A good movie

For some reasons, I was really eager to watch this movie and it took me about 6 years to finally find it. Indeed, since I have been playing the saxophone alt for maybe 8 years, I obviously really had to check it out. In fact, I did study Charlie Parker's music and it was basically the most difficult thing you could play on a sax. Indeed, even if I would play it 10 times slower than him, it was still really really difficult to handle! Anyway, back to the movie... The music was indeed just awesome and Clint Eastwood really succeeded to show it in all its greatness. Forest Whitaker also gave here his first starring part and he gave many layers to this character. Indeed, you could feel the genius but also all the vulnerability and you also got a good feeling of his demons. Another interesting thing was that, even though Charlie Parker constantly talked about his addiction, you actually never saw him shooting drugs and there was only one scene during which he displayed his tracks on his arm. I think it was actually a very sensitive approach and even though he was a heavy drug addict, it was more interesting to watch him playing his magical music than taking some dope like any other musical biopic. However, even though I really enjoyed this flick, unfortunately, it was still flawed. Indeed, even though the back and forth in the timeline was chosen more or less there to display his confused state of mind, I still thought it was a rather annoying and useless gimmick. Another consequence of this approach was that it was difficult to understand the impact of the other characters in his life. Anyway, in spite of these flaws, it was still a really interesting movie and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Jazz.