Movie Review: "Whiplash"

"Whiplash": B+.  If you have heard of the legal tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress but are not sure what it is, Whiplash could serve as a case study.  It is the story of life in a highly competitive, elite music academy located in New York City, where extremely talented young musicians attempt to endure what amounts to a battle for survival.  Several are forced to throw in the towel before graduating because they are unable to cope with the headmaster or meet his demanding requisites.  The film examines how high a price promising performers are willing to pay for a diploma that likely paves the way for a career in music.

Miles Teller plays Andrew Neiman, a drummer who dreams of making his living in the rhythm section of a jazz orchestra.  Buddy Rich is his idol.  Andrew is no slouch on the skins, immediately drawing the attention of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the imposing, muscle-bound headmaster of Shaffer Conservatory.  Year after year, Shaffer turns out some of the world's finest star musicians of the future.  A lot of Shaffer's reputation is a result of Fletcher's exacting standards.  But at what price are those standards tolerated?

Fletcher is into mind games, many bordering on mental cruelty.  Fletcher is keen on embarrassing students in front of the entire studio band, which is the ensemble at Shaffer in which the best musicians play.   When he dismisses a plump trombone player, the ensuing verbal attack includes harsh criticism of the young man's musicianship as well as his weight.  He derisively calls a demoted drummer "Mr. Gay Pride of the West Side."  When Andrew confides in Fletcher regarding Andrew's rough childhood, Fletcher uses that against Andrew publicly minutes later.  The musicians are treated like pawns, some brought by Fletcher into the studio band for the sole purpose of making incumbent players think they are about to be demoted.  He relegates some students to the job of being merely page turners for the musicians deemed superior.  The ultimate insult is to be labeled a permanent page turner.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle is quite good at setting tension-packed moods throughout the story.  The viewer never knows when Fletcher is about to explode in a tantrum.  Chazelle's script is not as successful in its attempt to paint Andrew as a likable normal college-age kid.  His relationship with his girlfriend, Nicole (Melissa Benoist), never seems on track, and his dinner table conversation with his male cousins is totally out of character.  Of course, you can't have a movie about a jazz academy without a terrific score; I have no complaints there.  (By the way, the film is named after the title of a tune heard frequently both in rehearsals and on the performance stage.)

The last act of the movie is triggered by a sad piece of news announced earlier by Fletcher to the studio band regarding a former Shaffer student.  We don't think much of it at first, but everything is not as it seems.

Unlike the fake singing, piano playing or horn blowing we might see in a lot of films, it's pretty difficult for an actor to convincingly pretend to be drumming.  Therefore, a huge tip of the hat to Teller, who obviously is a skilled kit man in real life.  But the scene stealer in Whiplash is clearly Simmons.  With his sculpted torso and bulging biceps, he commands attention whether by intimidation or credentials.  I would not be surprised to see Simmons nominated for an Oscar as a supporting actor.

We often hear about college and professional athletes who decide voluntarily to quit their sport while still in their prime and in relatively good health. The reason most often given is that the game is no longer fun for them.  After having seen Whiplash, one similarly wonders what musicians have to bear to achieve a career in music.  Is burnout a strong possibility because the fun is missing?  Whiplash raises another question too: How many musicians had the talent to be successful performers and entertainers, but were left at the wayside because of personal discouragement suffered at the hands of an instructor?      

Dillon Hall Diaries: Angst About Angers

I have never set anyone's cleats on fire, put peanut butter or Ben Gay in anyone's jock strap, or shaving cream inside anyone's cap.  Therefore, as a prankster I am not in the same league as someone like Bert Blyleven.  For the most part my shenanigans were more juvenile, like short-sheeting a bed, hiding a text book or leaving a fake phone message.  However, in all humility I must further state that I was the mastermind behind one of the best pranks ever executed in the fabled history of Dillon Hall.

 

You might recall from my September 9, 2014 post (Kiwi Can Contests) that during my junior year at ND, my roommate, Wayne Cuchna, and I occupied one of seven "doubles" in an isolated wing on Dillon's first floor.  The band of fourteen guys living there was comprised mostly of juniors and sophomores, with a sprinkling of freshmen, also known as "freddies."  I wouldn't go so far as to say the fourteen of us were like brothers, but because of the proximity of our quarters, we ate many meals together, often studied together, borrowed each other's records -- I am still waiting to get my Paul Revere & The Raiders album back from my next door neighbor, Rich "Rinny" Reinthaler -- knew each other's families and friends, engaged in dozens of bull sessions together, and generally supported one another through the highs and lows of the long and arduous school year.  And of course, as you already know, there were always the Kiwi Can Contests.

