Pitch Perfect

Saw Pitch Perfect (thanks, Amanda!) It's a pretty funny chick-flick comedy. It gives us two kinds of funny right-off: the small funny of a packed crowd at the national collegiate acapella tournament (complete with dead serious announcers) and the big funny of projectile vomit. This is a great start to a solid comedy. It mixes low-intensity, slow-burn humor with quick jabs of shock and gross-out humor. The protagonist is this heavily eye-liner-ed girl named Beca. She sulks through college, giving it a try at the behest of her dad before someday moving on to her dream career of DJ-ing. She meets up with a love-interest and with the psychotic duo who lead one of the four acapella teams. From there, it's only a matter of time until she gets the guy (or rather, allows the guy to get her) and joins the psychos.

I know the end of that paragraph reads like snark, but this film is very in on the joke. The head psycho says stuff like "Chloe, your voice didn't sound Aguilerian at all!" and "That's not an opinion I will allow you to have!" in a chipper, Stepford voice. It's hilarious. Also, the love-interest's rival is the campus radio DJ who shows absolutely no interest in Beca at all. His role as rival is completely perfunctory. There's a great, ongoing joke about how cool everyone thinks acapella is. During the college activity-fair, one rival acapella group suddenly springs into obviously-choreographed action. Instead of being alarmed and mildly annoyed at this burst of attention-seeking behavior, the crowd is charmed and delighted. Beautiful.

The film is really funny. It's weakest moments are when it has to do some plot-moving. The scenes with the love-interest are usually fairly tedious and the scenes with Beca's father are even worse (except for the first, establishing scene, which is great.) I suspected this might be a buried-so-deep-it's-bedrock joke about the predictability of rom coms, but I think it's just disdain for the machinery of the genre. Really, it's just the writers wanting to get back to the funny. Also, although you know this by now, there's a lot of singing. I always feel just embarrassed when a film tries to capture a really great performance (This, for example, yields this reaction.) There's invariably something cloying and brittle about all of these "stellar" performances.

When the movie is being funny, it's great and vicious and clever and firing on all cylinders. When it tries to be sensitive, it falters a bit, defaulting to cliche and tame lameness. It's never actually bad, mind you, just a bit stale. The trite romance is easily balanced out by the great comedy and, yes, for all of my squirming, the songs are really a lot of fun. I enjoyed the film. It's not a total tour de force, but damn near to it.