The MoFo Top 100 of the 2010s Countdown

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Victim of The Night
When I watched Whiplash, it seemed like the type of movie and worldview a young man would have. I was no longer young enough to care about it that much. Watching JK Simmons just be a dick for about 100 minutes was at least entertaining though.
Hm. I was 43 when I saw it and, obviously, I loved it.
Maybe I'm just young-at-heart.



Whiplash is hardly the kind of film that would have ever made my ballot, but it is still is a fairly gripping piece. I liken it somewhat to Black Swan, in that it depicts the degradation of the human mind and body in the pursuit of some idea of greatness. An obsessive need to become so perfect at something that nearly no one will even have the ability to discern how perfect you have gotten once you get there. And it's weird in that Chazelle's script seems to both be championing this kind of pursuit as well as clearly showing, when encouraged by the wrong people, how thoroughly it can destroy.



The faster or slower scene is so anxiety enducing, not only because of the battle of wills going on between instructor and student, and how lopsided the power between them is in that moment, but because we in the audience (or the vast majority of us) can never tell if he's ahead or behind the beat either. Is he really not meeting the mark? Is this all a game that is being played on the drummer to break him? Ultimately leading us to the question of "is a fraction of a fraction of a second ahead or behind the beat actually even that important".



What leaves us uneasy is that I don't think there is entirely an answered supplied by the conclusion. We are left with some kind of victory, that maybe he is finally hitting his mark exactly perfectly. But to what end? Who has he done this for. Was it all just to impress one man? Or was this for his art? Or was it always only something to fuel his own narcissistic self interest?


Still, I don't entirely get why it has completely captivated so many people to the point we are putting it in a top 5. What person is the average audience member gravitating towards here. Are they empathetic to Teller's drum journey, even though he's obviously a nightmare human being? Are people approving of Simmons teaching methods, when I see absolutely nothing that signifies him as a great teacher as much as a demanding bully? Do people like drums that much?



It's just a strange film to resonate so strongly with people who generally need their favorite movies to be filled with characters they root for. And there is nothing to root for in Whiplash (so you should actually think I would like it more)



Victim of The Night
Whiplash is hardly the kind of film that would have ever made my ballot, but it is still is a fairly gripping piece. I liken it somewhat to Black Swan, in that it depicts the degradation of the human mind and body in the pursuit of some idea of greatness. An obsessive need to become so perfect at something that nearly no one will even have the ability to discern how perfect you have gotten once you get there. And it's weird in that Chazelle's script seems to both be championing this kind of pursuit as well as clearly showing, when encouraged by the wrong people, how thoroughly it can destroy.



The faster or slower scene is so anxiety enducing, not only because of the battle of wills going on between instructor and student, and how lopsided the power between them is in that moment, but because we in the audience (or the vast majority of us) can never tell if he's ahead or behind the beat either. Is he really not meeting the mark? Is this all a game that is being played on the drummer to break him? Ultimately leading us to the question of "is a fraction of a fraction of a second ahead or behind the beat actually even that important".



What leaves us uneasy is that I don't think there is entirely an answered supplied by the conclusion. We are left with some kind of victory, that maybe he is finally hitting his mark exactly perfectly. But to what end? Who has he done this for. Was it all just to impress one man? Or was this for his art? Or was it always only something to fuel his own narcissistic self interest?


Still, I don't entirely get why it has completely captivated so many people to the point we are putting it in a top 5. What person is the average audience member gravitating towards here. Are they empathetic to Teller's drum journey, even though he's obviously a nightmare human being? Are people approving of Simmons teaching methods, when I see absolutely nothing that signifies him as a great teacher as much as a demanding bully? Do people like drums that much?



