Random Movie Review - Whiplash

Much like with The Theory of Everything, I'm once again going out of the territory of what I normally review to look at other films that I have an interest in and among these, is Whiplash. Now I have a general idea of how it feels to handle a drum kit as I've had a similar experience with a marching drum. While they are both very different to each other, the way they are played are the same, just one is more difficult to handle than the other. But enough about that, let's have a look at one of the first film festival films that I intend to look at in the near future:

Based on the real life experiences of Damien Chazelle's time in the Princeton High School Studio Band (who by the way, is the director of this very film), we meet Andrew Neiman (played by the new Mr. Fantastic, Miles Teller), a first year jazz student at the prestigious Shaffer Conservatory in New York who's ambition is to be the best drum player out there and attempting to be among the greatest of drummers out there. Impressed by his skills, conductor Terrance Fletcher (played by quite possibly the best actor to have played J. Jonah Jameson in any adaptation of Spider-Man ever, J.K. Simmons) takes him into his own jazz band where Andy hopes to impress him and be the best that he can. But little does he know that Fletcher is one conductor who loves to push people to the limits in a very abusive manner.

Now I was going into this thinking that it would be quite a difficult film to sit through and for what it is, it actually wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. The whole film is told from the perspective of Andy and I actually very much enjoyed it. It was full of Jazz music and Jazz is one of the genres of music that I like so it makes the film right up my street, it shows how hard it is to master the drums and maintaining your life with your dream in mind. And what was even more great was that the cinema I saw this in was an independent one and it had a jazz band playing in the screen room as people were coming in. Doesn't get any better than that. 9/10