Whiplash

[The Ultimate Badass]

Best movie I've seen in 2014. I don't know how this flew under the radar here. Also, the trailer sucks. Don't even watch it. Just see the movie.

[bigperm]

The less you know about this film the better, avoid trailers etc. Just go for it.

[polkablues]

With just an ounce of nuance, this could have been a great movie. As it is, it's a great showcase for J.K. Simmons, and I'm okay with it just being that.

[cine]

this was a Great movie. capital G. most definitely in my top 3 of favourite movies this year. i could watch and dissect each scene's brilliance all day long. as others said, fuck trailers, i never watch them anyway. just enjoy the ride.

[jenkins]

i think this popular movie deserves popularity

[pete]

not super into it. loved the final scene. Loved a handful of scenes. lots of one-note writing. seemed like the director or the drummer didn't know THAT much about jazz drumming and was only fixated on playing harder and faster in every single scene. also super not into the way music was filmed in this movie. sorry.

[jenkins]

i'd guess the drummer's "skillset" was indeed less influenced by jazz, and more by a desire to provide emotional tangibility for the audience. i think emotional tangibility was the goal through the movie, and i found neither the characters nor their behaviors believable. but i could feel them. feel their hearts

the family-dinner scene, for example, that's some bullshit. everyone is clearly being steered by a story and a script. the kinda conflict that's being demonstrated is highly relatable, but its execution is movie bullshit. at the end of the sequence i didn't think "omfg that's exactly like my family irl" but i did think "i've felt that way at a table with my family"

my summary is i liked the movie for its central theme. i think it's an important one, and i think it's relevant to our times. because everyone knows this is an age in which the internet will tell you what you're doing wrong, and i think that's trickled into our private lives in a massive way. but, simply, don't fucking let it ruin you. right? i agree with whiplash in that regard

[polkablues]

Part of the problem is that they have to come up with a way to convey cinematically, to non-experts, the concept of one person drumming "better" than another. This inevitably requires dumbing down an extremely nuanced skill into something simple and quantifiable, i.e., who can play fastest.

I did like the movie, you guys. I know it sounds like I didn't, but I did. The movie and I just have some issues we're trying to work through. We're sleeping in separate rooms for now.

[pete]

I don't know - those problems are not impossible, and if you were to turn to Japanese movies or even reality tv shows about craftsmanship (or some sports movies as well), there are ways to tell a story about craftsmanship or perfecting something without repeating one scene over and over again.

I think it's one of those movies where the subject is more exciting than the movie itself. I'm sorry guys, there are scenes that just really bothered me.

[jenkins]

yeah but how's he gonna express the repetition of insults at him without the repetition of insults?

i think it's adorable you're apologizing for not liking the movie. you can not like it! i don't think there's a movie that everyone at xixax likes

[edit] had to edit "with" to "without" which is kinda funny

[Knocho Pytsh]

Though I loved this film, it's worth noting that Fletcher's teaching "methods" would never fly in even the most prestigious of music schools. Suspension of disbelief issues aside, it's so much fun seeing J.K. Simmons do what he does with this material.

[BB]

seemed like the director...didn't know THAT much about jazz drumming and was only fixated on playing harder and faster

Oh totally. All kinds of weird things that even those with a relatively cursory knowledge of music would be able to call out. I don't think it's possible to determine a tempo WITH EXACTING PRECISION from a two-count, for instance. But it makes for a pretty good scene. Super strange that the writer/director has made two musical films and is in the process of making a third when he seems to know very little about music (or is dumbing it down for some bonehead mass audience).

More than the music though -- which is kinda like the who-cares, implausible science of Interstellar or Gravity -- the movie really gets the vibe wrong. Not only would the teacher's methods be prohibited (if not actually illegal), students wouldn't subject themselves to a program like this. Jazz people aren't athletes or military recruits. They're fuckin weirdo stoner types in goofy hats and shit. It's not about painstaking precision so much as feel and soul, artisanship, cool... There's a math/speed element, but it comes secondary to the intangibles. The movie's approach is actually more of a metal/prog thing.

All this is not to say I didn't enjoy it; I did! Felt very much like jenkins. I was a little surprised to see it turn up on so many best of lists in such an exceptionally good year, but it's a fine, fun, somewhat populist picture.

[pete]

but my problem wasn't lack of authenticity - or rather, it was lack of knowledge that resulted in overwrought scenes and acting because the director was bored with his own subject.

[Gold Trumpet]

Spoilers

Good movie, nothing more for me. My main issue was the dumb ideas of escalation between Teller and Simmons to play out the level of their feuding and hatred for each other. The fact they made Teller insufferable is fine, but the dramatic conclusion of Teller bottoming out in school with a car crash before a performance, escaping a totaled car, showing up bloodied and distraught and still being allowed to perform? Add on to that you have an absurd fight on stage when the whole thing fails? The film was not patient enough to dramatize a more likely subtle and lengthy abuse by Simmons of Teller where Teller eventually does something - more reasonably - dumb and gets expelled. Or his ego becomes eventually destroyed and he just leaves feeling like he can do nothing right. That would have required more attention to small moments and focus on things that could have gotten the film to disappear when trying its very best to get noticed during the festival scene. I hate the film had to go routes it did because so much of it is well made. It has a perfect simplicity to staging and composition angles that reminds me of what PTA did with Hard Eight so I think the director will do a lot better later, but still, too many issues.

[jenkins]

oh ok. it's the same problem i heard about the dance of reality. it's not a literal movie. that simple really