It's just a strange film to resonate so strongly with people who generally need their favorite movies to be filled with characters they root for. And there is nothing to root for in Whiplash (so you should actually think I would like it more)
Very interesting point of view (you clearly understand the film and have respect for it but don't get why it resonates so much, if I understand you correctly).
To the bolded, Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I mentor for Berklee College of Music Online and the thing I tell every student, over and over again, is that Time Is Everything. Melody is great and I'll help you work on that, Harmony is wonderful and I'll do my best to help you there (my weakest area personally), but Time Is Everything. If you can only kinda play one scale and you only know basic major and minor chords, but you have great Time, you will get work, people will want to play with you, people will pay you to play. And Great Time is not about keeping the beat, it's about having such a mastery of it that you can rush or drag or land exactly on the beat, regardless of how simple or complex the beat may be, intentionally. It's the most important thing in music from Classical to Hip-hop to Jazz.



For what it's worth, I'm a musician, I listen to Jazz every single day, and I've read these sorts of responses to Whiplash many times (I just read all of this one too) and I think they are totally bogus and that Whiplash is a fantastic film.
The one thing Brody gets right is, "this movie is not about Jazz, it's about abuse of power". And all the people who come around trying to say, "Well, that's not how it happens" seem to miss the point that it is not normally how it happens, this is a unique story worth telling because it stands out from the norm and that is why it's a movie and not a documentary about how people learn Jazz in conservatory.
Of course, as I say, I can't speak to the jazz part of it--I have no relationship to it (my musical tastes are as mainstream as they come). I can only say that my visceral response to the movie was to reject just about every aspect of it. The Charlie Parker story sounded wrong (and it was wrong, or, at least, inaccurate). Yes, it's about abuse of power, but it's a tacit endorsement of abuse--Andrew's performance at the end is a show of how well he's integrated Fletcher's abusive lessons. The student is now the master. Yeah, he'll be miserable but he'll be a miserable genius, the movie says. Well, I think that's baloney. What you get from abuse is the misery, not the genius.

I'm in the minority here, I know this. (Though I have a friend who referred to Chazelle's movies as "a cancer", and I haven't gone that far.) Technically, the movie is well made. But it's asking the wrong question.



Whiplash is gripping, compelling, exhilarating and.....flawed.

My review:

Whiplash

(
Damien Chazelle 2014)

I tried watching Whiplash when it first came out, I shut it off after 30 minutes. Previously I wrote this:

Originally Posted by Citizen Rules
Whiplash lost me when the music teacher picked up and hurled a heavy metal chair at the student. I know the director wanted to show the teacher's intensity, but that scene broke the illusion of believability. No way could I believe that in today's sue-happy society would a teacher with such near-psychotic behavior be allowed to continue to work... and I sure didn't want to spend two hours listening to someone yelling & bulling. That's the problem with many new Hollywood films, they have to be bigger, louder, ballsier than the last picture.

So...I just watched the entire movie and yeah it was entertaining but akin to eating a big bag of pepperoni sticks for dinner. Sure it gives a big punch and hits the right emotional spots. But like eating a bunch of junk food, it sure in the hell wasn't good...

Miles Teller...what a bad actor, at least in this one movie. His one note method of acting never varied. It didn't matter if he was knuckling under to his instructor or 'fake acting' being shy as he asked the movie theater girl out for a date. Nothing about his acting rose above the level of mediocre.

J.K. Simmons ...he actually kicked ass as an actor and was the best casting choice in the film. But the crappy dialogue that he's forced to say by director/writer Damien Chazelle is just pure bunk, bombastic. You know J.K. Simmons could've been more intimidating just by brow beating someone with a steely glance and a snide remark. He sure didn't need the homophobia hate language, that was a cheap writer's trick to get the audience to hate the instructor's guts. That hate was not earned by the movie, it was shoveled in our face by a lame script. And yes the chair throwing incident was ridiculous. Instead: the metal folding chair should've been thrown at the ground with force. Less is more!

Melissa Benoist 'The girl'...yup that's her role in the film, to be a girl. We get one contrived meeting scene between her and the music student, that has him shyly asking her for a date. I've seen the same scene done better in corny 1980s teen films. Then there's a brief pizza eating scene, then he breaks up with her. Why bother to do a movie relationship if the script can't earn what it wants to achieve. What the film wants to do is get us to the one crucial spot where he dumps his girlfriend so he can then study music full time...thus pounding into the audience's heads that he really, really wants to be a jazz drummer. That break-up scene wasn't earned. There needed to be a couple more brief scenes establishing that 'the girl' was falling for jazz boy and that jazz boy was increasingly become obsessed with his career.

