A highly charged, electrifying, intense and emotional movie with 46 awards and 78 nominations about Andrew Neimen (Miles Teller), a 19-year-old play-till-your-hands-bleed jazz drummer studying in a fictional music school, Shaffer Conservatory, learning under a tough teacher played by Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons). This may be every student’s nightmare to have an extremely demanding, screaming, superhuman-precise-metronome teacher by your side drawing every ounce of blood and tears from you because his mission is to groom the best of the best for cutthroat competitions.
Damien Chazelle, director of Whiplash, made this movie through his own experience as a drummer in his school band with a terrifying bandleader, which he still gets monthly nightmares until today.
In this movie, you see Andrew, an inspiring drummer, gets thrown into an elitist rehearsal room where competition and championships take priority. In the middle of the movie, a family discussion demonstrated the general public’s perception of music vs sports – the latter being the seen much stronger with a career possibility. “I’d rather die drunk, broke at 34 and have people at a dinner table talk about me than live to be rich and sober at 90 and nobody remembered who I was.” said Andrew (Teller) in the heated discussion.
This movie is nominated for the Academy’s Best Picture of the Year, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (J. K. Simmons), amongst others.
Here are the 2 songs which are featured in the movie:
Whiplash by Hank Levy
Caravan by Duke Ellington & Juan Tizol
It is every teacher’s dream to see their students successful and be proud of their achievements – or rather, it is also setting high expectations for the students, but at what expense?
A contributing editor at TBP.