 

One of those "freddies" was Ed Beck, who lived at the far "dead" end of our wing.  The other three or four freddies, including Ed's roomie, Bill "The Bird" Powers, were low key, rather humble guys, who more or less recognized the unwritten pecking order amongst the fourteen.  No one actually thought that the upperclassmen among us were any smarter or wiser than the underclassmen, but still, there was some deference shown by the younger guys to the oldsters.  There were no big fish in our little pond, but if, indeed, there had to be small fish, that role was fulfilled by the frosh.  There were certain things, particularly those relating directly to Notre Dame the institution, for which the juniors would have a better feel or a deeper understanding, if only for the fact that they had more experience as a university student than did the underclassmen.

 

Good ol' Ed did not see it that way.  Perhaps he couldn't help himself, being a native New Yorker and all (tip o' the cap to Salinger for my usage of those last two words), but any outsider with an overview of the entire scene would easily observe that Ed was the proverbial know-it-all.  His most distinguishing characteristic was rubbing folks the wrong way.  Regardless of the topic, be it current events, football, girls, politics, professors, music, what have you, Ed knew best and was not bashful about sharing the wealth of his knowledge with the remaining underprivileged thirteen.  He gave me a pain where I sat down, and I was not alone with that sentiment.  Ridicule, confrontation and avoidance did not work; he'd dig in even more.  Avoidance, by the way, was hard to accomplish, given the logistics of our wing.  But what really gored our collective ox was Ed's incessant referral to his acceptance into Notre Dame's Angers Program for the following school year.

 

Angers (pronounced "ahn-ZHAY") is a mid-sized city in western France and the home of a handful of colleges and universities.  During the years I attended ND, the University of Notre Dame had a program affiliated with Universite Catholique de I' Oust  located in Angers.  Participants in that program were usually sophomores who desired to spend one or two semesters across the pond.   In those days, studying abroad was not nearly as common as it has become during the last few decades.  Almost every one of my contemporaries dreamed throughout high school of some day attending Notre Dame, so why would we want to leave?  Even if we had that inclination, most of our families could not afford to send us overseas for even a semester, let alone a year.  The thought of applying for the Angers Program never crossed our minds.

 

Ed, on the other hand, did not think along those lines; just the opposite.  From the moment (probably around February) that he was accepted into the Angers Program, that is all he talked about or cared about.  We could be talking about dining hall food, Major League Baseball, South Bend crime or an upcoming kegger, and without fail Ed would manage to get Angers into the conversation.  He had a knack for slanting the discussion into a comparison between how much better off he would be in France versus us slugs stuck in The Bend.  At first it was funny, as Ed was turning into a caricature of himself right before our eyes.  But after enduring his patronization for weeks on end, retaliation was in order.  Luckily, two separate ingredients fell perfectly into place, enabling me to pull off my caper, which I prefer to refer to simply as "The Letter."

 

The first ingredient was the fragile social status and simmering mood of the US, and elsewhere, in 1968.  That year has been called by many historians and political scientists the most tumultuous year in US history.  The Cold War was in full swing, the civil rights movement was surging, Viet Nam War protesters dialed up their demonstrations several notches, especially following the Tet Offensive, and the US presidential election, including the intra-party nomination campaigns, was no holds barred.  The Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4 of that year, and race riots ensued.  Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles nine weeks later.

 

But the US was not the only place of social unrest.  In May, 1968, France was the scene of violent protests and strikes carried on predominantly by students and laborers.  That country almost came to a standstill, as students occupied campus buildings and workers shut down industry.  The police were outnumbered.  Demonstrations turned into riots which got out of hand.  It would take several weeks, and an actual dissolution of the French Parliament, before order was restored.

 

The second ingredient, strange as it may seem, was what we found in the practice space used by my band, Lemon Oil Mahogany.  LOM had "inherited" from my first band, the Dark Ages, a postage stamp size storage room located at the bottom of an extremely narrow stairway near the front of Dillon.  Apparently the room had not been used, or even visited, in many years.  Dust, mold and cobwebs were everywhere.  It could have functioned as a chamber of horrors from a Stephen King novel.  The guys in the Dark Ages made a deal with our rector, Father James "Flash" Flanigan, that in return for our cleaning the place up, he would let us practice down there.  Now, a year later, LOM was the beneficiary of that arrangement.

