The greatest movie of the last twenty years is the movie Drumline. The movie Drumline is about a group of young whimsical drummists at a fictional university in Georgia. Nick Cannon is a special drummist, and he turns the drumline upside down with his newfangled ways, which are tremendous. There’s a scene where a very attractively butch young woman does a set of one-armed pushups, and this is a scene that is very dear to my heart. In a particularly excellent scene, Nick Cannon must have his head shaved because he did not read the entirety of the drumline’s rulebook (the final rule of the rulebook is that if you cannot recite the final rule, your head must be shaved, which is as true now as it was then).
This scene is very droll, and also delivers on everything it promises. Nick Cannon’s head is shaved; Nick Cannon’s pride is brought low. He will have to rise from the ashes of his dead self and ascend stepping-stones to better things. Nick Cannon! You are a delight to my heart. Nick Cannon! How often I pretend you are not anti-abortion. Nick Cannon, it brings me joy to hear your name spoken aloud.
It is a good movie, possibly a great movie; perhaps the greatest movie. Nick Cannon gets in a lot of philosophical arguments with Orlando Jones. The older brother from Smart Guy is in it, and if I recall correctly, has a lot of trouble keeping up with the rest of the team, drum-wise. Zoë Saldana is in it as well, but does comparatively few push-ups. I do not hold it against her, but it must be said. There is a drum-off. There is a duel for mastery that prominently features drumsticks.
Did you enjoy the campy absurdity of movies like Step Up or Center Stage, and do you also like enormous fucking drums? Then you will like Drumline. It is a movie that has everything in it, particularly lots and lots of drums. Swirling drums and giant drums and medium-sized drums and droves moving in unison and sideways drums and upside drums and just when you think there aren’t more drums, there come the drums. It is better than most other movies that exist. Most other movies have an appalling lack of giant fucking drums getting just whaled on by Nick Cannon making the most serious face he can muster. Let us look at the evidence.
Challenger: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Moral of Challenger: Several people with inexplicable hairstyles regret dating Jim Carrey, for various reasons. Having memories is hard.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: GIANT DRUMS ARE AMAZING
Challenger: The Dark Knight.
Moral of Challenger: Agent of chaos spends upwards of 20 minutes carefully and rationally explaining his justification for becoming an agent of chaos; nobody has any fun.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: BING BANG BOOM CRASH BOOOOMMM
Challenger: Donnie Darko
Moral of Challenger: Do not take your ADD medication. It will kill your sister and it will crash planes.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: Nick Cannon is handsome like an old-timey milkman. And he learns how to stand up for himself with the help of a team of misfit drums.
Challenger: Into the Wild
Moral of Challenger: If your family loves you and sends you to college, you should definitely run away to Alaska and starve to death to show them how fucked up their conventional values are.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: Sure, you’ve played the drums…but have you played the drums while SPINNING AND WEARING A CAPE? GIANT DRUMS ARE AMAZING. WITH A FUCKING PLUMED-ASS HAT ON IT? FUCK YOU AND YOUR SIMPLE, RESERVED HATS. PANTS WITH STRIPES AND SHOULDER PADS WITH STRIPES AND SHOES WITH STRIPES AND BANDANAS WITH STRIPES AND PLAYING THE DRUMS WITH YOUR FEET AND STRIPES STRIPES EVERYWHERE FUCK YOU YA FUCK.
Challenger: (500) Days of Summer
Moral of Challenger: If you loved your girlfriend, and she goes on to love somebody else, you are an interesting person.
Parallel Moral of Drumline: FUCK YOUR SAD EYES JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT USE YOUR SAD EYES TO LOOK AT THIS:
Drumline is better than anything. Fuck you.
Tags: arbitrarily rating things, drumline, excellence, movies, nick cannon
ALSO: Drumline is always on television, and it is the BEST movie to watch at the gym while you run/bike/elliptical.
THE BEST
I was going to make fun of Mallory for her love of Drumline but then I remembered my favourite movie is one where superintelligent sharks eat Samuel L Jackson, so.
Don’t apologize for Deep Blue Sea! Best mid-sentence death ever.
*aump*
LL Cool J defeating a shark with kitchen appliances to avenge the death of his beloved parrot is a most beautiful story.
Drumline is like an afterschool special for marching band.
Also? It has one handed pushups.
