Whiplash
To employ a cliché of film critique, Whiplash is not a film about drumming. Well, it is, but it's also about desire, obsession and sacrifice in pursuit of greatness. It follows Andrew Neiman, a 19 year old student at the Shaffer Conservatory in New York who practices obsessively on the kit. He attracts the attentions of conductor Terrence Fletcher who recruits him for his band.
Fletcher's methods are unconventional to say the least. He attempts to motivate Neiman by amongst other things, slapping him across the face, throwing a chair at him and in one particularly memorable sequence, instructs him to keep playing until his hands bleed. J.K Simmons recently won Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars and it's difficult to see how it could have gone to anyone else. It's a brilliant, monstrous performance as the conductor from hell.
Miles Teller also impresses as the young man who eats, sleeps and breathes the drums at all costs, even to the detriment of a promising relationship with a student named Nicole. Eventually he's driven to the brink by Fletcher's psychological torture and both of them are expelled from the institution.
After a chance meeting in a bar, Fletcher offers Neiman an olive branch in the form of a position in his band at an upcoming jazz festival. This proves to be a trap designed to humiliate him in public but Neiman turns the tables in an astonishing, gripping finale that's quite unlike anything I've ever seen in the cinema. An utterly compelling motion picture.
Fletcher's methods are unconventional to say the least. He attempts to motivate Neiman by amongst other things, slapping him across the face, throwing a chair at him and in one particularly memorable sequence, instructs him to keep playing until his hands bleed. J.K Simmons recently won Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars and it's difficult to see how it could have gone to anyone else. It's a brilliant, monstrous performance as the conductor from hell.
Miles Teller also impresses as the young man who eats, sleeps and breathes the drums at all costs, even to the detriment of a promising relationship with a student named Nicole. Eventually he's driven to the brink by Fletcher's psychological torture and both of them are expelled from the institution.
After a chance meeting in a bar, Fletcher offers Neiman an olive branch in the form of a position in his band at an upcoming jazz festival. This proves to be a trap designed to humiliate him in public but Neiman turns the tables in an astonishing, gripping finale that's quite unlike anything I've ever seen in the cinema. An utterly compelling motion picture.
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