Tweet
Pitch Perfect (2012)
Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Skylar Astin, Elizabeth Banks. Directed by Jason Moore.
Most football fans are aware of the annual Big Game between Stanford and UC-Berkeley. It’s one of the sport’s storied, long-standing rivalries at 114 games. What most people don’t know is that in the week before each Big Game, among other activities is the Big Sing, a performance of both schools’ a capella groups in a celebration of the rivalry. I know this because I was once very close to someone who sang in an a capella group at Stanford. For three years I heard great stories about the rituals, fund-raisers, concert shenanigans, rivalries, concert tours, and friendships this friend experienced in her small corner of the school. It is a different world, the world of college a capella.
It seems to me that the people who have the best experiences in college are the ones who carve out their places in these little corners. For me it was a campus ministry and the student paper. For others I know it was Greek life, intramural athletics, music, or even a favorite campus job. Pitch Perfect has excellent music and that’s all the reason it needs for existing, but it does make an attempt at a message, and this is probably it: the college experience (and maybe all our experience) is its fullest when we form meaningful relationships with a few people in our little pieces of the school.
Anna Kendrick stars as Becca, a misfit loner who creates mashups on her laptop computer and aspires to a career in the music business. She doesn’t really want to be in college, but her father, a professor at her university, insists. When he promises her he’ll help her move to California to pursue her dreams only if she gives college an honest try by joining at least one campus group, she reluctantly auditions for one of the school’s a capella groups.
Her group, the Barden Bellas, was last year in the finals of the International Championship of College A Capella (a competition that I just recently learned actually exists, since 1996), but a projectile vomiting incident and the graduation of most of its members have resulted in the group’s starting anew with only two returning singers. Its sullied reputation means that the Bellas are stuck with a lot of the leftovers after schoolwide auditions, and it is now a rag-tag group of odd personalities who can really sing.
The plot is actually pretty good, and it involves a love interest (a member of a rival singing group) and Becca’s difficulty with intimate relationships with her father, with peers, and with potential lovers, in addition to the built-in drama of district, regional, and national competitions. Along the way there is a lot of singing, and it is all wonderful and excellent. Even when the Bellas perform songs that bore the apparently jaded audiences and commentators at the competitions, the songs are fantastic. There is a beautiful joy projected in just about every song, by every group that performs. There are impossible-to-believe spontaneous numbers and more-impossible-to-believe a capella battles, but the ridiculousness of the setups is excused by the undeniably fun music.
I could almost like this movie as a movie, and not just as a vehicle for great singing, but there’s just far, far too much lowest-common-denominator stuff here, stuff that was a big hit among the college-aged audience I saw this with the second time. There’s a lot to chuckle at, but not as much as my fellow moviegoers would have you believe. They laughed so loudly at what they considered a funny accent (by Rebel Wilson) that they didn’t hear the actually funny things she said. They laughed so loudly at an Asian girl who can speak barely above a whisper that they missed the disturbing (and funny) things she actually said. Maddening, I tell you.
But fat jokes and vomiting aside, the film and its characters do a nice job of poking light fun at the world of college a capella, which one of the main characters playfully calls “nerd singing.” This is the funny stuff, the stuff that emerges out of what’s actually believable and likable, which includes nice performances by Kendrick (on whom I have been crushing since her Oscar-nominated performance in Up in the Air), Wilson, Brittany Snow, and Anna Camp. It’s only a passable movie, but I can recommend it whole-heartedly to anyone who appreciates good singing.
6/10 (IMDb rating)
61/100 (Criticker rating)
Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Skylar Astin, Elizabeth Banks. Directed by Jason Moore.
Most football fans are aware of the annual Big Game between Stanford and UC-Berkeley. It’s one of the sport’s storied, long-standing rivalries at 114 games. What most people don’t know is that in the week before each Big Game, among other activities is the Big Sing, a performance of both schools’ a capella groups in a celebration of the rivalry. I know this because I was once very close to someone who sang in an a capella group at Stanford. For three years I heard great stories about the rituals, fund-raisers, concert shenanigans, rivalries, concert tours, and friendships this friend experienced in her small corner of the school. It is a different world, the world of college a capella.
It seems to me that the people who have the best experiences in college are the ones who carve out their places in these little corners. For me it was a campus ministry and the student paper. For others I know it was Greek life, intramural athletics, music, or even a favorite campus job. Pitch Perfect has excellent music and that’s all the reason it needs for existing, but it does make an attempt at a message, and this is probably it: the college experience (and maybe all our experience) is its fullest when we form meaningful relationships with a few people in our little pieces of the school.
Anna Kendrick stars as Becca, a misfit loner who creates mashups on her laptop computer and aspires to a career in the music business. She doesn’t really want to be in college, but her father, a professor at her university, insists. When he promises her he’ll help her move to California to pursue her dreams only if she gives college an honest try by joining at least one campus group, she reluctantly auditions for one of the school’s a capella groups.
Her group, the Barden Bellas, was last year in the finals of the International Championship of College A Capella (a competition that I just recently learned actually exists, since 1996), but a projectile vomiting incident and the graduation of most of its members have resulted in the group’s starting anew with only two returning singers. Its sullied reputation means that the Bellas are stuck with a lot of the leftovers after schoolwide auditions, and it is now a rag-tag group of odd personalities who can really sing.
The plot is actually pretty good, and it involves a love interest (a member of a rival singing group) and Becca’s difficulty with intimate relationships with her father, with peers, and with potential lovers, in addition to the built-in drama of district, regional, and national competitions. Along the way there is a lot of singing, and it is all wonderful and excellent. Even when the Bellas perform songs that bore the apparently jaded audiences and commentators at the competitions, the songs are fantastic. There is a beautiful joy projected in just about every song, by every group that performs. There are impossible-to-believe spontaneous numbers and more-impossible-to-believe a capella battles, but the ridiculousness of the setups is excused by the undeniably fun music.
I could almost like this movie as a movie, and not just as a vehicle for great singing, but there’s just far, far too much lowest-common-denominator stuff here, stuff that was a big hit among the college-aged audience I saw this with the second time. There’s a lot to chuckle at, but not as much as my fellow moviegoers would have you believe. They laughed so loudly at what they considered a funny accent (by Rebel Wilson) that they didn’t hear the actually funny things she said. They laughed so loudly at an Asian girl who can speak barely above a whisper that they missed the disturbing (and funny) things she actually said. Maddening, I tell you.
But fat jokes and vomiting aside, the film and its characters do a nice job of poking light fun at the world of college a capella, which one of the main characters playfully calls “nerd singing.” This is the funny stuff, the stuff that emerges out of what’s actually believable and likable, which includes nice performances by Kendrick (on whom I have been crushing since her Oscar-nominated performance in Up in the Air), Wilson, Brittany Snow, and Anna Camp. It’s only a passable movie, but I can recommend it whole-heartedly to anyone who appreciates good singing.
6/10 (IMDb rating)
61/100 (Criticker rating)