The beginning of the end of my relationship with my med school roommate was when she deleted the months-old (and FREQUENTLY rewatched) recordings of Drumline and Love and Basketball to make room for some reality show about cupcake bakers.
she
did
WHAT
to LOVE AND BASKETBALL?
YES. And once her awful boyfriend laughed when he walked in on me tearing up during the scene when they played one-on-one for each other’s hearts (I’m sorry I’m not made of STONE, asshole).
LOVE AND BASKETBALL NOOOOOO
Jeebus this is the saddest thing I have heard all day.
I only got into the first five seconds of the clip when I got a message saying “An error occurred, please try again later.” and now I am OUTRAGED (at youtube.)
This is all true.
This was going to be my exact comment.
I have wanted to see that movie since it came out but totally forgot about it until now. THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME. I miss marching band!
I marched trumpet! What did you march?!
Actually, I was in color guard. Hope that still counts. 😉
I played clarinet in grade school and middle school but didn’t stick with it. Sometimes I wish I had, but I really enjoyed color guard so it seemed to work out fine.
It counts, though I never understood anything your crew did, and I think we kind of viewed you as aliens. (Iike the guys from Mars Attacks but with better fashion sense and prettier). Guard also always functioned at a 46% higher drama rate than the horn-line. Snarky and catty guard members have provided me with hours of entertainment during rehearsals.
Haha. In my school the guard and the musicians had a better rapport. Most of our girls were pretty mellow and cool, but I still had the most fun when we did things with the rest of the band than when we were on our own, because the band was where most of my friends were. Plus there were boys.
It always stuck in my craw that, when we traveled to away games and competitions, the guard had to ride our own bus. I hated this because I wanted to ride with my friends, and I always felt like all the fun happened on the band buses. Any protest was met with the excuse that we had to French braid each other’s hair on the way there. One time I snuck on the band bus and got in trouble when we reached our destination, but it was totally worth it.
I love hearing stories of Marching Band. I played clarinet is middle school, as well. I was never any good though so I quit. I had lots of friend in Marching Band and they would fill me in on all of the drama going on. I lived vicariously through them.
Plus, our marching band won more competitions than the football team.
In your next life, you’ll know what to do.
Our marching band sucked. In our school’s entire history, the only time we won competitions were when we were the only band competing in our category. UNTIL that one, glorious day when we beat a band. WE BEAT A BAND. We all knew that third place trophy meant so much more than all the number ones.
Apparently now my school’s marching band is really good! It only took 20 years. 😉
I love everything this post chooses to be.
I watch this every time it’s on TV and my fiance always makes fun of me and LOOK WHO’S THE COOL ONE NOW, ASSHOLE
Joseph Gordon-Levitt would probably agree with you about the drumming.
When I was in high school (and on my school’s drumline!!!!), I watched that movie nearly every week. Good times. Good memories. Terrible story line, but the drumming was super fun.
I have never seen “Drumline” before and I just watched the finale above and I almost started screaming “FUCK YEAH” at my desk. Holy shit.
WATCH IT WATCH IT IMMEDIATELY
On a long-distance band and orchestra trip in high school, one of our directors put Drumline on the tour bus TVs, and everyone refused to get off the bus until the movie was over. We cheered and screamed our heads off outside of some hotel in Indianapolis for 20 minutes. DRUMLINE IS THE BEST.
It just really makes me happy to imagine that scene of y’all in the bus. Also, I’m pretty sure Drumline is still the movie of choice for entertaining buses of high schoolers.
Our go-to was Remember the Titans. A good movie, but it’s no Drumline.
They made us watch it in choir once when we had a sub because I guess there aren’t choir movies. No complaints.
Bands of America grand nationals?
Thank you for the Nick Cannon love! While Drumline is obviously the best movie he’s been in, I still believe Love Don’t Cost a Thing is horribly underappreciated and better than the original.
It’s been way too long since I’ve watched Center Stage …
If, as Mallory says, Drumline is as good as Center Stage, then I must go watch it immediately. Or maybe I’ll just go remind myself who the best g*ddamn dancer is at the American Ballet Academy.
Perhaps you should watch the Australian TV show, Dance Academy. It’s like Center Stage, but better. They can actually dance.
I see your Drumline, and I raise you…ROLL BOUNCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsrW2uXwx1c
How have I never even HEARD of this movie? it looks amazing and will be watched tonight during a double feature along with Drumline. I am so excited.
It is truly cinema at its finest.
