A movie very close to my heart as I played a featured extra, Layla's Mom. It was an honor to work with Nick Cannon and Zoe Saldana. They are both the most kind and talented actors in the business. Meeting, Angela, who played Nick's mom was a treat. she is the daughter of Florence on "The Jefferson's. The highlight of my acting career, so far, was working on this extraordinary movie. Filmed in Atlanta, this movie brought a lot work to many actors. It also show cased the soulful sounds of African American college bands and the talented and beautiful dancers and majorettes. If you want to be entertained with some great music and see some beautiful people of color please see this movie ASAP. If you want to see "yours truly" look for me after one of the major band scenes. Enjoy

...Well i don't like them much. My sister was given this film as a gift for Christmas. The family decided to watch it together. I think each of us wish we had a brick to embed in our skulls afterwards. This film wasn't shot badly nor was it badly scripted, if your into marching bands that is, but it is incredibly bad if you don't care about this stuff. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who could really enjoy this film and i don't mean to be offensive but I just did not enjoy watching this movie.If I was into marching bands it would probably get an 8. So....if you like marching bands watch it. If not, don't.

Why do people keep telling me to enjoy the music and not worry about the plot as if that's some kind of saving grace for the film? I'd probably have enjoyed some filmed performances of actual bands a whole lot more. If you feel a need to add some kind of plot to the genre, you really ought to make it plausible, even if you're going to make it formulaic and predictable. Spoilers coming between the stars.***OK. This young kid gets a full ride scholarship in music to a college. Nobody could tell he can't read music?!?!!!?!??! I'm sorry, but that sort of thing just trips my ohfergodsakegimmeabreak switch, and it ruins entire movies for me even if they were otherwise pretty good.Even getting accepted for training at a music school will require you to read a piece of music you will never have seen. The filmmakers, though, apparently want me to believe that he got a full scholarship to a music school without anybody checking that out? It might even be possible that such a scholarship could be given even with such a lack if the player is good enough, but it would certainly have been discovered prior to acceptance unless the school is being run by morons.There's even a "sight reading" audition where he apparently was given the music beforehand. WRONG!!!!! Sight reading means it is plopped in front of you, and you get maybe 30 seconds to look it over before you have to play it. There's even a good chance that it was written shortly before auditions. Sight reading is a test to find out how quickly one can absorb an unfamiliar piece of music. Any chance to prepare it defeats the purpose of the test. The only reason to do it the way this film does it is that the story writer wanted to have this undiscovered deficiency in the character. That's just plain awful writing.***So the plot if formulaic, predictable, and badly written. Maybe it's just me, but formulaic, predictable, badly written plots ruin my ability to enjoy the music. The performances were probably better than I thought they were because of this. That's criminal.

I've always had a mild to moderate fascination and admiration of marching bands; especially the marching bands of Black colleges. That and boredom got me to watch "Drumline". "Drumline" did nothing to hedge my feelings of marching bands. It did drive home a good message: preparation and hard work are more valuable than talent.Nick Cannon played a showboating, hot-headed freshman drummer now in college where things are a little different. More is expected from you in college, such as responsibility, maturity, and all of those other characteristics associated with growing up. Devon Miles (Nick Cannon) wasn't displaying any of that. So, the movie had a cliché story of growing up, learning important life lessons, and David slaying Goliath. It didn't really move me one way or the other, the movie was very average.