The abusive teacher....Now that I've seen the entire film, I do know they address that the teacher was abusive. BUT that one brief scene with the lawyer (or whoever she was) trying to convince the drummer student to tell the authorities about the teacher's abuse, rang hollow...Once again the director/writer treats the scene like an afterthought. The demise of the abusive music teacher and the repercussions from that, should've been the entire third act.

Whiplash
tricks the viewer into thinking they've seen something amazing when all we really did was go on a fast & loud ride.




Very interesting point of view (you clearly understand the film and have respect for it but don't get why it resonates so much, if I understand you correctly).
To the bolded, Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I mentor for Berklee College of Music Online and the thing I tell every student, over and over again, is that Time Is Everything. Melody is great and I'll help you work on that, Harmony is wonderful and I'll do my best to help you there (my weakest area personally), but Time Is Everything. If you can only kinda play one scale and you only know basic major and minor chords, but you have great Time, you will get work, people will want to play with you, people will pay you to play. And Great Time is not about keeping the beat, it's about having such a mastery of it that you can rush or drag or land exactly on the beat, regardless of how simple or complex the beat may be, intentionally. It's the most important thing in music from Classical to Hip-hop to Jazz.

I understand why a 'cinephile' might love the film, because it is well made. I understand why someone like yourself might like it because it speaks directly to something you might have the ears to understand as you have studied music yourself. What I find surprising about the film is the average Joe that aligns with it. Those who are only vaguely interested in the artistry of a film, and those who (while possibly being a fan of music) don't have any 'in' into entirely being able to understand exactly when Teller's character gets 'great'. The average person obviously does not have the ears of Simmons' character, and so who are we to trust when he finally breaks through. We aren't in a position to trust any feedback we get from this teacher. And so where does Joe Q Public's allegiance lie in such a film. I feel there is almost a championing of this kind of abusive teaching that is going on, and that is what I don't quite grasp. And maybe don't even want to understand.



As for the importance of time, trust me, I get the value. I've no doubt you probably have better ears for perfect time than I do, but drums and those that keep the rhythm have been my gateway into being able to understand most great music that is considered complicated as well as rudimentary. I would not have grasped Coltrane's "Ascension" without Elvin Jones. I don't think the thick funky syrupy squall the Stooges made would come together and swing without Scott Asheton. And I wouldn't love the Stones nearly as much without the perfection of Charlie Watts behind the kit.


But...at a certain point, you are chasing perfection for an audience of no one. I believe you can get so good at something, there is no longer anyone left to truly understand how good you've become. That if you were a fragment less good, it wouldn't make any true tangible difference to how a piece of art resonates with anyone else. Or at least very very few people.


And...this also isn't me saying I don't think we should chase that level of perfection. I'm not a musician but writing has been the pursuit I've dedicated myself to and I've got the blisters on my typewriter fingers and even on my brain to prove it. In my teens and early twenties, I would devote eleven to twelve hours a day just sitting in my room alone. Experimenting. Perfecting. Rewriting from a different perspective. Rewriting from a different tense. Playing with passive ways of writing to see if what they offered was more interesting than asserted approaches generally more approved of. I would walk out into rain storms for hours at a time with a note pad, scrawling down observations of what being caught in the rain felt like, then go home and write pages and pages and pages of that one experience trying to wring every sensation I just experience down on a piece of paper. And the end result was that, yes, I got better and better, but I also developed massive problems with anxiety (because the more you learn about something, the more you clearly come to understand how far you still have to go to get truly good) as well as having everyone in my family, and everyone in the neighbourhood who saw me walking around in the rain with a pen and paper think I was a total looney (and, undoubtedly, I was....but I didn't have to make it so obvious). And at no point have I regretted this kind of dedication. It's almost a monks like life where you devote your entire existence to one thing. There is a simple beauty in that.


