Movies!

Get 4 days off? Hang with family? Get in verbal fisticuffs with the Uncle who thinks Obama is a Muslim socialist? Eat too damn much? Yeah me too. And then?

Movie Time.

WHIPLASH:

You like jazz? Nope, nobody does except me and old black folks appalled by what passes for music nowadays. But Whiplash aint about jazz. Oh yeah, Andrew Nieman (Miles Teller), who idolizes Buddy Rich for both his drumming and for his being a prick, drums and drums and drums at a Julliard type music school. But what this movie really is about is bullying. And how bullying is one of the most contagious diseases known to mankind.

Terence Fletcher (J K Simmons) is a bullying jazz professor intent on not so much teaching jazz, but on destroying those who do not live up to his standards. Which is everybody.

Fletcher destroys young people with his profane, mean, racist, homophobic outbursts much like R Lee Ermey did in Full Metal Jacket. But Andrew aint biting. At least until he has his Private Pyle breaking point.

This movie is not for everyone. Andrew is Fletcher light. He's an asshole too. But Fletcher is a nuclear asshole and watching Simmons, the Farmers Insurance guy in case you don't know who he is, play this role is fascinating. Man, he scared ME half the time. You just want somebody to deck him. And so does he. The self loathing is evident.

Whiplash is a great movie. One of the best I've seen this year. And J K Simmons? Wow. It's Oscar time.

Back with another later. Gotta go watch Terence "Bud" Crawford fight.