So, Matt Damon is now middle-aged?  Who knew?  And by the way, what does that mean for me?  But I digress.

The Adjustment Bureau in a nutshell – Matt Damon plays a washed up politician who meets the the very charming and funny Emily Blunt.  Damon falls hard for the English lass,  but the keepers of fate decide it was never meant to be and try their best to keep the two apart.  Our man Matt’s not having it though and pursues his girl until the bittersweet end.

The story line is thin, but the chemistry of Damon and Blunt make this film work somehow.  Blunt belongs to the Lucille Ball, Debra Messing school of comedic heroine. Her timing is fresh and her beauty present but accessible.  Damon, once again, shows us that Boston charm that has allowed him to go far on very little.  This film is a medium-speed action adventure on foot.  Run Matt. Run.  It doesn’t strive for very much and for that reason succeeds in delivering something worth watching.

Nothing else to do? Yeah, why not.  Give it a go…

So listen.  Jones is right that the Met production of Lucia di Lammermoor wasn’t in top form.  Natalie Dessay started slow, but I have to admit finished strongly with her death aria.  I mean – the lady knows how to exit.  Dessay’s voice ended with colour, and a playful wisp that almost made me believe she’d find a way to hang around a bit longer. Thankfully, she didn’t as we got a chance to hear and see her visceral and beautifully physical demise.  But, I think more should be made of tenor Joseph Callejas in the role of Edgardo.  The role isn’t easy in that the opera is written with Lucia in mind. Edgardo is a tricked, betrayed romantic who at every step misjudges the wrath of Lucia’s brother and the frailty turned fickleness of Lucia herself.  In most productions the role is a backdrop or a plinth from which Lucia pushes.

But, Callejas didn’t let the limitations of the libretto stop him.  In his interpretation, Edgardo became, not a romantic, but love in allegorical form.  The consistency and richness of this tenor removed him from membership in the retinue of singers hoping for greatness and placed him as one of the best currently on stage.   I also note that Callejas managed to make his role as much about the vulnerability of blind, extreme, masculine love as Dessay did the sublime tragedy of the feminine version.

Dessay pulled it off at the end, but Callejas delivered all the way through.

Thumbs up here.  Go see it New York.

There was a clamorous lack of tartan in the Met’s Lucia, broadcast live last evening at selected cinemas around the world – a missed opportunity, but  a conscious decision, I’m sure. The up-dating to the second bustle period also seems  un-necessary and makes the story, pretty ridiculous in the early 18th century when it’s set, absolutely idiotic, unless one accepts it as just a tale of doomed love and ignores the political clan rivalry that causes it to be doomed. This being said, it was then a wonderful production with real (albeit Irish!) wolfhounds in the opening scene on the Scottish moors. A ghostly figure appears in this scene for all, except Lucia’s companion, to see, so we’re still not certain if this is a figment of the poor girl’s imagination, made febrile by her mother’s death and her own passion for the neighbouring Laird, her own family’s sworn enemy.

Natalie Dessay seemed, to my ear, a little under par in this performance, though it may, of course, have been the quality of the sound production. The audience at the cinema where I was watching, mostly old enough to have seen Callas in the role (if not, in some cases, Nellie Melba) also seemed somewhat unimpressed by her. What she did bring to the role, almost impossible for the likes of Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills both of whom  played the role to great acclaim, was a sense of Lucia’s fragility, and this did add a dimension often not possible to stress in productions of this opera.

Joseph Calleja was in great voice as Edgardo and Natalie Dessaye and he sang wonderfully together. The scenes between Edgardo and Lucia’s manipulative brother Enrico, spiritedly played and sung by Ludovic Tezier, were some of the most stirring of the evening.

An enjoyable evening, then, but I didn’t feel I had seen a truly great or definitive performance or production.

