NEW YORK TIMES MOVIE REVIEW: The world worships excellence and runs on mediocrity. Most of us are fated to dwell in the fat middle of the bell curve, admiring and envying those who stake out territory in the higher realms of achievement. There is a wide gulf between doing your best at something and being the best at it, a discrepancy in expended effort and anticipated reward that is the subject of “Whiplash,” Damien Chazelle’s thrilling second feature.
This story of an ambitious young striver and his difficult mentor could easily have been a sports movie, and structurally, it resembles one. There are montages of grueling practice scattered among scenes of tense competition, all of it building toward a hugely suspenseful (but also, to some extent, never in doubt) championship game moment of reckoning. But Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) is a jazz drummer rather than an athlete, enrolled at a highly selective Manhattan school (Juilliard in all but name) and under the sway of a charismatic and terrifying instructor, Fletcher (J. K. Simmons)…
The long, intricate final scene transcends psychological drama with a surge of pure musical inspiration, pushing the audience’s response from curiosity to empathy to awe. Just try to sit still in your seat. “Whiplash” may not quite be a great movie, but there’s no doubt that it knows a thing or two about what greatness means… (more)
EDITOR: The three of us left the theater almost traumatized, in stun silence and deep thought, as did the rest of the audience. It is the type of movie that is in fact an experience. It possesses the mind for at least a day and we can’t wait to go see it again because there is so much more to take away.
We award it four stars.
By the way, this was a very low cost production. It goes to show that genius can out perform money every day.
We saw it at an art theater in New York City. It comes to the Zoetropolis at James and Mulberry in Lancaster from December 19, 2014 @ 6:30 pm – January 7, 2015 @ 6:30 pm.
