There’s one main reason to see Damien Chazelle’s (Grand Piano) Whiplash. Despite its outstanding 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s not a movie that offers anything original. It’s a good film, but not a great movie. However, it does deliver one of the finest (if not the finest) supporting performances of the year. We’ve seen this story in books, on television, and the big screen hundreds of times. The content changes, but the story stays the same…a young person trying to do whatever they can to win the approval of someone they are trying to impress. In this case, the young person is Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller – The Spectacular Now, 21 and Over), a first-year drumming major at New York’s Shaffer Conservatory of Music, one of the top music prep school’s in the country. And the person he is unsuccessfully trying to win over is Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons – television’s Oz, television’s The Closer), the school’s most well-known teacher and maestro of the school’s top jazz ensemble. It’s well-known that if you can succeed in Fletcher’s group, you’ve got the potential for a great career as a musician. The movie is good. Continue reading Whiplash (2014)
I’ve finally found the first “award buzzing” movie of 2014 that has lived up to its hype. While there have certainly been a handful of other films that I’ve found to be good, there hasn’t been a movie, except for maybe 
The best part of James Marsh’s (Man on a Wire, Shadow Dancer) Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything is the stunning performances of Eddie Redmayne (
Interstellar is a good movie that aims to be not just a great movie but a movie that people talk about for years and years to come. I imagine that there will be a circle of fans who will do this, but I think, for the majority of people, this will be a movie that they enjoy but won’t ever think of as being unique or legendary. I think this movie tried too hard to make that lasting impression rather than just live in the moment of making a great film. As I will mention below, this movie could have been much more straightforward and, in doing so, much more effective. I felt the first 45 minutes of the movie created a cast of characters and a setting in which numerous stories could have been told, and the film could have succeeded. I say this because Interstellar is, first and foremost, a space exploration movie with overtones of the importance of human relationships and weighing what is best for society against what is best for an individual. However, I would like to know if I recommend the movie. And I do recommend it. As much as I wanted it to be great, it wasn’t. But it was still good. At 168 minutes, it is at least 45 minutes too long. And the spaceship scenes themselves are absolutely brutal. There is way too much dull talk of esoteric physics that went straight over the heads of 90% of the audience. It wasn’t needed and forced you to try to use your brain to comprehend everything that was happening. That wasn’t why I was there. I go to movies to not have to use my brain.
It’s getting closer and closer to awards season, and I have continued to wait for that one movie that will establish itself as the movie to beat before the real crop of contenders comes out between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Unfortunately, some of those I thought would show themselves, especially