Sunday, March 1, 2015

MY FINAL BLOG ENTRY. FARE THEE WELL "DANIEL KRONE'S FILM BLOG".

Fare thee well to my blog of many years. I will miss you. You have been my good friend. I'm not sure if any of you have been paying attention but I've been writing this blog for the past several years.

My blog is now like a dingy old house I go back to sometimes. It is purposely sloppy. It is as vapid and empty as a nostalgic old toy devoid of the reason why I really loved it in the first place. I have come here time and again to vomit my thoughts in the form of tedious bizarre rants and just recently had the epiphany that I don't need it anymore.

I started this blog soon after I received a job for "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and it has functioned basically as writing practice. Sketches. Just getting ideas and thoughts out of my system. It has functioned well but as I said it is tedious. On that show I used to write reports on various things daily. All that tedious report writing numbed me from the passion I used to have for writing as an art form. But now I'm sick of being numb.

This blog is like a nostalgic old haunted house, a relic of dreams, memories, ideals, writing styles, tastes and thought patterns I used to have. It is a time capsule but no longer a reflection of my own personal zeitgeist.

Goodnight great beast. I may slip into you in the far future, but for now I bid thee well. For now I must concentrate my mind and life on other things.

Sign,

Daniel Louis Krone - March 1 2015.



WHIPLASH

I think this movie is a masterpiece.

Image result for whiplash

I'd been putting off writing a top 10 of this past year because I never felt compelled to write it. I have conversations with my good friends about what I like but I just felt like this year I didn't need to keep a record of the things I enjoyed. It seemed like a tedious exercise.

I'm not even going to do a full on review of this film I'm just trying to get these particular thoughts I'm currently having out of my system and in the form of a blog entry.

This will be my second to last blog entry on "Daniel Krone's Film Blog" and my very last film review or 'thought-rant on a particular movie'. 

I have seen "Whiplash" 3 times now. The first in a theatre, the second on blu-ray, and third on blu-ray commentary. "Whiplash" is exactly what I want in a film. Passionate. That's all. I want a film that is more conscious about its subject matter than most film's seem to be and I got that with this.

The film's plot is razor thin and its idea is so stunningly simple but the film is conveyed with such meticulous passion to every line of dialogue and every edit to milk every moment to a point so perfect it feels interpretive, and free-style, much like the jazz in the film.

I only really need and want to talk about 2 things I think are stunningly well executed in this film. JK Simmons's character "Fletcher" and the editing. The story of the film is good but basic. Kid joins a jazz band, is psychologically tortured by his composer, and continues to drive to be one of the best drummers in the world. The cinematography is good looking but basically everything has either a pastel green or glowing gold color too it. It is not bad but not mind blowing either. I think this film is a masterpiece but basically on the strength of just two things when boiled down. Those two things are like the main ingredients of a dish with many ingredients that work well but none that overpower the flavor of these two alone.

JK Simmons as Fletcher.

JK Simmons won an oscar for this performance so there isn't much more praise I can give it than most who've seen this film have already done. His performance so flip flops with emotion and a raw anger force that from my seat it is something worthy of deep admiration. It is a delicate balance of perfectly timed emotional moments and unexpected spurts of dread summoning outbursts and back again. His performance is a wonderfully timed roller coaster and in a way, much like the editing is like free form jazz in its ability to surprise me all 3 viewings.
Editing. 

"Black Swan", "Perfect Blue","All That Jazz","King of Comedy", and "The Wrestler" were all films that came to mind when I saw this. For some reason I love films about the struggles of artists. But the main one, in terms of editing, this film reminded me of was "All that Jazz". Both films earned an oscar for it. To me it was the best film of the year because of the culmination of the editing. The director knew the perfect amount of coverage to get but I'm astonished that most of the sequences in the film are so powerful yet made up of basically b-roll any editor could in theory move in many different ways to tell the story but in the way it is presented here seems to heighten every moment in an unpredictable free form kind of a way with its own flare for montage and style. It's very difficult to explain. For me it's an emotional thing. I fell in love with this movie the moment the editor and director decided to cut to a spit valve being opened and spit falling on the floor. The characters and dialogue are fun but the attention to details in such a limited space and the ability to make each sequence with the band seem nuanced and fresh while only concentrating on 1 of 2 characters in the mix could have easily been tedious but in the final cut of the film is anything but. The film ends at an emotional climax that's built up to its exact boiling point, it's heartbreaking but exactly what I'd wanted at my most ambitious ideals about the film I thought when I first bought my ticket. It's exactly what I wanted and needed. It reinvigorated my love for the art of storytelling simply through editing techniques, coverage, and a unique take on a performance I was in awe of and refreshed by.

So that's my two cents.