Pitches Be Crazy

Year: 2017

Director: Trish Sie

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The Pitch Perfect franchise has a pretty personal connection to me. The first one arrived when I was a freshman in college, the same as the characters in the movie. And just like how I grew up at roughly the same rate as Harry Potter, I grew along with the Garden Bellas, through college and into the vaguely defined post-graduation future. These movies have followed every beat of my life since 2012, arriving every couple of years to remind me of the pop songs I tried to ignore while the years were passing. So I knew I had to check out the third and ostensibly final entry in the franchise, despite the fact that I borderline hated the previous entry. Let's see how it went!

Ah, I see they're traveling to Europe! That's always a good sign, right?

Pitch Perfect 3 cuts the fat of the franchise's cast, slicing off pretty much every male character and even one of the Barden Bellas (sorry Stacie, I don't know if you were actually pregnant or just busy, but at least you get a scene over FaceTime - Skylar Astin is stuck prepping for the Trolls TV series and he got squat) as the now graduated Bellas return for one final adventure. They are all struggling with finding their place in the larger world, so they're throwing their all into a USO tour, hoping that they can get noticed over the other bands and picked to open for a cameo-ing DJ Khaled on his big televised show at the end of the week.

The plot is mostly just DJ Khaled straining for laughs, shooting his bizarre personality in every direction possible, but let's break it down a little more. Beca (Anna Kendrick) just quit her job as a corporate music producer, but when she meets Khaled's manager Theo (Guy Burnet) she realizes she might not have lost her interest in that lifestyle. Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) encounters her mafioso father (John Lithgow sporting a terrible Aussie accent), who tries to charm her back into his life for potentially nefarious reasons. And, um... Chloe (Brittany Snow) flirts with hot Army dude Chicago (Matt Lanter). I guess there's other girls too (Anna Camp, Ester Dean, Hailee Steinfeld, Hana Mae Lee, and poor Chrissie Fit - who was saddled with the worst character in PP2 and as a reward for her patience gets absolutely nothing to do here).

The biggest issue is that the bands they're competing with use actual instruments and claim not to perform covers (that's a big part of the way they judge the Bellas, but if there's a original song in the lineup we eventually see, I'll eat my f**king hat).

Nice try, Josie and the Pussycats.

Now, it's not entirely Pitch Perfect 3's fault that its songs are boring as hell. Sia is very popular at the moment (plus, she has a tie with the first film's use of the song "Titanium"), so it makes sense that they chose to perform "Cheap Thrills." Unfortunately, that song has the tempo of a funeral dirge and does not befit itself to a high energy comedy sequel. It feels like the movie has been thrust into slow motion, and the other songs don't do much to bring the pace back up. 

Among the artists selected to be brought to tedious life without instrumentation are Flo Rida, George Michael, some unbearably hip songbird called Daya, and oh... that's about it. It just all seems hopelessly random and listless, and only Britney Spears' "Toxic" does anything to pique the interest (they clearly know this because the performance is repeated twice, in the opening and about an hour later). There's not even any mash-upping happening here, which is the only trick the Bellas have in their bag! The only thing that got me through the second movie was the a cappella performances, and this film lacks a major lifeline.

At least they didn't force us to listen to any more Hailee Steinfeld-penned original song catastrophes.

I've never liked the recurring Pitch Perfect joke of slapping the prefix "aca-" in front of random words. It's not really a joke, and it's one of the writers' favorite things to shove in there when a scene is flagging. Of course, this entry is more than ready to double down on all the gags people purportedly respond to from the franchise, so I don't get off easy in the comedy department either.

Luckily, the cast is still charming (and quite comfortable in their characters' skins at this point) and manages to deliver some fun, punchy material from the midst of this messy, scattered plot. They're clearly having fun together, and that does spice up some of the potentially leaden moments. But there's no doubting that the whole affair is being held together with bubblegum and twine.

Just like the Ghostbusters remake before it, the end credits reveal just how many scenes were cut to shreds, shoving in outtakes left and right that are very clearly entire scenes that wound up on the cutting room floor. And the film is so uninvested in actual character growth, some of these scenes actually provide vital exposition that should have actually been doled out to us 80 minutes before.

I will say this: Pitch Perfect 3 does know how preposterous it is, and it does lean in with some semi-charming meta jokes and an actually enjoyable sense of total reckless abandon. This is best exemplified in this film's Riff-Off, in which people who clearly have no right knowing how a cappella works conspicuously burst into song, to the chagrin of the Bellas. That doesn't make it a good film, but sometimes it's a sort of enjoyable one.

Better than Part 2? That's a low bar to clear, but I honestly don't think it can claim that title. These sequels have indulged in the worst impulses of the original, which was an incredible comedy in spite of certain flaws. Now these films have buffed out everything but the flaws, and this is a well I hope they don't return to until they've had a long time to think about what they did.