 

Originally we just cleaned out enough space to squeeze in our equipment and ourselves.  Subsequently one late spring day after practice we had a little more time, so we started clearing shelf space.  The books on those shelves were so old that the bindings gave way when we opened them.  But then, pay dirt!  Tucked away in a corner was a box of official Notre Dame stationery, with letterhead designating "Administrative Offices" and a beautiful etching of the Administration Building (aka the "Gold Dome Building") above it.  This was like finding gold.  My scheme to prank Ed Beck was hatched!

 

Father James Riehle (pronounced "really") was the no-nonsense Dean Of Students in those days.  The main responsibilities of the person holding that position were to oversee the conduct of the student body, and to enforce the multitude of rules and regulations which ND men were expected to follow.  If you're inclined to think that the incumbent in that office would, necessarily, be tough as nails, you would be correct.  Father Riehle, although only in his mid-forties, was one of those guys who appeared to be many years older than his actual age.  A cigar-chomping, gruff ex-hockey player, he was surely cut out to be the Dean Of Students.  No news from Father Riehle was good news for all Domers under his figurative thumb.  An aside:  My first sophomore year roommate,  Mike "The Ripper" Rippey, was called on the carpet by Father Riehle on many sad occasions before finally getting the heave-ho after the first semester.  The Ripper's downfall was mostly alcohol related; he was a well-known fixture in after-hours South Bend.  Every time he got called in to the Dean's office he'd say to me, "John, this time I'm Riehle in trouble!"

 

It took me a few days to compose The Letter to Ed.  I went through several drafts on notebook paper before I was finally satisfied.  Once I had crafted my masterpiece, I borrowed The Bird's typewriter under the pretext of having to submit a research paper, and hunted and pecked my way through.  Of course, I typed The Letter on my newly found Administrative Offices stationery.  It has been over forty-six years since I composed The Letter, but to the best of my recollection, it read something like this: 

 

Dear Mr. Beck,

 

I regret to inform you that, due to the civil unrest in France, including Angers, the University of Notre Dame has decided to cancel the Angers Program for the coming school year.  Please know that this was a very difficult decision to make, as the administration is well aware of the eagerness with which many of our students, including yourself, looked forward to the opportunity to study in Angers.  We will revisit the situation toward the end of the current calendar year, and if circumstances merit doing so, we will consider reinstating the Angers Program for the 1969-1970 school year.

 

The safety of our students is always our foremost responsibility.  Thank you for your understanding.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

James L. Riehle, C.S.C.

Dean of Students 

 

I did my best forgery job of Father Riehle's signature, stuck the letter in a regular ND envelope which was available in the bookstore, and mailed it to Ed on a Thursday, using an intra-campus postal box.  I knew it would reach his Dillon mail slot the next day, Friday, the hardest day of the work week to get ahold of anybody in the Ad Building.

 

The rest is history.  Ed did, indeed, receive the letter on that Friday.  I can still hear his wail, like something out of The Hound Of The Baskervilles.  His whole reason for being was gone.  There was no one else nearby in the dorm heading for Angers with whom he could commiserate, so he tried to get ahold of Father Riehle by phone.  I knew that would be next to impossible, especially on a Friday afternoon.  Ed was beside himself as he ran over to the Ad Building, letter in hand.  I did not see him for several hours.  My guess is that it took that long for many phone calls to go back and forth to ascertain whether the Angers Program was in jeopardy and if Father Riehle had actually sent that letter.

 

When Ed finally entered the South Dining Hall, barely in time for the swill they called "dinner," he was totally exhausted, yet evidently relieved that he had merely been the victim of a hoax.  We didn't hear much from Ed about Angers for the rest of the school year.  The Angers Program was not cancelled, and as far as I know, Ed was there as planned for the '68-'69 school year while I made the best of things on campus my senior year.  I have not seen nor heard from Ed since the spring of '68.

 

Other than my roomie, whom I swore to secrecy, I have never admitted my prank to anyone -- until now.  As much as I wanted to take credit for the caper, the price of being found out was too much to risk.  Of course, the guys in our wing figured the culprit was one of our group, and their level of enjoyment was almost equal to mine.

