of Varèse is audible in much of his music. In Thorsten Schütte’s absorbing, revelatory documentary, Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words, it’s never clearer than when we hear Pedro’s Dowry (1979) with its distinctive 20th-century noodling. Schütte spent years “snuffling out Zappa truffles in television archives, finding an amazing treasure trove of interviews, TV appearances and concert recording” before celebrating the man and his extraordinary musical and political legacy through the prism of this archival footage in his finished film.

Frank Zappa and Steve Allen 1963

Excerpts from 28 of Zappa’s compositions, including the very early Improvised Piece for Two Bicycles, Pre-Recorded Noise and Orchestra he performed on the Steve Allen Show in 1963 (alongside the bemused host), make up the rich soundtrack. Fascinating archival footage ranges from two interviews from the 1980s with Chuck Ash, a Pennsylvania State Trooper in full uniform, to a remarkable reception by Czech president Vaclav Havel which formalized the state acceptance of his music by a country whose citizens first fell in love with it in 1972 causing it to be banned by the then Soviet bloc country.

Frank Zappa

With his unruly hair and soul patch, Zappa appeared to embody the 1960s generation gap, his appearance alone an affront to straight society. Yet he barely tasted cannabis and banned drug taking by his band on road trips. A master showman whose acute social observations led to lyrics that caught the zeitgeist (while mocking and offending the establishment), Zappa was an articulate defender of free speech and a self-proclaimed conservative with a wife, four children and a mortgage. A gifted guitarist who led small and large groups of musicians, he considered himself primarily a conductor who was also the music’s composer.

For a man who “always wanted to be a serious musician,” who hired the London Symphony Orchestra and the 31-year-old Kent Nagano to perform and record several of his complex scores in 1983, and who believed that “the whole body of my life is one composition,” it’s fitting that Schütte’s final images of Zappa in the film show him conducting Varèse’s Ionisation (the only music in the film Zappa didn’t write).

Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words began its exclusive Toronto engagement at TIFF Bell Lightbox July 8.

Yo-Yo Ma in The Music of Strangers

Morgan Neville, fresh from his Oscar-winning documentary, Twenty Feet from Stardom, has crafted his most personal film to date with The Music of Strangers, a joyous account of Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. Neville, a musician himself, found working with “these great musicians almost a religious experience.” His devotion shows in the three and a half years of work that took him all over the globe to tell the film’s uplifting story of the power of music to speak to disparate audiences and unite diverse performers.

Ma literally grew up with music and fell into being a professional musician without having found his voice (according to the composer Leon Kirchner who was one of his Harvard professors). But he would do so through his association with the worldwide collection of upwards of 50 musicians who comprise Silkroad. A constant questioner, Ma was influenced by Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Norton Lectures that sought a universal explanation of music. The cellist’s search for the origins of creativity took him to the intersections of cultures.

Cristina Pato

Neville focuses on Ma but also brings us the stories of several key Silkroad participants: Kinan Azmeh, the genial Syrian clarinetist, who found refuge in New York City from his country’s civil war; Wu Man, pipa virtuoso extraordinaire, who was part of the first class to enter the conservatory in China following the Cultural Revolution, and who benefitted from Isaac Stern’s historic master classes [see the 1979 documentary From Mao to Mozart]; and Cristina Pato, the Galician bagpiper whose enthusiastic musicianship is contagious, and whose dog is named Yo-Yo.

Neville said after last September’s TIFF premiere that he thinks of culture as the plate the cake sits on -- it’s “the most essential thing, not just the frosting on the cake.” The Music of Strangers is prima facie evidence of that essence.

The Music of Strangers plays the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema [formerly the Bloor] from July 8 to 14.

Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma on set of Mission: Impossible as seen in De Palma.

De Palma, the indispensable documentary about Brian De Palma, directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, is a candid, highly entertaining and illuminating look at one of Hollywood’s longest directorial careers from the mouth of the man himself. In compulsively watchable detail, De Palma -- who considers himself “the one practitioner who took up Hitchcock’s form” -- talks about each of his 29 features, dropping one factual nugget after another. (As a child, the fledgling director saw a lot of blood watching his orthopedic surgeon father operate; later he would follow his father hoping to catch him cheating on his mother.)  Anecdotes and analysis range from camerawork and direct influences to gossip about famous actors not learning lines (Orson Welles).  