Still though, and I don't know if you've ever experienced this with your pursuit of music, I got to a point where I realized 'who on earth is going to realize for even a second that I spent the last two months debating with myself if I should use a contraction or not in one particular sentence'. These were the kind of things I would tear my hair out over, and sometimes cry, and sometimes go to be for weeks at a time when I couldn't figure it out. And maybe all that strain led to me making the right decision in using 'do not' instead of 'don't', but...does it actually matter. If art is communication with others, did I need to take the minutia this obsessively to the point of actual self harm? At what point is it needlessly destructive.


Hence, that is how I got to wondering what fractions of fractions of a second really matter in the big scheme of things. Like...how much do they actually matter if almost no one else is truly going to ever hear this tiny difference. Have we just been chasing our creative tails all this time thinking that perfection (which is of course always a malleable term to some degree) was what we should even be persuing (as I'm sure we both know, after all, there are also a lot of great drummers who have made great careers out of not being perfect time keepers, Keith Moon for example). So, how important is perfection...really?


Basically, it's more of a philosophical inquiry that I found the movie tapped into and that, I don't believe, it actually answers. Which I actually find compelling about the film but....I doubt many other bigger fans of the film care much about all the critical minutia I just spilled out here.



Of course, as I say, I can't speak to the jazz part of it--I have no relationship to it (my musical tastes are as mainstream as they come). I can only say that my visceral response to the movie was to reject just about every aspect of it. The Charlie Parker story sounded wrong (and it was wrong, or, at least, inaccurate). Yes, it's about abuse of power, but it's a tacit endorsement of abuse--Andrew's performance at the end is a show of how well he's integrated Fletcher's abusive lessons. The student is now the master. Yeah, he'll be miserable but he'll be a miserable genius, the movie says. Well, I think that's baloney. What you get from abuse is the misery, not the genius.

I'm in the minority here, I know this. (Though I have a friend who referred to Chazelle's movies as "a cancer", and I haven't gone that far.) Technically, the movie is well made. But it's asking the wrong question.

This is partially what I was getting at. Although I grant the film more ambiguity on whether it is championing this kind of tutorship and its supposed results or if it's an indictment of it. Or, a very real possibility, Chazelle himself doesn't really know either.



Hm. I was 43 when I saw it and, obviously, I loved it.
Maybe I'm just young-at-heart.

"Young," as in specifically the angsty, full-of-himself, late teen years.


I had a vaguely similar view of what @kgaard did. Or at least, I saw that dichotomy posed (happiness vs greatness through the cost of suffering), and that was a type of story arc, at least presented the way it was (and ultimately felt like the movie actually endorsed), that would have appealed to me in my late teen years. And being somewhere in my thirties when I saw it, I rejected the premise (or the dichotomy). I think partly because while there's something to be said about sacrifice through practice, I think the instrument of growth here being challenge by way of abuse rings hollow for me as an adult.



Yeah, for what it's worth I didn't get the impression that the film was endorsing anything. Maybe a teeny tiny bit, but I thought of it as daring to ask the question of whether certain levels or types of greatness require abuse (self-abuse or otherwise), require obsession, and if so, is that worth it? Is there a difference between the film saying "he's miserable but he's a miserable genius" and "he's a genius but he's a miserable one"? It seems like those two things would look the same and which we felt was the message would turn more on ourselves and how we approached it.

Anyway, I think any film that asks a tough question is going to get pilloried both for possibly answering it and for possibly answering it wrong, though, which is one of the reasons I put my thumb on the scale for the ones that do. But I think it can be a great film even if it is taking that stance, and even if it's wrong about it.



This is partially what I was getting at. Although I grant the film more ambiguity on whether it is championing this kind of tutorship and its supposed results or if it's an indictment of it. Or, a very real possibility, Chazelle himself doesn't really know either.
Yeah, I think a film that examines the obsessive lengths someone will go to to hone their craft, to the extent that you could reasonably question whether those final, tiny incremental improvements are noticeable to anyone other than yourself (and, maybe, another obsessive), and whether the costs of that are worth paying, I think that could be interesting. That's not what I got from this movie. I know calling something "phony" is provocative, but I can only say that my own emotional response was a rejection. Anyone who got something different and better from it, that's a good thing.



