As Over-rated As They Come

Rating: 6/10 (2 March 2015)

Yes, the acting by JK Simmons was very good, and yes the storyline was compelling regarding greatness, and how greatness is found and nurtured, or in this case abused.
The idea is our society is too friendly and politically correct to be able to develop great musicians. The interesting concept of the film is that the mentor is as important as the mentee, which of course we already knew, but the idea was that the mentor must be willing to push the mentee in ways or manners the mentee would not do otherwise. Very interesting concept that could yield hours of interesting debate over a bottle of wine and a cigar.
However, the movie does not behave like an Indy film, but like a Hollywood picture. There is far too much drama. The primary character (Andrew Nieman) bleeds no less than three times during the movie on his trap set! Seriously, bleeding! He gets in a car accident, rolls his car over, and runs to the recital he was late for while bleeding and unable to control his limbs from the trauma.
Then there's the complete lack of character development of ANY of the characters in the movie. Why is Andrew Nieman so obsessed with music that he breaks-up with his girlfriend because he thinks she will eventually get in the way? JK Simmons is good, but sorry, I don't know why he behaves the way he does, nor would his style ever be effective, or accepted at any college, private or public.
The idea that Charlie Parker became great because he had a symbol thrown at him is extremely trite and irrelevant to greatness. Again, this is not an accurate representation of the truth. The reason we don't have any modern Charlie Parker's is because our society doesn't care about Jazz music any longer, in fact it's the butt of many jokes. Jazz was played everywhere in Parker's day. You could buy a saxophone at JC Penny's for Pete's sake. Today, you can barely buy a saxophone at a music store. The fact of the matter is that people become great in areas that the people care about; football, basketball, baseball, and in the arts symphony orchestra. Yo-Yo Ma is one of the greatest cello players of all time. So did he become great because he had some dude yelling profanities in his ear? NO! How about 50,000 hrs of practice, and prospect of getting rich and being adored.
So much hype and very little substance behind it I'm afraid, unless of course your used to watching Marvel superhero movies, so you've become abundantly inept at recognizing a good film unless it slapped you in the face. Which of course, JK Simmons does slap Peter Parker, I mean Andrew Nieman :)