Rosewater
Crit
First, let me say that I've never been so fond of Leonard Cohen. I noticed in the end credits that the music supervisor was Linda Cohen, but I've been unable to establish whether the surname is coincidental. It's not exactly a rare name.Jon Stewart nails it in his debut as screenwriter and director, adapting Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari's memoir, Then They Came for Me, of his Kafkaesque imprisonment and torture by the Ahmadinejad regime. We've seen prison and solitary confinement and torture in movies before, but I'm not sure we've ever seen as good an articulation of the rhetorical question: who is the more imprisoned?
But wow. Another torture story, though one in which the victim is a lot more complicit in the process. Andrew (Miles Teller, whom we loved in The Spectacular Now) is an insanely driven drummer at Juilliard-in-all-but-name, and Fletcher (J. K. Simmons, who has been a wonderful character actor for ages without ever being remotely as scary and repulsive as this) is the abusive-for-the-art director of the institution's marquee jazz band. All you need to know is this: I came out of the first fine film of the day deeply affected by the protagonist's ordeal. I came out of this absolutely exhausted from the stress and anxiety--this a film where some blood does get spilled, the worst of it from excessively vigorous drumming. Holy christ, what a film. A lock right now for the year's best list.
Whiplash
Crit
First, this: what sort of example does a film set to have two characters in an early scene chatting in the movie theater where Rififi has just started?But wow. Another torture story, though one in which the victim is a lot more complicit in the process. Andrew (Miles Teller, whom we loved in The Spectacular Now) is an insanely driven drummer at Juilliard-in-all-but-name, and Fletcher (J. K. Simmons, who has been a wonderful character actor for ages without ever being remotely as scary and repulsive as this) is the abusive-for-the-art director of the institution's marquee jazz band. All you need to know is this: I came out of the first fine film of the day deeply affected by the protagonist's ordeal. I came out of this absolutely exhausted from the stress and anxiety--this a film where some blood does get spilled, the worst of it from excessively vigorous drumming. Holy christ, what a film. A lock right now for the year's best list.
Trailers
- Foxcatcher--Yes; would have been an apt completion of a torture triplet.
- Mr. Turner--Not big into art, but (1) Mike Leigh, (2) Timothy Spall, (3) hell yeah.
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