And as in the finale, there’s no interest in surprising us even a little bit. This sequence doesn’t not work, but the arrangements themselves never build to any kind of excitement. He introduces a category (Song About Butts! I Dated John Mayer) and the assembled groups, including the Bellas, the Green Bay Packers, and a bunch of comedians (Reggie Watts and Jason Jones). The big sing-off in the commercials takes place in the dungeon of a rich, weird, deep-fried a cappella fanatic played by David Cross. The party sequences have neither a point nor any life.
Pitchperfect flashlight movie#
But the movie is in no hurry to get there and barely feels compelled to bother with drama. The group can get its good name back by toppling a hydraulic German outfit - Das Sound Machine - and winning the world championships in Copenhagen. The rest of the movie is chaotic and random (Kay Cannon, the 30 Rock veteran, wrote both installments Banks directed this one). The international overreaction - from Jake Tapper to hate mail from Sonia Sotomayor - is good and absurd. In the meantime, there’s the other plot, in which the color commentators played by Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins tell the Bellas that the group has been barred from the international a cappella federation (or whatever it is) because Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) has a wardrobe malfunction at the Kennedy Center during a birthday performance for President Obama. He could take over for any of the characters on Empire - or all of them - and sling that show further into the ionosphere. The best part of the internship is Keegan-Michael Key, who plays Beca’s flamboyantly unimpressed boss. These scenes feature Snoop Dogg, playing himself and recording a Christmas album (for him, Beca mashes up “Winter Wonderland” and “Here Comes Santa Claus”). But at the label, she gets to surprise everybody with her flair for mash-ups all over again. Beca secretly focuses on a record-label internship that interferes with her innovations for the Bellas’ repertoire. Kendrick seems ready for adult parts (she’s 29), but the plot treats her like an ingenue. That’s telling: What’s missing from this movie aside from music (the numbers are so thin they feel scarce) is the arc of self-discovery. One of the group’s new members (Hailee Steinfeld) is an annoyingly earnest legacy Bella who just … can’t … wait to rush. So when you see Kendrick in Pitch Perfect 2, she seems like such an adult that the only explanation for her being a college senior is that this is actually 26 Jump Street.
Or: I’m not sure how you’d pull one off, since most of the actors looked too old to be freshmen in the first round. This is all to say that I’m not sure that movie needed an encore. I actually left that movie thinking that Astin, who’s got the shameless sense of showbiz that is college a cappella, could be a star.
But the actors sold the mess - especially Skylar Astin and boys who had names like Benji and Bumper. The musical numbers were as messy as they always are in musicals now, whether we’re talking about Glee or any of Rob Marshall’s Vitamix smoothies. That first movie was a confusion of ideas, one of those charmers that also indulged an urge to be gross and brazenly offensive because there was still some novelty in it. It was a specialty that gave her group, the Bellas, the winning edge. Kendrick’s character, Beca, turned out to be a nerd, too - her musical superpower was doing mash-ups: two or three songs become one.
Pitchperfect flashlight plus#
Nerd Plus Ultron: There Has to Be More to ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ Than Printing More Money.Blah Cappella: The Mess and Minor Insult of ‘Pitch Perfect 2’.‘Mad Max’ As Hell: The Masterful, Maniacal, Surprisingly Feminist ‘Fury Road’.Killing It: ‘Spy’ and Sharing Comedic Wealth Plus, the Masturbatory ‘Entourage’.Rex ’n’ FX: The Charming ‘Jurassic World’.It was like watching hoop-skirt Sandy become leather-pants Sandy for the last number in Grease. But there’s a moment in the first Pitch Perfect, during a riff-off battle, in which Kendrick leads the charge against a bunch of boys with a snarling version of “No Diggity.” Her pretty, birdlike voice flashes a couple of talons. You didn’t think Kendrick would even bother to sing. Some of what that intelligence suggests is that she isn’t a joiner - of sororities, of singing groups, and certainly not of singing groups that are basically sororities. Kendrick radiates intelligence without making it seem like a safety hazard, the way it always appears to be with Jodie Foster. She was a cool, kind-of-uptight Alice in the nerdy, earnest, cutthroat Wonderland of competitive a cappella singing. The appeal of 2012’s Pitch Perfect had everything to do with Anna Kendrick.
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