Victim of The Night
Of course, as I say, I can't speak to the jazz part of it--I have no relationship to it (my musical tastes are as mainstream as they come). I can only say that my visceral response to the movie was to reject just about every aspect of it. The Charlie Parker story sounded wrong (and it was wrong, or, at least, inaccurate). Yes, it's about abuse of power, but it's a tacit endorsement of abuse--Andrew's performance at the end is a show of how well he's integrated Fletcher's abusive lessons. The student is now the master. Yeah, he'll be miserable but he'll be a miserable genius, the movie says. Well, I think that's baloney. What you get from abuse is the misery, not the genius.

I'm in the minority here, I know this. (Though I have a friend who referred to Chazelle's movies as "a cancer", and I haven't gone that far.) Technically, the movie is well made. But it's asking the wrong question.
No offense intended, but I think this is a misreading. The fact that unnecessary adversity can shape you in a positive way is a reality of life and this world, one I personally experienced not only in Music but also in Medicine where the culture, in my time, was every bit as abusive as one sees in Whiplash, and the film showing that is not inherently and endorsement. Not at all and I've never read it that way nor can I see it that way. And again, this is the story of just these two people, not every professor and student. The fact that Andrew is better at drumming after working harder than he ever imagined out of fear of failure, while also showing throughout the movie how unhappy he is and ending the movie without in any way indicating that he validates or forgives Fletcher's methods is exactly the sort of open ending that the movie needed to avoid exactly what you and some others are saying the movie actually says. If it said that, it wouldn't be nearly as good of a movie. But it doesn't.



Society ennobler, last seen in Medici's Florence
#4. Whiplash (2014)

I saw it when it came out, in preparation for the award ceremonies. As a whole, we've enjoyed the movie. A bit artificially overcooked here and there anyway J. K. Simmons fully entered our radar of actors we like a lot.

To be honest, didn't like Miles Teller. We see, they try to promote him and we've came across couple more of his appearances in other movies in the following years. Every time he failed to attract us.

... I see too much talking for this title, honestly wonder how the powers manage to inject certain topics...

The film was briefly in consideration for my ballot, finally taking #52 on my Decade list. Obviously, it didn't need my vote.

- (77/100)
__________________
"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.



I keep making new posts rather than taking my time and saying everything I want to in the previous one(s), so uh, sorry for that, but re: obsessiveness and genius.

One of the reasons I respond to the film is because I think it is partially correct that certain levels of accomplishment either require or strongly correlate with negative personality traits. This seems most obvious with great athletes, nearly all of which, we usually learn, carry some ridiculous fabricated chip on their shoulder. Stories of players like Michael Jordan inventing grudges out of thin air to motivate themselves abound. That same guy was settling scores with his high school coach in his Hall of Fame induction ceremony speech. And it seems obvious to me that so many of the greatest athletes of the last couple generations are just perpetually unhappy people, in need of constant and never ending affirmation, and this is contributes to their "greatness," in the extremely narrow sense of that word. Certainly not a human sense.

So, I think there's something real here that Chazelle's depicting about human nature, however much I may dislike it and however inconvenient or abuseable it may be, however much it may enable this or that complete tool to justify their antisocial behavior in sports or politics or life in general.



Didn't think much of Whiplash the 1st time, thought it was decent the 2nd time thanks to Simmons. I think it's supposed to be intense but I couldn't take it seriously, awwww poor little drummer boy, why don't you try showing up on time you schmuck. Doesn't help that I don't see much in Miles Turner.



Victim of The Night
I understand why a 'cinephile' might love the film, because it is well made. I understand why someone like yourself might like it because it speaks directly to something you might have the ears to understand as you have studied music yourself. What I find surprising about the film is the average Joe that aligns with it. Those who are only vaguely interested in the artistry of a film, and those who (while possibly being a fan of music) don't have any 'in' into entirely being able to understand exactly when Teller's character gets 'great'. The average person obviously does not have the ears of Simmons' character, and so who are we to trust when he finally breaks through. We aren't in a position to trust any feedback we get from this teacher. And so where does Joe Q Public's allegiance lie in such a film. I feel there is almost a championing of this kind of abusive teaching that is going on, and that is what I don't quite grasp. And maybe don't even want to understand.



