Musicians: Whiplash (Dir Damien Chazelle,, 1h46m, 2014)
Damien Chazelle is no stranger to this column; very long-time readers will remember my delight at his musical, La La Land (2017) being a musical I actually liked , whilst his follow up feature, First Man sloughed off its slow-moving portrait of Neil Armstrong in its final, spectacular act, as the director went beat-for-beat through the Apollo 11 landing. Chazelle's films, on the whole, consider performers, musicians in particular, from his first feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009) onwards, to Babylon (2022)'s dramatic depiction of the birth of Hollywood, Nowhere is this seen better than in Chazelle's arrival in cinema, in the form of Whiplash , in which Miles Tellers' up and coming student does battle with the abusive and controlling figure of J. K. Simmons' teacher. We've already considered, across every film this season, the nature of failure: Llewyn is going nowhere, Brian Slade has awoken a generation, but at the cost of his o...