 

The Statute Of Limitations has long since expired, and Father Riehle passed away in 2008.  I think I am safe. If you ever watch the movie Rudy, keep an eye out for the man playing the role of the Notre Dame football team chaplain.  That guy is no Hollywood actor; it's Father Riehle who, in addition to his day job as Dean Of Students, was the football team's chaplain in real life.  I wonder if he will read this post from that great cigar lounge in the sky.   

Movie Review: "John Wick"

"John Wick": B-. My favorite professor at Notre Dame was Easy Joe Ryan, a former Chicago newspaper man who taught freshman composition.  His nickname came about not from his grading methods -- heavens no!  It had to do with his cool demeanor, his patience and his kindness.  I am not sure what his family history was, but he lived by himself in Lyons Hall.  No matter how well a student thought he had written, Easy Joe could find several places for improvement.  I corresponded with Professor Ryan via Christmas cards for a number of years after I graduated, until his brother notified me of Joe's passing some time around 1978.

I was thinking of my old prof Wednesday afternoon when, by default, I sat through John Wick at the West End theater.  If I had written the script for that movie and submitted it to Easy Joe, it's likely he would have returned it to me replete with dozens of not-quite-acerbic comments, all written with the fire engine red ink he favored, admonishing me to try harder.  Viewing John Wick drove home the fact to me that, when putting together a film to appeal to the targeted demographic, presumably males under 40, you don't have to strive for greatness.  What you strive for are fast cars, non-stop action, and a high body count.  Evaluated under that premise, John Wick hits the mark.

The story-telling structure is one we've seen before.  In the opening sequence, Wick (Keanu Reeves) drives his car at a relatively slow speed, head-on into a barricade in front of a loading dock.  He slowly opens the door and half-falls into the street.  The blood all over his clothing and upon his face clearly could not have resulted from the impact.  He must have been in a fight.  We wonder if the lead eponymous character is going to croak ninety seconds into the film.  But, no, 'tis not to be.  As Wick takes out his cell phone to take one last look at his deceased wife on video, the story flashes back so we can see how he got into this predicament.

Wick is a "retired" hit man who used to work for the Russian mafia in New York City.  The mafia's kingpin is Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), who has a real dolt for a son.  The son, Iosef (Alfie Allen), makes the stupid decision to steal Wick's 1969 Mustang, and exacerbates the stupidity level by intentionally killing Wick's dog in the process.  Among other things, Iosef is unaware of two important facts.  First, because the dog was given to Wick posthumously by Wick's wife, Wick considers it the main link between him and her memory.  Second, Iosef is clueless that his chosen victim is a former hit man once employed by Viggo.  Even when the owner of Iosef's chop shop, Aureilo (John Leguizamo), gives him a heads up on the Mustang's owner, Iosef shrugs it off as a minor inconvenience.  When Aurelio then gives Viggo a call to tell him what Iosef has done, that's when the story kicks into another gear. 

John Wick is to guns what Bruce Lee movies were to martial arts.  Whenever Wick gets into a fight, which is often, he is always outnumbered by the bad guys.  But just like in the martial arts movies, the villains line up one at a time to do battle with the hero.  The thought apparently never occurs to them to rush Wick en mass.  Also, they conveniently come out from behind their hiding places and fire a few wayward shots before Wick easily plugs them.  It makes no difference how far away Wick's target may be.  He is deadly with a hand gun from any distance; no need for a rifle.  On occasion, the mafia baddies bring knives to a gun fight.  One interesting, albeit physically impossible, technique employed by Wick is that whenever he flips a guy over his shoulder, he manages to keep one hand free so that he is able to fire his hand gun point blank before the fallen warrior can rise.

This movie has other "touches" which are noteworthy.  John holes up for a couple of nights at The Continental, a hotel which caters to assassins.  The one house rule is that no "business" can be conducted on hotel premises.  By the way, don't make the mistake of assuming that all the paid killers are of the male persuasion!  Willem Dafoe plays Marcus, an older mentor who shows up at the funeral of Wick's wife, but then accepts a $2 million contact to bump off his protege.  Marcus' calling card is that, no matter whom he's paid to shoot or in what location, he always gains access to a perfect rooftop perch with an absolutely clear view of his prey.  How lucky can a killer be?  I also liked Charlie (David Patrick Kelly).  Need a dozen dead bodies removed, no questions asked?  Just call Charlie and make dinner reservations for twelve.

