Enjoying and Producing Music

If Groucho Marx crashed “Airplane” into “When Harry Met Sally”, the self-aware, rapid-fire romantic comedy debris would take the form of They Came Together. The pleasantly predictable cliches of the dozen or so rom-coms that women openly love and men secretly love are upended, lampooned, skewered, and filtered through a juvenile YouTube sensibility. The result is a trope-trampling treat of a movie; perhaps one that tries a bit too hard, but we forgive it because it brought us flowers and gave us that look.

The Q/A after the screening was as hilarious and chaotic as the film, with director/co-writer David Wain and cast Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd describing the fun they had shooting. Rudd characterized the movie as “relentlessly silly” and at one point ran into the audience to propose to a questioner. A-

Partly funded to the tune of about $2M by Kickstarter, director/cowriter Zach Braff’s, Wish I Was Here has all the resonance and quirkiness of his Sundance 2004 classic “Garden State”, but not quite as much magic. This more mature effort has Braff and spouse Kate Hudson struggling with imperfect solutions to the grown-up problems of parents on the decline and children on rise, with some keenly observed insights along the way.

In the Q/A following the screening, Braff thanked the Kickstarter supporters and apologized for the typos on the closing credits that were still being finalized. He also said that he did not cast himself in “Garden State” so he could make out with Natalie Portman, and that he did not cast himself in this movie so he could squeeze the buns of Kate Hudson. B

Crowd pleasing melodrama Whiplash (winner of Sundance’s audience and jury prizes) follows the aspirations of a young jazz drummer at an elite music academy. Miles Teller, who others have compared to a young John Cusack and who was so good in last year’s Sundance hit “The Spectacular Now”, is spot-on as the drummer with the heart of a lion, and J. K. Simmons (Juno’s dad) is a force of nature as his wrath-of-god music teacher. The film is energized by powerful big-band-jazz performance sequences, including a remarkable finishing number.

Below the surface, there are similarities to Sundance 2013’s “Jobs”, with both films examining the very definition of greatness, the struggle to achieve it, the personal costs involved, and most importantly, the flawed leaders who who somehow inspire it.  B+