Baumbach and Paltrow seamlessly intercut scenes from 45 years of filmmaking; the comfort level among the three men (who have known each other for ten years) is key to De Palma’s ease and forthrightness as he examines his entire career.

                                  Sean Connery, Brian De Palma and Andy Garcia on set of The Untouchables as seen in De Palma.

De Palma has worked with the cream of film composers, from Bernard Herrmann (“who sees the movie and goes off and writes the score”) on Obsession and Sisters to John Williams (Williams’ 1978 score for The Fury was one of De Palma’s favourites); Danny Elfman (Mission: Impossible), Mark Isham and Ryuichi Sakamoto to seven with Pino Donaggio (Carrie, Dressed to Kill etc). The idea for Phantom of the Paradise came from hearing a Beatles song playing as Muzak in an elevator; Paul Williams, its composer, was able to write parodies of all sorts of pop music forms. De Palma offers several insights into Ennio Morricone’s work on The Untouchables. (“Give a composer the time and space to develop the scene… the sequences inspire the composer.”)

And to think it all began when De Palma saw Vertigo at Radio City Music Hall as a teenager in 1958.

De Palma opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox June 17. Split/Screen: The Cinema of Brian De Palma – also at the Lightbox – runs from June 18 until September 3 screening 25 of his feature films.

Diamond driller and sunrise over Northwest B.C.  A scene from KONELĪNE: our land beautiful.. A Canada Wild Production

Nettie Wild’s magnificent new documentary, Koneline, is a fully fleshed-out portrait of a place and its diverse inhabitants. Shot in northwestern B.C. in the region of the Stikine River and the Cassiar Mountains, it’s a film of contrasts anchored by an inclusive even-handedness that reflects the filmmaker’s mature view of her subject, a wild habitat of pristine beauty and precious natural resources that is home to the Tahltan First Nation, fishermen, miners, hunting guides and hydro workers, all of whom are in thrall to the area’s remoteness.

Northern Lights on the North West Transmission Line.                              A scene from KONELĪNE: our land beautiful.                             A Canada Wild Production.

Some are attracted by the Northern Lights, the snow-covered mountains, glaciers and the howling wolves; others by the Stikine River valley (“the Serengeti of North America”). The Tahltan First Nation elders are worried about Imperial Metals’ mine (Wild cuts from their meeting with the mining company’s supervisor and B.C. Cabinet Minister to a pristine birch grove but also pointedly shows the bonds between the elders and a young Tahltan miner who welcomes the opportunity to feed his family and the compromise that seems to be the modus operandi of everyone involved).

The ecstasy of stick gambling,                                   A scene from KONELĪNE: our land beautiful.                                   A Canada Wild Production.

A Tahltan father and son spend a day killing and cleaning a moose, then the evening playing fiddle and guitar in a dance band; a woman who hunts in the bush also makes moccasins with her husband; others fish the river as their ancestors did 8,000 years ago; and there are those whose love of stick gambling is vocation enough. A hunting guide clears 100 miles of trails and guides her pack of horses from a motorboat as they swim across a wide river to prepare for a season of 14-hour tourist-driven days of hunting.

The astounding images and the stories of the people who live within them are enhanced by Koneline’s evocative electronic score by Jesse Zubot and Hildegard Westerkamp, whose fingerprints seem to be all over the soundtrack. Known for her work as a founding member of R. Murray Schaefer’s World Soundscape Project, soundwalking -- her own environmental listening events -- and her considerable contribution to several films of Gus Van Sant, Westerkamp is able to contextualize an individual within his surroundings using an uncanny blend of natural and electronic sounds. At one point the sound of ice pellets and the wind merge into a melodious hybrid; sometimes we seem to be listening to a concerto for wind. At others, the soundtrack varies from wariness and apprehension to inspiration, intensifying Wild’s narrative.

Koneline: Landscape with Pink Sky

Koneline [Kóh - nah - lee - nah] won the Best Feature Documentary Award at the 2016  Hot Docs Canadian and International Film Festival.

Koneline: our land beautiful begins a limited week-long engagement June 10 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.

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