Golden Globe winner J.K. Simmons offers patient mentorship to Miles Teller as the indie hit film WHIPLASH gets a recession-buster screening at the Count Basie Theatre Tuesday night.
If the Golden Globes be truly the gateway to Oscar’s soul, then the indie hit film Whiplash has the drumbeat of momentum behind it, having just netted five Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture).
It happened a few days after workhorse character player J.K. Simmons took home the Globe trophy for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture — a hard-earned accolade for which he competed with a field that boasted a Hawke, a couple of Hulks, and a Robert Duvall.
Audiences primed to handicap this year’s main event can catch up with the buzzed-about dramatic feature from writer-director Damien Chazelle, when it comes to the big screen of the Count Basie Theatre on Tuesday for a one-time showing at a price that cannot be refused.
Scheduled months ago as the latest in the Count Basie Theatre Cinema Society series of screenings, the 7 pm presentation finds the Basie plugging into one of the biggest festival circuit and indie hits of 2014 — and attendees able to see it for a ticket of no more than $5 (or FREE, if you’re a member of the Society).
Simmons — the busy actor best known as everything from J. Jonah Jameson in the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, to the trainer in those “We are Farmers” insurance commercials — appears as a demanding music teacher whose ways are skewed more to the General Patton/Gunnery Sergeant Hartman side of things than our own Miss Sherri‘s methodology. Miles Teller is the intensely ambitious young drummer who becomes a particular project for the hard-driving bandmaster, in the scenario that kicks the mentor-student tropes of Stand and Deliver and The Karate Kid up a notch or ten.
Take it here to reserve $5 seating to the Tuesday screening — and here to become a member of the Count Basie Theatre Cinema Society.
