It’s hard to find a genre more cliché-festooned than the boxing film. Ben Younger knows that, and doesn’t so much avoid those clichés as try to artfully re-arrange them the best that he can. But Miles Teller delivers something better than the sum of the film’s clichés. With his bulked-up physique, wispy pencil-thin mustache, and slightly dim reckless intensity, he turns what could have been a cartoon into a real person. Aaron Eckhart, as his hangover-prone trainer, also turns a familiar archetype into a character with three full dimensions. Source: www.ew.com
With executive producer Martin Scorsese figuratively looking over his shoulder, Ben Younger injects the action with as much visual and performance juice as he can muster, stirring interest in a crude, emotionally imprudent and severely flawed man (much as Scorsese often has) and serving up a thick slice of specific ethnic family ways—Rhode Island working class Catholics the likes of which haven’t been much seen onscreen since David O. Russell’s The Fighter six years ago.
As maniacally as he took drum playing to the limit in ‘Whiplash,’ Teller fights ‘til he wins or drops here. His intensity and determination levels are extreme, his proclivity for reckless, unthinking behavior just a bit less so, and the actor cuts a convincing boxer’s figure in the many scenes of training and combat.” Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Whiplash feels like young Scorsese—hungry, ambitious, well disciplined, superbly cut. Chazelle understands that good filmmaking means showing command and locking into in the groove—tempo, timing, spirit, pulse. It’s a brash but out-there film that’s necessarily mad and manic. Teller's Andrew is vulnerable, anguished, charismatic, thoughtful. He really doesn’t want to be like his kindly, failed-writer dad (Paul Reiser), and he can’t find peace with a pretty girl (Melissa Benoist) because she isn’t as consumed as he is. Andrew just wants to wail like a champ, and this is how almost all great musicians are. Young Brian Wilson became a self-taught pianist in Hawthorne by playing every day like a crazy man, and ignoring the usual high-school stuff. Source: www.hollywood-elsewhere.com
I was heading down the escalator inside the Chinese/Dolby complex, heading for the orange level in the parking garage. I noticed this shapely ginger-haired girl with some big-shouldered, dark-haired guy standing behind her. Then I realized the guy, who was wearing a powder-blue shirt of some kind, was Miles Teller…. Then ginger girl dropped something and bent over to pick it up just as she and Teller were passing me, and I couldn’t resist checking out. She wasn’t looking so what the hell… right? Except Teller was looking at me. And then the humiliation: “Don’t be a pervert, man.” And he kind of bellowed it. Shamed, I tried a little “oh, no, man… I was just… you know, you and Damien Chazelle… I’m on the team!” But Teller wouldn’t back off, he kept looking at me like I was scum. Typical guy thing: “Hey man, she might be hot but I’m with her so avert your fucking eyes, and keep them averted!” Just another over-protective boyfriend flashing his alpha dominance. The irony is that I never gape at women shamelessly. Teller’s girlfriend Keleigh Sperry was the one I was subtly eyeballing. (Not subtly enough, I mean.) Teller is cool enough, a serious actor. He is Mitchum, in a way. —Jeffrey Wells in Hollywood Elsewhere
“I was excited to play the straight guy who actually has more of a moral compass,” Miles Teller recently told IndieWire of his role as David Packouz in War Dogs. “Those aren’t always the parts you’re getting. It’s rare to get a script for [roles for] guys in their young twenties that are actually doing things with big responsibility or a more mature tone.”
“For a lot of the projects I’ve done, it’s taken some foresight and some faith by the director,” Teller said. “When Ben cast me in ‘Bleed For This,’ I think I was just coming off ‘That Awkward Moment’ or something where I’m literally the pale, goofy friend. I don’t think many people had me on a short list to play a five-time world champion Italian boxer.”
“I remember the first project that I was legitimately bummed about. The first thing that I thought I was going to get and I didn’t and I was bummed out was ‘The Descendants.'” Teller read for the role of Sid, the stoner boyfriend of Shailene Woodley’s character, going so far as auditioning for director Alexander Payne, before being beat out by Nick Krause. Even though the memory still stings, Teller has a relaxed attitude towards how things panned out. After all, for Teller, it all comes down to one simple aim: “I just always wanted to be versatile.” Source: www.indiewire.com
David and Efraim are not friends. It’s not friendship. It’s just business. Teller then punches Hill in the face — and one gets the sense here that his David might as well be Todd Phillips himself. One senses that, after a career of playing the cool kid, and of celebrating his jerks as his heroes, Todd Phillips is finally ready to focus on the straight man and the moral center. That, in ostensibly making his Drama About Business, Todd Phillips has finally managed to make his Comedy About Friendship. And that, after all of these years, and all of those movies, Todd Phillips has finally figured out just what it is about friendship he has to say: ‘Don’t be a fucking dick.’ Source: theringer.com
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