The thing about commercial film these days is that there’s so much hype around the major releases before you get to the  cinema.  The weeks before Howl opened were filled with pronouncements of actor James Franco’s lack of physical similiarity with Allen Ginsberg, of Franco’s ability to cleverly catch the essence of the Beat poet’s placid radicalism, and of the capricious mix of live shot and animated segments that comprise the film.

Franco has been a visible presence on TV and radio with much being made of his intelligence – demonstrated by his studies at Oxford and his current status as a candidate for a Phd in English literature at Yale.  Here, at last, is an actor with the intelligence and acting skill to bind the subtle threads of the sensitive radical that was Allen Ginsberg.  Or, at least, this is what we were told.

Howl is adventurous.  It attempts to take the literally minded film-goer used to concrete images and  fully-developed characters and throws him into a world where the walking Ginsberg, unlucky in love, poised against the establishment, is adroitly juxtaposed with the creative carver of verse.  Lewdly and incisively yet truthfully and simply he writes of his love, his lust, his street, your street.  The film is successful in presenting the overlapping influences of  family, love, and social revolution on the poet’s life and work without being pedantic.

Franco, however, was disappointing.  His portrayal of the urban bard smacks of the smarmy brainiac who thinks he can do anything well – probably because the rest of us tell him that he can.  Well, he can’t.  Our Yale hero shows acting as imitative truth without an understanding of what it means to be marginalised and fighting, ugly yet beautiful, lonely yet adored.

Credit  should be given to all involved for the attempt, but this film is a lesson in the need for film casting to be less concerned with star quality and more concerned with casting leads who have a connection with the material.  I’m not saying that Franco is too young, too pretty, or too smart for the role.  I’m saying that he isn’t Ginsberg and lacks the qualitities needed to become Ginsberg – if only for a couple of film hours.

The film is worth seeing – but not cheering.

On February 12th, under the auspices of the newish  The Met Live in HD  series of productions, we went to see Nixon in China in live performance at the Met but showing  simultaneously at selected cinemas around the world, in this instance  the Gate Cinema, Notting Hill. Firstly the Metropolitan Opera deserves a huge bravo for initiating this idea, which I thought might have pitfalls but, if last evening was anything to go by, will run successfully for a long time to come. Something of the excitement of arriving at a great opera house seemed to have filtered through to this small cinema in West London  and I noticed, not without some satisfaction, that our audience didn’t seem significantly dowdier than that arriving for a matinée at the Met.

When I saw this production before I remember the first act seeming very static but the two great advantages of seeing it on film are, firstly, that the camera at least can move around and secondly, we had the magic of the close-up shots of the performers, missed by  our co-audience actually in the opera house. These two things added, in this instance, immeasurably to my enjoyment of the work.

The idea of turning this momentous meeting of  opposing ideologies into an opera came from Peter Sellars, who was in charge of the Met production; he put the idea to John Adams who, as well as having composed the music, was conducting the orchestra for yesterday‘s performance.  The work seems to have gained in stature – possibly it needs the size of stage provided by the Met and simply not available at the Colisseum in London, where I saw it before. The production seemed the same but widened and enlarged. The music seemed at the same time weightier and more tuneful than I remembered. This is nothing less than a truly great 20th century American opus.

James Maddalena’ singing as Nixon, a part he seems to have appropriated, seemed a little under par yesterday but the other performers were at the top of their game: Janis Kelly making much of Pat Nixon’s bewilderment and confusion when faced with a culture so alien to her own; Russell Braun magnificent as Chou En-lai, movingly wondering if the regime had achieved what it had set out to do and, indeed, if their aims were right for the Chinese people, whilst suffering from the pancreatic cancer which would soon kill him; Kathleen Kim giving a bravura performance as Madame Mao with Robert Brubaker strong as the frail Mao himself. Richard Paul Fink was also extraordinary as Henry Kissinger who, in the second act, takes the lead in a ballet choreographed by Mark Morris, while singing – no small feat for a somewhat portly singer.

All-in-all a wonderful and fascinating evening, and a chance to see world-class performers in great works a few hundred yards from home. Can’t wait for the next broadcast…..

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