If you love Glee …
Pitch Perfect (Anna Kendrick, Skylar Astin, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Elizabeth Banks) – I admit it; I’m a Gleek. I wouldn’t miss an episode of Glee. And yes, I took some heat for my positive review of High School Musical. I like musicals, too, from Sound of Music to Grease to Evita, Rent, and Nine. The thing people have to understand about musicals is that the storyline – the plot – is only a vehicle to move from song to song. Later in the year, we’ll get Les Miserables, the musical, and we’ll see if it does better than the film versions of Phantom of the Opera or A Chorus Line.
Pitch Perfect is based on a book, not a Broadway musical. It is a blatant rip-off of Glee in that features two show choirs, one the longstanding all-male champions (the Treble Makers in the movie, the Warblers in Glee) and the perpetual also-rans (the Bellas here, the New Directions in Glee), a melting pot of misfits with its gay character, its overweight character, its space cadet, its one African American, and one Asian American to complement its otherwise stereotyped white cast. There are massive (lol) differences, too: The Bellas are all female; these are college choirs, not high school; and they sing a capella (no musical instruments). What a stretch!
Our main characters are Becca (Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick from Up In The Air), the daughter of a professor at the college who wants to be a music producer not a college student, and Jesse (Skylar Astin), a totally likable, easy-going guy who sings, works at the college radio station (with Becca), and is wise beyond his years. Speaking of that: like Glee, all of the actors are way too old for their parts so please suspend belief … again.
The choirs face off on campus and in competition. The guys always beat the girls. The guys are obnoxious except for its newest member, Jesse. The leader of the Bellas, Aubrey (Anna Camp) is obnoxious and overbearing, insisting that the group sing tight harmony versions of tired pop songs, most notably I Saw the Sign (all apologies to Ace of Base). Becca has other ideas but mostly phones it in rather than oppose Aubrey and her sidekick, Chloe (Brittany Snow of Hairspray). The Bellas want to get back to “Nationals” (don’t forget, the New Dimensions lost the first time they got to Nationals, too). The Treble Makers looks as formidable as ever until they lose their top singer (remember that The Warblers in Glee lost Blaine). The Bellas are likely to tank this year even with its new members.
Now that I have spent paragraphs dissing the plot, remember that the plot doesn’t matter in a musical. It’s a bridge to the music. And it is here that the film soars. These young people are incredibly talented. Their harmonies are beautiful; their choreography is wonderful; their mix (“mash-ups” in Glee vernacular) of old favorites and today’s hip-hop and heavy-beat favorites rock.
The music makes the movie worth $8.25 for a matinee in southern California (about the same as prime time movies in the Midwest). It may be a little long at 112 minutes but I was never bored since the songs “just kept on comin’.” Gleeks will love it; movie mavens will hate it. Produced by actress Elizabeth Banks and her husband, Max Handelman, Pitch Perfect isn’t but it is plenty entertaining for anyone who loves good music.