TL;DR: Pitch Perfect 3 is a scattered, tedious sequel that doesn't do right by its characters, its story, or - most importantly - its music.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1072

Reviews In This Series

Pitch Perfect 2 (Banks, 2015)

Pitch Perfect 3 (Sie, 2017)

Once More

Year: 2014

Director: John Carney

Cast: Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, Adam Levine

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In 2006, the indie Irish production Once burst onto the scene, dazzling critics with its meandering not-quite-romance between two Dublin-based musicians. In 2014, that same director tried his hand at the indie rock sort of musical genre once more with the aptly named Begin Again. It's much less esoteric than Once, which will certainly enrage many fans, but places it more firmly in my wheelhouse.

As much good as Once does in reinvigorating the movie musical and telling a unique love story without all that pesky romance, it really does rely entirely upon people standing around playing music. It worked magic with the budget that was available to the filmmakers, but as a narrative it was severely lacking in many regards.

This new film is far from perfect, but it manages to translate Once into the modern age and marry it to a story that, while full of stock situations and characters, manages to feel lively and brisk rather than full of dead space. The songs aren't quite as revelatory and that might bring the energy down from time to time, but there's enough going on around the music that Begin Again doesn't bore.

I could never be bored with a movie featuring both Adam Levine and beards.

So, how about this "plot" thing I've been hearing so much about? Gretta (Keira Knightley) is a young songwriter who recently broke up with her musician boyfriend Dave (Adam Levine) after he gets a record deal, some bigger britches, and a sexy mistress of his very own. Dan (Mark Ruffalo) is a down-on-his-luck record producer and Deadbeat Alcoholic Dad™ complete with an estranged wife (Catherine Keener) and daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) expansion pack.

It's a match made in movie heaven when the two meet at an open mic night at a local New York bar. Although Dan is on the outs at his company, he and Gretta set out to record an album live in places around the city and change the face of the music industry. You know, like they did in that one Glee episode where Santana and Mercedes sing in a dingy basement? Exactly like that.

Whatever, nobody's watching Glee. I'm not even  technically watching it. I merely ran afoul of a cursed karaoke machine a while back and am doomed to view it weekly until its finale.

Ah, the bliss of the ignorant.

One of the most interesting things about Begin Again is how seamlessly it integrates modern technology (see: Apple) into the narrative. Rather than clumsily inlaying texts over the screen like The Fault in Our Stars or Non-Stop (thank you for the tip-off, Hunter), the film merely includes the use of technology as an organic way of interacting with other people in the modern world.

In one especially indicative scene, Gretta uses a handheld video on her iPhone to initiate a flashback sequence. The way she mugs to the camera with the phone itself is obviously crass product placement (although in the wake of Transformers: Age of Extinction, they could have decorated the entire apartment with iPads and still seemed like a subtle complement in comparison), but the narrative function it serves is a terrific step in the ongoing synthesis of narrative storytelling and modern communications.

And the visual style, while still considerably routine and average, is miles ahead of the freshman Once, especially in an early scene with an invisible orchestra. This scene does everything Smash did with sledgehammer blows and turns it on its ear with elegant beauty. This was the single most valuable point that got me on the movie's side in the early going.

It's like ice cream for the eyes.

Now, Mark Ruffalo has been tearing it up in the notices lately thanks to The Normal Heart (thank you, Normal Heart), and he does fine here, but he's consistently outshined by Keira Knightley. Where Ruffalo merely does his Ruffalo thing (which is, on average, outstandingly higher than, say, the Keanu thing), Knightley is turning in her best performance in years, forging a quick chemistry with a wide array of actors like Ruffalo, silver screen newcomer Adam Levine, accomplished neophyte Hailee Steinfeld, and Cee Lo Green (All that's missing is Aguilera and we'd have a full-on The Voice reunion.)

Let's put a pin in that for a second because Cee Lo Green provides some of the most hilarious unintentional comedy I've seen this side of Troll 2. He's only in about one and a half scenes, but those appearances provide about one-third of the cuts in the movie. He's only ever onscreen for a consecutive three seconds or so before they cut to a different angle or something else entirely.

Now keep in mind that this is just conjecture, but the only possible explanation is that the man gave a performance so epically terrible that his lines had to be salvaged in small chunks haphazardly pasted together in order to seem like he accomplished anything even close to "acting." He is frequently overdubbed on other shots or has lines tossed in from the back of his head. In the scenes that show his face, he seems addled and unsure, which is compounded by the sheer mass of takes it must have required to get so much coverage. 

Hats off to editor Andrew Marcus, who is on my short list for an Oscar nomination due to his Herculean efforts to composite this footage into something that resembles a "scene" without having to squint one's eyes. But enough about the poor promotional tie-in man. Knightley is transcendent (and she'd have to be to have chemistry with the anthropomorphic wood block that is Ceel Lo Green), and she's not a half bad singer to boot.

And an even better leaner.

Thanks to Knightley and Ruffalo's chemistry and Carney's able direction, Begin Again is a delightful indie musical film. It's not my genre, so I doubt I'll ever have the inclination to revisit it, but it's certainly worth a watch.

TL;DR: Begin Again is a decently solid effort bolstered by a terrific performance from Keira Knightley.
Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Well, I'd certainly have you spend it on this rather than Transformers, Tammy, or Echo.
Word Count: 1055