Whiplash

bnt

Just finished watching Whiplash, and it's got me all annoyed, but for the right reasons, if that makes sense. A Rant now follows. How valid my annoyance is depends on how true-to-life the film is: the writer/director says he based it on his own experiences but "pushed it further". I've heard the stories about Buddy Rich, for example, who would sometimes fire his whole Big Band and rehire them the next morning.

As a musician, I have a problem with Jazz: not all Jazz, but the specific form of Big Band Jazz that appears in the film. The script specifically mentions the Lincoln Center scene and Wynton Marsalis, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Marsalis bears some of the blame for the state of Jazz today: a fossil with no soul. (I'm not making this up - see this for one more critique of many.)

The idea of musicians as interchangeable cogs in a machine is a plot point - drummers swapping in and out of the drum chair, all playing the same standard kit set up the same way. Want to move a cymbal to a better position? Nope. You get a new chart, and are expected to play it well straight away and perfectly the next day. No chance to put any of yourself in to the music. The chart says a tempo of 215BPM, you'd better it play at 215BPM, like a human metronome. We hear about Sean Casey, a graduate of Fletcher's class who moves up to the first chair in Marsalis' band - the pinnacle of Big Band Jazz achievement - then commits suicide.

I haven't read all the reviews, so I don't know if others see it as a critique of this kind of Jazz as a spectator sport. I was expecting Andrew to take some performance-enhancing drugs at one point, just so he could bash that ride cymbal a little bit faster. The difference between that style of fossilised Jazz and Music is the difference between Typing and Writing.

It's good when a film annoys me - it means it has actually gotten through to me, even if the message I received isn't necessarily the one the director was trying to send. I think we're supposed to feel some sympathy for / empathy with Terence Fletcher (JK Simmons) by the end, but I've got nothing. The character is an absolute horror of a human being, who only seems to be bothered by the loss of his teaching position because of how it came about (the lawsuit), but has learned nothing. He still thinks he can justify his passive-aggressive behaviour as excusable by his pedantic perfectionism. Music doesn't kill people: people kill people. :cool:

PS: I didn't say anything about the ending, which was deliberately ambiguous, but my thoughts are generally in line with what squonk said above. Andrew got his five minutes in the sun, definitely showboating. The critics & jazz musos in the audience probably wouldn't hire him on the basis of what he did, since it comes off as undisciplined, but then Andrew, by this point, doesn't want that anyway. The ray of hope I see comes from a magazing clipping we see on a wall, which reads (paraphrased) "anyone who plays Rock is no longer a musician". With that kind of elitist crap in the air at that college, I hope Andrew soon gets exposed to The Who, Led Zeppelin, Rush, The Police, and other bands with great rocking drummers. Maybe then he'll actually get to enjoy music for music's sake.

Kirby

Late to the party. Several years late in fact. Not sure how I missed this one but watched it last night and thought it was great.

Not a fan of drumming. When the BPM is that high it sounds more like noise than music to me and I haven't changed my opinion on that but it doesn't matter as it could have been any instrument centre stage.

Simmons is bloody brilliant. I can see why he won so many awards and accolades.

This movie was certainly my tempo.

CatFromHue

Simmons was great, Teller was pretty good too which seems to be over looked a bit.

It's a funny film when you think about it as there aren't that many films were nearly all the cast are quite unlikeable.

Melissa Benoist's character, the girlfriend, is the only actual likeable character imo.

El Duda

This is probably in my top 5 of the last decade or so. Exhilerating would be the most apt word to describe it.

CatFromHue

For me it's much better than Birdman, which won Best Picture at The Oscars.

Bridman, while cinematographically and acting wise very good, I just couldn't get into and found by the end I was bored by it.

Going into the final parts of Whiplash I'd no idea what was going to happen and when I thought it was over there was so much more still to come.