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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....OK 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.