Pitch Perfect

AW YEAH LOOK AT THOSE GLASSES.

"Get Pitch Slapped."

Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Tagline! It's another week and I have more movies, more rambling, maybe more anecdotal evidence that my life is an ever-changing landscape of humiliation and debasement. Okay, so there are DEFINITELY movies at the very least. Last week, people all around me reminded me that Anna Kendrick was having a birthday. Now for those of you who neither know nor care who Anna Kendrick is, well she is the leading lady in Pitch Perfect among other things. I know I shouldn't mention that she was a supporting character in the Twilight movies, but I'm going to, she did that, and now we all have to live with the repercussions of her actions. That being said, I was trying hard not to hold that against her when I went into this movie. Besides, she was also in Up in the Air, and that was a pretty good movie, something that Twilight movies wouldn't know anything about, on the grounds that they are all uniformly horrible. Well that's not true, each is awful in a special way but I'm getting off track here.

Those headphones are really working for me.

Pitch Perfect stars Anna Kendrick as Beca, an anti-social college freshman who doesn't even want to GO to college, because she'd rather be homeless trying to be a music producer in LA. Her father, who is a college professor, wisely makes her attend school at least to see if she might enjoy not working at a Del Taco on Sunset Blvd while she tries to solicit her hip hop remixes (nothing against Del Taco). Getting off-track again. Anyway, Beca is all about music, but not remotely interested in the seemingly most popular passtime of Barden University, a capella singing. I can't blame her, that sounds pretty lame but let's just go with it, my hobbies are at least as lame. Despite her attempts to not attend any classes or participate in life in any way, Beca is eventually forced by her father to join a club. After she gives life at school a try, her father says he will let her leave for her career as a hobo, and he'll even pay for it! I don't believe he ever intended to do that, but really it's not important.

Meet Fat Amy. That's just what she calls herself.

Beca ends up being roped into the ranks of the Barden Bellas, a once prestigious group of all lady singers humiliated at the previous year's finals, when their leader Aubrey (Anna Camp) projectile vomited like a gross puke geyser in the middle of a solo. Now a new generation of Bellas is taking to the stage, among them a really quiet Asian girl who beatboxes, a girl who can't stop having sex with everything on two legs, and a girl from Tasmania named Fat Amy (born Fat Patricia). The girls are a little... different, but they're also determined to win, and beat the other major a capella group on campus, the Treblemakers (ouch dudes).

Naturally, Beca has a thing for this guy Jesse, who has joined the Treblemakers, so that it's oooh forbidden. Whatever, there's competition and singing that's really not the good part of this movie, it's all pretty by the books. What makes this movie work is really the performances of it's actors (Anna Kendrick has a real presence and is likable even when her character is kind of stuck up for instance) and the general sense of humor and over the top method of delivery it prefers. Rebel Wilson, the actress who plays Fat Amy is pretty hilarious, and I just sort of find something inherently funny about people being deadly serious about college a capella. Also the idea of someone being brought to tears by the end of the Breakfast Club. That's comedy.

God just look at that awful Twilight filter.

In the end, I was pleasantly surprised by Pitch Perfect, which ended up being much greater than the sum of its extremely rote parts. On paper I didn't even especially like the idea of it, but in practice it was actually very enjoyable. Unfortunately as a side effect I now have to take up stalking Anna Kendrick, and that could really cut into my blogging time. So it's win and lose.

Join me again on Thursday, when I will be reviewing Elysium, a movie where Matt Damon becomes Master Chief so he can kill Jodie Foster, who lives above the Earth on Halo.