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Rating: 4/10 (16 March 2015)

I'm going to strictly avoid using expressions with musical terms, or that's what I would say if I knew several. Whiplash left me puzzled. It was maybe a labor of love, being a pet project of writer-director Damien Chazelle, of whom I've never heard of before. The movie seems to be an indie film with a staple of an action movie thrown in for good measure. A car accident, viscerally shown. Lately since the noughties it has been easier to show car crashes. So I'm assuming this one was thrown in to appeal to a wider range of fans.
There are a few things I don't understand about the movie. Like the drum kit is one of the loudest and least quiet instruments of all. So how can the father (Paul Reiser), be so surprised about Andrew's virtuosity? Also The kid, the trumpet player, who 'supposedly' was playing false, really WAS playing false! All these little surprises didn't gel with me, because a) They were stupid b) They would work only if the hero was less smart than a comatose monkey, which in the movie, he was c) they shouldn't have mentioned Casey hanged himself because it's a distraction and you think he should have been the subject of the film d) the twists prevented us from knowing more about Andrew.
The regrettable thing about Whiplash is that there is only one person who got the perfect amount of limelight, treatment, and attention, and that was J.K Simmons. The others got the same level of detail, which was wrong. Andrew is shown as a boy playing drums, and before that at a family dinner. He also dates a girl briefly. He is a very quiet lad with his band and with his girlfriend but surprisingly smart-Aleck and runs his mouth like a machine gun when the story asks for it. Not my tempo. That's all I had to say, hope you found the review helpful.