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WHIPLASH: Cruel Genius
Whiplash is a title that reveals what the film will give you. This enthralling story, a sophomore work from writer and director Damien Chazelle, snaps between extremes so quickly it shocks; the plot swings like a pendulum until the final scene chimes like the hour turning on a grandfather clock. Before arriving in commercial theatres this winter, it premiered at Sundance last year and was lauded by critics and viewers alike, taking home Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for a dramatic film. It's a suspenseful and darkly funny drama that is alternatingly delightful and difficult to watch, because triumph and trouble alike are absorbing.
Named after the song by composer Hank Levy, Whiplash is about one musician's struggle to achieve excellence within the niche universe of competitive jazz and the ruthless teacher who drives him to get there. It's a film that will make you wonder about the difference between talent and hard work, ambition and obsession, and, even, good and bad. Whiplash is somehow inspiring and simultaneously upsetting, a tantalizing combination of contradictory emotions. The film, which bounces between opposites, arises from the conflict between two opposing main characters.
The relationship between young jazz drummer Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) and maniacal conductor Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) makes the bulk of the film. Andrew wants to become one of the greats, the kind of musician remembered by strangers around dinner tables in the future, and he is convinced that Fletcher, a feared professor at a fictional prestigious academy in present-day New York, is his way into the exclusive club. Yet Whiplash isn't another heartwarming mentor-protégé tale: Fletcher sees greatness as something achieved by overcoming humiliation, and he pushes Andrew so recklessly that the border blurs between creativity and insanity. The drummer retreats after experiencing a mental break, but he emerges invigorated when their game of revenge escalates to an electric musical showdown.
J. K. Simmons is the kind of rare actor that can navigate his character, Fletcher, to those sublime coordinates between awful and awesome. The teacher is deliciously detestable, repulsively appealing. He is a drill sergeant who spews venomous insults with a fiery force. Glimmers of his intriguing sensitivity - speaking with the young daughter of a colleague, shedding a...