Rocky for the 21st Century

Rating: 1/10 (19 June 2017)

This can only be understood in the light of Rocky winning best picture at the 1976 Academy Awards.
This is your standard inspirational movie. You can almost time to the minute that the 'girlfriend' appears.
It's a movie aimed at people who are inspired by motivational speeches, where every aspect of the speech is predictable. But many people like predictability, that's the attraction. This movie is the predictable inspirational movie with a few alterations. The teacher is the enemy and there's some shades of grey sadism. And it's about jazz, not boxing.
In many ways it could be a parable of our times. Gone is the brawler from the working class, instead we have a middle-class white person wanting to play jazz - a nearly dead art form, kept alive by music schools for middle-class white people. The middle-class white person is now achieving heroism. Overcoming your background is now an existential experience, not a reality.
In terms of jazz, it's a million miles away from the black people who dominated this art form: Billie and Ella, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Mingus and Monk. It's closer to modern classical music: gone are the days of Rossini and Puccini writing brilliant music to earn a living, instead we have piano competitions. Of course, if the student was black, it wouldn't have a market. Well, actually the student probably wouldn't be black to begin with.
Black jazz is dead. Long live middle-class white people 'fighting' for a shot at 'perfection'. Can you imagine Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell in some kind of 'duel' to see who could out-do each other on a piano? This is the 45th best film of all time, according to voters. What times we live in. This film makes Eddie Murphy in Beverley Hills Cop look like hard realism based on a Pulitzer Prize winning piece of journalism