JPO Spring Symphony Season: Second Week

Just a few short notes from Thursday's JPO concert, the second in this Spring Symphony Season.

Justus Franz was back to conduct, and the soloist was the Latvian violinist Kristine Balanas. (After our ovation, she let us know she had been to South Africa twice before, and found our audiences warm and generous.) She played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, with an incredibly sweet, flowing sound (like a light lyric soprano), which was a bit small at times; sometimes, when the orchestra played, I couldn't hear her at all. She also played with a strikingly free rubato, some of the freest tempi that I've heard from a soloist. Her encore was a lovely tango, played with even greater sweetness and sensitive tempo fluctuations.

Jurd: The 10 Greatest Movies of All Time

The British film magazine Sight and Sound conducts a famous decennial poll, among movie critics and directors, for the Greatest Films of All Time. The first poll was in 1952, and the next one will be released later this year. It’s probably the most prestigious and respected of all such lists, and is one of the places that beatified Citizen Kane as the greatest of all movies. (Famously, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo knocked Citizen Kane from its Number One spot in the last poll, in 2012.)

No one asked me for my vote for the Top Ten, but, to observe the 2022 poll, I’m giving my own choices here. The task turned out to be inordinately tricky; there’s a host of inspiring and transformative artists that I would want represented in a list of the best that cinema has to offer – far more than ten little slots can accommodate. For the most part, I’ve resorted to whittling down a list of my top directors, and selecting one movie to represent each; it’s not a perfect system, and I’m just as unhappy about what needs to be left out as what I’m proud to include. But what would be a better number? Would we be happier if we could list twenty movies? We’d still have to cut out a few greats. Would fifty do, or would that start to make the selection a little less special? (Forget about ranking; there’s no idea for grading movies in individual slots that has ever made sense to me.)

Do please send me your own Top Ten selections; I’m very interested to see and publish as many individual lists as I can.

“Don’t Worry Darling” is Terrific

I’ve just come back from seeing Olivia Wilde’s new movie, Don’t Worry Darling, and I’m very excited to report that it was a terrific undertaking. I’ve seen many reports from people who found the movie unoriginal, dull, and insubstantial – and they’re entitled to those views – but my own experience was very, very different. From what I had heard, I was expecting a retread of The Stepford Wives, but from the movie’s first moments, it emerges as a keenly observed, deeply emotional, fiercely engaging work. And Wilde is shown to be a strong and distinctive director, one who can focus her assembled cast and crew not only into the absorbing endeavour of finely crafted storytelling, but into a unified artistic vision, a white-hot worldview presented visually.

If you’re interested in watching the movie fresh, perhaps you should stop reading here and go see it, because a lot of the thrill comes from the unfolding of the plot (though I won’t give away any details here). The setting of the movie is the microcosm of the wide world that is traditionally seen as the modern man’s lorded realm; namely, the household and the picture-perfect family that resides there. Like Ira Levin before her, Wilde has selected the insular and isolated suburban American neighbourhood of the 1950s as its quintessential representation – it’s the archetype of nuclear families with half-deified heads, as well as of women’s repressed individuality. It’s almost like Wilde has put a visual form of voiceover over her movie, to say, there’s a reason the mid-century feminist movement broke out in places that looked just as idyllic as this.