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‘Pitch Perfect:’ An Advance Film Review

 

Pitch PerfectRemember that scene in Good Will Hunting?  The one where Robin Williams tells Matt Damon all about how Williams met his wife?  He was with his buddies about to attend the sixth game of the 1975 World Series and became smitten with a girl in a bar.  He gives away his ticket and says, “Sorry, guys. I gotta see about a girl.”

I had a similar movie going experience tonight.  I went to see a film for which I am decidedly not the target demographic.  But, I went because I wanted to see about a girl.

The girl in question is Anna Kendrick and she’s brilliant.  She was Oscar nominated alongside George Clooney in Up in the Air.  As Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s therapist, she was one of the best things about last year’s great cancer comedy, 50/50.  And, she’s one of the only actors to survive the Twilight train wreck with their artistic integrity intact.

As I said, I am not the target demo for Pitch Perfect.  I am not a young woman age 15-25.  Furthermore, I find Glee to be pretty loathsome, despite it frequently being on the money in terms of its social agenda.

But, I think Kendrick is pretty spectacular, and the idea of her in a rap battle really piqued my interest.  I believe in the synergistic power of actors to elevate the material they’re in (and vice versa), so I decided to give Pitch Perfect a spin.

Pitch Perfect is set at fictional Barden University, where the biggest rage on campus is a cappella singing and the freshman are all 30 years old.  It’s the kind of college that only exists in the movies and at times makes you question whether or not screenwriters have gone to college at all.  Football and basketball are apparently non-existent at Barden and, instead, four a cappella singing groups seem to fill that void.

The most popular of these groups is the Treble Makers (there’s a drinking game to be made of this film where you drink whenever a bad music pun is made).  Led by a guy named Bumper (Adam DeVine of Workaholics with the obnoxious turned up to 11), the Treble Makers are the defending national champions and they have total disdain for the Bellas.  

The Bellas are Barden’s all-girl singing group and, after a disastrous performance at the previous year’s national championships, the Bellas are having trouble recruiting new members.  The Bellas are boring and square; imagine a bunch of female Pat Boone clones dressed as flight attendants.

Kendrick plays Beca, a freshman with career goals to be a music producer.  Beca is recruited reluctantly into the Bellas, who are now a bunch of misfists and underdogs.  It’s a movie, you see, and they have to be misfits and underdogs.  The Bellas are lorded over by Aubrey, an uptight stick-in-the-mud who refuses to be creative with the group’s songs or musical arrangements.

Gee, I wonder if Beca will be able to redefine the Bellas’ musical stylings in time for nationals . . .

As much as I like Anna Kendrick (and she’s extremely appealing here), the real star of Pitch Perfect is Ben Bram, the vocal arranger.  There is some really great singing in the movie and some terrific and inventive musical arrangements.  Early on, there’s a show-stopping audition sequence in which singers are cleverly edited performing Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone.”  And then, there’s the “riff off,” a competition among the groups that’s like an 8 Mile rap battle.

As long as Pitch Perfect is singing, the movie sings, too.

I just had some issues with some of the comedy.  There are jokes here at the expense of a lesbian character that were surprising to me in not only how puerile they were but also how archaic.  It’s 2012 for God’s sake.  Is this sort of tee-hee-hee humor still viable today?  I was reminded of the hoary gay jokes in Revenge of the Nerds, and that thing is almost 30 years old.  

The other problem I had was the comedy sidekick character.  She calls herself Fat Amy, and she’s played by the not untalented Rebel Wilson.  At first I had high hopes for Fat Amy, as she is a confident female character not bothered by body image issues.  But, like many comedy sidekick characters, it becomes evident that Fat Amy doesn’t exist in our dimension.  She exists in the dimension where she works overtime to get laughs which requires the actor to play scenes for jokes rather than for truth.  The result is a character with no behavior that resembles an actual human being.  Fat Amy exists to be a punchline machine.  For instance, there’s a scene in the movie where Bumper throws a burrito on Amy.  She knows it’s a burrito when it hits her.  And, rather than being angry at the guy who treated her so disrespectfully, Amy goes into some schtick thinking she’s been shot.  This, of course, leads to the lesbian character trying to perform mouth-to-mouth on her.  None of it works as comedy, and it’s all kind of embarrassing and insulting.

So, while I found a lot of the film’s comedy to be badly played and more than a little demeaning, the musical numbers really do carry the day.  And, pros like Elizabeth Banks (who also produced the movie) and Christopher Guest alum John Michael Higgins show up as television commentators.  Yeah, it’s the Fred Willard stuff from Best in Show, but it’s more often than not pretty funny.

And, did I mention Anna Kendrick was awesome?

 

 

 

 

Chris Spicer, Fanbase Press Contributor

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