Cartoony Sadistic Villain for Non-Musicians and Brutal Porn for Stockholm Syndrome Sufferers

Rating: 1/10 (3 January 2016)

This movie is high on my Top 10 Most Over-rated Movies in recent years list.
Posh school authority can act like mafia lord and cause great psychological/ physical/ property damage - and students of the free-est nation on earth had no guts to give him a third finger, or laugh out loud, or throw it back at the abuser, change school, make police report...etc etc? Instead the "good guy" bleed on to get....approval? Or pay high price to get...tiny little revenge victory? Seriously?
The moral(s) of this story: there WILL NOT BE justice - and that is why good people (like poor little me) resign to cowering and performing tedious soul-destroying grunt work to get breadcrumb of approval.
But the actors are good and emotionally convincing despite the absurdity of it all, and the production value is high quality. So I'm not going to mock the general audience for buying into "OMG getting a music degree is even harder than qualifying to be a dental surgeon!".
I do fault Hollywood for scaring off potential big dollar music school customers especially from overseas. Even the most militant tiger moms would think twice now sending their children to American music college now! Oh no. lol.
Musicians - music school or self-taught, classical or pop, will find the two leads sado-masochistic professor-student interaction utterly ridiculous at first, and then resigned to just laughing at the writer/director's desperate attempts at "creating conflict and dramatic tension" where there is, well, little. Musical craft is just boring, sustained repetition. The rest, talent/ greatness, is individual.
What shocks me the most are not even pro critics high praise - these are cynics by nature. Why shocks me is how people seem to be okay with being abused and shamed and scapegoated in the open, in supposedly civilized places, work or academia. In more conservative modern Asia, yes I can understand high rating for this movie, people resonate with a "good guy" who "endure" absurd level of undeserved abuse. But the West? Really?
Integrity is not just a nice virtue on paper. It is a survival necessity. Financial survival, and artistic survival. I need a lead I can respect, and root for. I can't root for this one. Not even at the end when he attempted to fix the situation. Some may find that heroic. To me it was too little, and too late - for him.
The favorable rating of this movie is probably saying...
1. Unreported criminal abuses by authorities in USA academic institutions are under-reported
2. There are more Stockholm Syndrome sufferers among educated adults of the world than I thought.
Watch it for the good acting performance, mediocre musical craft. Brace yourself for unnecessary cartoon brutality.