Mallory, did you just paraphrase Tennyson’s In Memoriam in this post on Drumline, because if so I have a marriage proposal I need to talk to you about
To be perfectly honest, I paraphrased Bertie Wooster’s mangling of Tennyson, because the Jeeves novels are where I get all of my knowledge of the poets of Empire.
OH NO THAT’S EVEN BETTER
This movie is my spirit animal.
Also, when I was a crappy percussionist in my high school marching band – which, of course, entailed a tin-soldier/beefeater-looking uniform, they put me on bass drum.
So the drumline heads down early for halftime, to do a few cadences, whatever. Point is, the entire rest of the band is sitting in the stadium next to me, I’m walking down the concrete steps with my bass drum on.
I trip.
(Go ahead, imagine it: Mel in her black-and-red uniform, tumbling down the steps, then the drum, then the soldier-girl, drum, soldier, drum, soldier. I’ll wait while you laugh.)
Only thing injured was my pride, but the next year they put me on cymbals, obviously. And I had a cymbals-guru-senior-gal who taught me the value of hand lotion when you spend a few hours a day twirling large brass disks around by their leather straps, and also some stuff about being cute, or, rather, the ways in which I was not cute.
And despite the sometimes-unfortunate lessons learned, I watch Drumline and my marching band flashbacks are all FLASH BOOM CRASH YEAHHHH, and I’m just sad that my soldier uniform had neither plume nor cape.
We didn’t have a marching band, per se, so much as a bunch of us who showed up to football games in matching hideous t-shirts and played music in the stands, but we had a pretty excellent drum line, and I still remember the cadences (& the dances those of us who weren’t drumming would do) and it was pretty amazing. Also, I can never hear the National Anthem anymore without adding the bass drum & cymbals.
Oh, say can you [boom, crash]
by the dawn’s early [boom, crash]
what so proudly we [boom, crash]
at the twilight’s last [boom, crash]
That is SO TRUE about the National Anthem. I thought I was the only one who sang it like that in my head!
When can we make time to go more in-depth on Center Stage and Step Up, though?
I, for one, second a Center Stage post.
This movie brings me back to the best parts of all my high school marching band memories EVERY TIME I SEE IT. My brother and my HS boyfriend were both on drumline, so this movie was a staple.
I was in HS marching band when drumline came out. I don’t think I had ever seen our real-life drumline unironically excited for anything popular before that. They just completely forgot to pretend to be too cool for anything newer than Rush. Drumline is magic.
You definitely stacked the cards by not ranking Bring It On or Step Up 2 The Streets.
Come on, Mallory.
That said, I love Drumline and I fully endorse this post.
I haven’t seen it, but when I watched that clip, and the rival team played on the other team’s drums, I was like “Oh, SHIT!”
The world be a better place if every battle was fought with choreographed drumming or dancing. No, I’m sorry you can’t use chemical weapons, guns, or bombs, better invest in some drums. I will also allow marching band battles.
This is truly the path to World Peace. The Gaza Strip would be a much better place.
I adore Drumline. I will always watch Drumline… it is completely impossible for me to pass by it in a channel guide, no matter if it’s a Tuesday night or Saturday afternoon or I’m in a hotel somewhere. I will be late for your wedding if you schedule it during a Drumline airing – plan accordingly.
I love high school marching bands, especially the ones with the overtly sexual dancing girls; it’s just such a new thing to me! I may feel differently when the BBs hit high school. I also enjoy the pom-pom boots.
I saw this in the theater in college. Six of us piled into a two-door car somehow. We walked out making those snake hands. Ah, youth.
I love hearing stories of Marching Band. I played clarinet is middle school, as well. I was never any good though so I quit. I had lots of friend in Marching Band and they would fill me in on all of the drama going on. I lived vicariously through them.
Plus, our marching band won more competitions than the football team.
Perhaps you should watch the Australian TV show, Dance Academy. It's like Center Stage, but better. They can actually dance.
Nick Cannon’s serious face throughout the movie always makes me convulse with laughter.
Unfortunately watching drumline with commentary isn’t as life changing as watching drumline without commentary would lead one to believe.
True Drumline fact: this movie was filmed in Atlanta. For the scene with the final competition in the Georgia Dome, they invited local high school marching bands to fill the stands. I had already graduated, but my brother was still in high school and got to go down there and be stand filler. Naturally, I was ragingly jealous.