As for the importance of time, trust me, I get the value. I've no doubt you probably have better ears for perfect time than I do, but drums and those that keep the rhythm have been my gateway into being able to understand most great music that is considered complicated as well as rudimentary. I would not have grasped Coltrane's "Ascension" without Elvin Jones. I don't think the thick funky syrupy squall the Stooges made would come together and swing without Scott Asheton. And I wouldn't love the Stones nearly as much without the perfection of Charlie Watts behind the kit.


But...at a certain point, you are chasing perfection for an audience of no one. I believe you can get so good at something, there is no longer anyone left to truly understand how good you've become. That if you were a fragment less good, it wouldn't make any true tangible difference to how a piece of art resonates with anyone else. Or at least very very few people.


And...this also isn't me saying I don't think we should chase that level of perfection. I'm not a musician but writing has been the pursuit I've dedicated myself to and I've got the blisters on my typewriter fingers and even on my brain to prove it. In my teens and early twenties, I would devote eleven to twelve hours a day just sitting in my room alone. Experimenting. Perfecting. Rewriting from a different perspective. Rewriting from a different tense. Playing with passive ways of writing to see if what they offered was more interesting than asserted approaches generally more approved of. I would walk out into rain storms for hours at a time with a note pad, scrawling down observations of what being caught in the rain felt like, then go home and write pages and pages and pages of that one experience trying to wring every sensation I just experience down on a piece of paper. And the end result was that, yes, I got better and better, but I also developed massive problems with anxiety (because the more you learn about something, the more you clearly come to understand how far you still have to go to get truly good) as well as having everyone in my family, and everyone in the neighbourhood who saw me walking around in the rain with a pen and paper think I was a total looney (and, undoubtedly, I was....but I didn't have to make it so obvious). And at no point have I regretted this kind of dedication. It's almost a monks like life where you devote your entire existence to one thing. There is a simple beauty in that.


Still though, and I don't know if you've ever experienced this with your pursuit of music, I got to a point where I realized 'who on earth is going to realize for even a second that I spent the last two months debating with myself if I should use a contraction or not in one particular sentence'. These were the kind of things I would tear my hair out over, and sometimes cry, and sometimes go to be for weeks at a time when I couldn't figure it out. And maybe all that strain led to me making the right decision in using 'do not' instead of 'don't', but...does it actually matter. If art is communication with others, did I need to take the minutia this obsessively to the point of actual self harm? At what point is it needlessly destructive.


Hence, that is how I got to wondering what fractions of fractions of a second really matter in the big scheme of things. Like...how much do they actually matter if almost no one else is truly going to ever hear this tiny difference. Have we just been chasing our creative tails all this time thinking that perfection (which is of course always a malleable term to some degree) was what we should even be persuing (as I'm sure we both know, after all, there are also a lot of great drummers who have made great careers out of not being perfect time keepers, Keith Moon for example). So, how important is perfection...really?


Basically, it's more of a philosophical inquiry that I found the movie tapped into and that, I don't believe, it actually answers. Which I actually find compelling about the film but....I doubt many other bigger fans of the film care much about all the critical minutia I just spilled out here.
Wow, man, that is really f*ckin' cool. I used to enjoy creative writing but it never occurred to me to do all those things you talk about to actually practice that craft. Frankly, I wish more writers did that.