There is a scene about a third of the way through the movie which struck my funny bone.  It involves a conversation in Wick's doorway between Wick and a cop named Jimmy (Thomas Sadoski).  Jimmy peers in and sees a corpse in the hallway, but because Wick is a friend, they simply bid each other good night.  It wasn't until then that I realized that the movie is practically devoid of humor; I decided to keep count of how many times the writers and director gave us a break from the tense action by using a funny line.  The final tally was three (in a ninety-six minute movie).

I wrote above that I ended up seeing John Wick "by default."  My original plan was to see Fury, but the ticket seller at the West End told me that it would not be shown that day due to a special, unadvertised event for a private audience.  At that point my only options were to view St. Vincent, Bill Murray's latest which had already started ten minutes earlier, or JW.  I would have preferred Murray, but since I didn't want to start watching after it had already started, I opted for the latter.  At least I got to see if Keanu Reeves had improved his acting ability since I first saw him in 1994's Speed.  Not so much.

Movie Review: "Gone Girl"

"Gone Girl": C+.  Major clues are discovered, almost in plain sight, inside a suspect's house days after the police supposedly combed the place with high tech tools looking for evidence.  (Maybe they were in a hurry to get to the doughnut shop.)  A character enters the hospital with dried blood on the skin, and emerges days later with the blood still visible.  (Maybe there was a shortage of soap and wash cloths inside the medical facility.)  No one orders a paternity test for a fetus playing a key (invisible, of course) role in the story, even though the purported father has already willingly submitted his DNA to the authorities.  (Why didn't he or his lawyer think of ordering the test, even if the police didn't?)  A missing woman's former boyfriend is identified early-on to the cops, but they don't bother to set up a stake out or put him under any kind of surveillance. (Maybe the script writers ran out of time, but this film does run two and a-half hours.)  One of the greatest mysteries surrounding Gone Girl is how a movie with so many holes can be a major hit at the box office. (The film, which was released in October, has a very good chance of becoming one of the top ten grossing movies of all time for that month.  As of November 5, ticket sales had exceeded $137 million; it must reach $164 million to crack that top ten.)  The only explanation I can come up with is that the film's success is mainly attributable to the mega-hit 2012 book by Gillian Flynn bearing the same title.  Flynn also penned the movie's screenplay.  Her adoring reading public must have flocked to the theater for multiple viewings.

Many studies have shown that three of the most common elements in troubled marriages are money, fidelity and children.  Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) have hit that trifecta, and then some.  When the story opens, Amy is already missing.  Ben, alerted by a phone call from his neighbor that the front door to his house is wide open, rushes home from the bar he owns to discover the living room ransacked.  There is no sign of his wife, the police are called in and the usual questions are asked. From that point, the storytelling goes back and forth, with intermittent flashbacks revealing that the "perfect" couple had their behind-the-scenes problems.

The police, led by Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), do not initially look upon Nick as a suspect, but little by little both the police and we, the viewers, start to catch on that Nick might not be the all-American guy he outwardly seems.  Why was Amy's life insurance policy recently upgraded?  (Isn't that true in all such TV shows and movies?  The missing person or the deceased always carries an enhanced life insurance policy, naming the prime suspect as the beneficiary.)  Why did Amy secretly buy a hand gun?  And what about all those accusatory entries in her diary?

Less than half way through the film, we learn that Nick has had a little nookie nookie going on the side with Andie (Emily Ratajkowski), one of his former college students who looks more like a high school sophomore.  How dumb can Nick be?  He even invites Andie over to spend the night with him at the house of his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon). The scads of media members who have been camping outside Margo's house inexplicably are nowhere to be seen when Andie enters and exits; how convenient!

My two favorite aspects of Gone Girl are the performances by Tyler Perry and Missi Pyle.  Perry plays Tanner Bolt, a Johnnie Cochran type of attorney, the camera-loving kind that celebrities hire when their backs are against the wall and public opinion has already found them guilty.  Pyle is absolutely dead-on as a cable TV pseudo-journalist in the style of Nancy Grace, who immediately presumes all suspects to be guilty, especially if the alleged victim is an attractive woman.  Speaking of which…

Rosamund Pike, a former "Bond Girl" (2002's Die Another Day), is outstanding as Amy, a difficult and taxing role.  Not having read the book, I was surprised at the number of scenes in which she appears.  Not that I'm complaining.