Signs warn of alligators and snakes near Seven Seas Lagoon.
By Tom Meek GLOBE CORRESPONDENT SEPTEMBER 09, 2016
Vacation resorts — those destinations you leverage your life savings for so the family can relax and have fun without sweating the pressures of daily life — include safety and security as part of the package, right? Such was the likely expectation of the family from Nebraska whose 2-year-old son was killed by an alligator at Walt Disney World’s Grand Floridian Resort earlier this summer. The attack, which took place on an idyllic swath of beach on the manmade Seven Seas Lagoon, occurred as the family took in one of the resort’s family movie night offerings. For me the news was extra chilling, as just weeks earlier, my wife and 6-year-old daughter sat on that very beach watching “The Force Awakens.” Eerier still was the realization that a misadventure of mine two years earlier had given me a glimmer into the dangers that lurked in Walt’s waters.
I’ll be the first to testify to the structural beauty of the stately Grand Floridian and its limitless amenities, but those foreboding “no swimming” signs along the beaches gave me pause the very first time I passed them by. There was no footnote or qualification, just a red slash through a silhouetted swimmer. I assumed the water was polluted. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
If you’re not familiar with Ayer, he’s a guy’s guy, the testosterone-probing hand behind such brooding character studies as “Harsh Times” and 
Basically in the new “Jason Bourne” we’re a long way from the Robert Ludlum material that was so organically and intricately concerned with spy games and double dealings at the highest levels, with Jason Bourne caught up as the harried fly in the ointment. In the five installments – four starring Matt Damon and now three of those helmed by chaos choreography maestro Paul Greengrass (“Captain Phillips” and “United 93”) – the impetus has moved from an internal struggle driven by outside forces to dubious machinations in those external structures (the CIA and its splintered sub-organizations) looking for any excuse to put Bourne in someone’s crosshairs. In this case it’s those of CIA director Robert Dewey (a craggy Tommy Lee Jones, inheriting the role of heavy from Albert Finney) who doesn’t want Bourne (and his long-running inside collaborative, Nicky Parsons, played again by Julia Stiles) to pull a WikiLeaks dump of the Treadstone file (listing all the behaviorally engineered Bourne-like assassins). Plus he’s got his hooks into social media mogul Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), an amalgam of Zuckerberg and the Google guys, and wants to leverage the company’s Deep Dream network platform (think Facebook) as a tool to acquire info on anyone, anywhere, anytime. 
Our protagonist, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), an impassioned nebbish from the Bronx with dreams of grandeur, possesses the right seeding of an Allen alter-ego. Given he’s a young man living in a cramped post-Depression apartment with a yenta-lite mom (an excellent Jeannie Berlin), Bobby heads to Tinseltown, where Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) is an agent to the stars and hobnobs with the likes of Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers and Errol Flynn. We never meet any of these icons like we did in “Midnight in Paris,” but Phil talks to them often on the telephone as Bobby sits longingly across from him in Phil’s big office, hoping his mother’s brother will toss him a bone and give him a job.
For me, the month began with great optimism. I sent letters to transportation heads in Boston and Cambridge outlining 10 unnecessary hazards to bikers in each city where immediate improvement could be had. I ride a 15-mile round trip every day from Porter Square to the very end of the Seaport, and had hoped that, given the month, documenting these persistent areas of peril (unclassifiable on the wonderful, but limited
The basis of the film is an unpublished novel by Karen Rinaldi, who must be a friend of Miller’s. Or perhaps the project began as a fragile conversation at a cocktail party and took root once the financial backing got the green light. After sitting through the visual adaptation, I can only imagine that the final pieces of Rinaldi’s complicated love triangle among intellects never quite got cemented – thus its in-limbo status. Miller, who adapted the story as well as directs, is clearly all in and seems more comfortable behind the camera than with earlier efforts “Personal Velocity” (2002) and “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” (2005). 