One subtle difference though between what you do and what I do is that Writing is a pretty solitary art form (outside of an editor) whereas Music is very collaborative. What's going on within the band is frequently as important or more important, especially for Jazz musicians, as the audience's response. For example, in composed music, whether that's Classical or Rock or what have you, being able to play it exactly as the composer hears it in their head is essential, so if they tell you "I want this in 5/4 with accents on the 1s and 4s (instead of the 1s and 3s, say) and I want it swung, but not too loose"... well, that's already a lot and you have to be a pretty highly practiced musician to even pulled that off, but then you actually have to, ideally, play all that with a relaxed feel and be able to react to what the other musicians are doing, and possibly improvise and fill and even be playful with all of that. And, obviously, this is really true of Jazz where you have a room full of excellent players but "that guy's just a little too stiff" and "that guy's just a little too loose" and "that guy's always rushing" (a really common problem) and "that guy's playing it perfectly but he doesn't seem to have much to add" and so forth. You want to be able to talk to each other and you want to able to make a musical joke and have everyone in the band musically "laugh" along with the joke and maybe return one as well. I mean, you can be sarcastic in music. It's conversational. And to be conversational you need to be fluent. Because the other people in the band are listening. When you play Jazz, you are playing to experts. The other players. That's your audience and that's the standard you're trying to live up to. The "audience", the people in the seats, may not have any idea that you just "whispered" something (musically) to the bassist that made him "chuckle" (musically) but that's what Jazz musicians and I think great improvisational musicians in general are really on that stage for and they are just inviting an audience to watch them have their conversation. I mean, that's really what Jazz is, I think. And that takes an incredible, Herculean amount of practice. Like what you were talking about with your writing but never stopping.

To bring it fully to your point, the bassist in the band I'm in is very much the opposite of me and will never be a Jazz musician because he wants to know what he's playing and play it and feel satisfied that he did his job, he does not like to take risks in front of people, and he plays for the audience. He's always on about how we need to keep the tempo up for the audience, that people want to dance, and all this other stuff about the audience, that's probably true of some audiences, but obviously not all. So it's hard to get him to take any risks or play musician games. He does not need to practice like the musicians in Whiplash because his audience is a pretty average audience.
I, on the other, hand, am playing for the drummer, the "lead-guitarist"/songwriter, to some degree the bassist if he's actually listening and not just making sure he's playing his part well and checking out the "audience", and for myself. And I assume that if I'm good enough to play for that audience, then the audience on the floor will hear good music whether they realize why or not.

And, to your first paragraph, definitely good for the "cinephile" in me, but it's also the feel. I think that movie has a feel, like any good movie with a feel, and that could be Messiah Of Evil, for example. I'm not talking about a style, and obviously those two movies have very different feels, but it has a feel and I think you know what I mean from past conversations we've had about movies; and it also makes me feel like I am living in the space with the characters and I don't quite know what witchcraft that is but Chazelle is a filmmaker (among others) who can do it.




I think it's worth remembering that most of the big, classic H'Wood musicals aren't sung by the people onscreen. It's the kind of thing I think producers would see as a big risk now with 'authenticity' being foremost in peoples minds, even in fantasy.

.
Let me correct this."I think its worth remembering that (some) of the big, classic H'Wood musical (parts) aren't sung by the people onscreen." Most are. And those people not only took acting lessons but singing lessons and dancing lessons. They were well trained in their craft. They often came from vaudeville so had a lot of experience "putting over a song" or "hoofing" and many started at quite a young age. Many of our pop stars are quite able singers and dancers and they can act as well. There is all of Broadway to find people who are "triple threats."

Also authenticity, should not mean lack of skill. Look at Meryl Streep's performance in Iron Weed. It is heart-rending and feels authentic. But if Meryl did not know what she was doing, it would not have worked,




16. Edge of Seventeen (2016)

17. War Horse (2011)

#21. 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

#22. Train to Busan (2016)

#23. Looper (2016)
I haven't seen Warhorse but the rest of these are great. Edge of Seventeen made my list.



Let's continue my exercise in vanity and pretend that my ballot matters to anyone else than me.

#10 - Let Me In

As much as I hate Hollywood's tendency to remake every foreign movie, sometimes even they get it more or less right. This one isn't as good as the Swedish version, but it's still pretty damn good.

#9 - The Painted Bird

Beautifully shot B&W misery showing off the worst in humanity. At least one other member likes this, but I don't think she sent a ballot.

Seen: 43.5/97

My ballot (this far)  
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