Pitch Perfect (2012)

You Have Juice Pouches and Rocky!

I feel like as much of me that wanted to see today’s movie did not want to see it.  It looked like it had just as much opportunity to be cute and entertaining as it had to be painful and predictable.  My inner torment led to me not bothering to see it in theaters and even ignoring it every time I saw it at a RedBox, but my finger came close to clicking that button numerous times.  The push that I needed came from my friend Ashley Janet, who requested the movie.  That would be enough to cause me to finally watch and review Pitch Perfect, based on the book by Mickey Rapkin, written by Kay Cannon, directed by Jason Moore, and starring Anna Kendrick, Skylar Astin, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Rebel Wilson, Ester Dean, Alexis Knapp, Hana Mae Lee, Adam DeVine, Utkarsh Armbudkar, Ben Platt, Freddie Stroma, Jinhee Joung, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, John Benjamin Hickey, John Michael Higgins, and Elizabeth Banks.

Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick) is a bad girl wannabe DJ, angry at daddy for getting divorced, and for forcing her to go to college instead of pursuing her dream of going to Los Angeles to produce music and then failing and winding up doing porn.  I feel like I would’ve liked to see Anna Kendrick in that movie instead, but that’s not how this one goes.  Instead, her dad talks her into giving college a shot and joining some clubs to have the college experience.  One of the heads of the accapella group, the Barden Bellas, named Chloe Beale (Brittany Snow) catches Beca singing in the shower and forces her to join the Barden Bellas, still reeling from their failure last year where the other leader of the group, Aubrey Posen (Anna Camp), throws up all over the stage.  Beca joins the group with the black lesbian Cynthia-Rose (Ester Dean), the white whore bag Stacie Conrad (Alexis Knapp), the quiet Asian Lilly Onakuramara (Hana Mae Lee), and the Australian comic relief Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson).  Problematically, Aubrey refuses to take any chances and deviate from the song they’ve been performing forever, and they’ll need something new to beat last year’s champions, the Treblemakers.  Also a problem, Beca’s reluctant love interest, Jesse Swanson (Skylar Astin), is a member of the Treblemakers.

I kind of went into this movie thinking I’d hate it, which was probably the reason I avoided it for so long.  The greater majority of the movie helped me believe I had been making the right decision.  It’s just too predictable.  I imagine I could’ve written a rough outline of exactly how the movie was going to go down if you just handed me the setup.  There’ll be some dumb reason for the “bad girl” to join the team, there will be some friction, then a falling out, then a tearful reunion, and they’ll win and she’ll get the boy.  And the story itself isn’t even realistic, or at least I hope it isn’t.  If there are indeed places that take accapella so seriously, I’d be much more comfortable acting like they don’t.  They have accapella Fight Clubs!  But none of that is me telling you my feelings about the movie in general.  I have buried the lead and fooled you all.  This movie still managed to charm me, strangely enough.  Sure it was predictable and lacked anything resembling a surprise in the story, but it was cute.  I guess the story itself wasn’t what did that for me, but we’ll get to what did later.  Some of the dialogue was good, and some was bad.  I never was really able to tell whether or not the shitty puns they used all over the movie were aware of themselves or not.  It seemed a lot like a whole movie of “Cheer-ocracy” and “Cheer-tator” from Not Another Teen Movie.  One of the groups was called the Treblemakers, and there was a whole section where they talked about a “Toner,” which is apparently a musical boner.  That was pretty terrible, but the payoff of Anna Kendrick saying “That’s my dick” got a chuckle out of me.  I also thought the line about juice pouches and Rocky was pretty adorable, but I feel like most of the credit goes to the delivery.  I also took issue with the vomiting in the movie.  It happens a couple of times, and I assume it was for humor’s sake, but I just thought it was disgusting and juvenile.

The music and I started out at odds, but eventually it swayed me.  The music wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, being a great deal of pop music that I either didn’t like or didn’t recognize.  But I started getting into it around the time of the “Riff-Off,” when they started mixing up pop songs with some 80’s rock in some very appealing ways.  The music kind of won me over from that point.  I did get mad during the Riff-Off, when Beca started rapping at Jesse and her whole team seemed dumbfounded by what she was singing.  These people practically dedicate their lives to music and they can’t recognize No Diggity?  Even I recognized that song!

I think what wins me over the most about this movie is the cast.  Anna Kendrick is extremely likeable.  Good-looking and great actress.  Her character motivations were slippery for me at times.  I don’t know why the “bad girl” would be so tolerant of the leader girl’s controlling way of running the group.  I believe her father only said she had to “try” with the group thing, and her character didn’t seem like the type to tolerate that crap.  If she had joined a Face-Punching Society and decided it wasn’t to her liking, I’m sure he’d be cool with her leaving the group.  I also wasn’t a fan of Skylar Astin.  I didn’t think he was nearly charming enough, and didn’t really believe that Kendrick’s character would find him that interesting either.  I didn’t even know if he was supposed to be a good singer either based on the part he sang when the other kid asked him how his voice was.  He turned out to be a good singer, but I felt like a better take could’ve existed there.  It was a little pitchy, dog.  Of course, all of these things might be me being bitter because I didn’t get to make out with Anna Kendrick.  Who could say, really?  Rebel Wilson is typically funny, and it wasn’t much different here.  I felt like she was trying too hard in parts, and some of her better jokes were in the outtakes, but she held up the comedy really well.  I was also a fan of the slutty girl in the group, Alexis Knapp.  She was really hot and said a lot of things about sex, so it’s pretty easy to get me on your side with those credentials.  Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins had a pretty good job in this movie too, playing the announcers.  They just got to chill in a booth and say ridiculous and funny things, but it was enjoyable.

Pitch Perfect did nothing for me by way of story, being too predictable and cliché while seeming to be well aware of both.  But over time the movie melted my cold heart with great performances, beautiful ladies, some genuine funny moments, and some pretty fantastic music that was able to draw me in even though it wasn’t really my musical tastes.  I’m not going to act like I didn’t raise my fist in the air at one point in this movie.  I can’t help it when a certain song is playing.  It’s a reflex at this point.  I’ll probably wind up buying this movie and maybe even downloading the soundtrack, although I think the music wouldn’t do as much without the visuals.  For you, I’d recommend at least giving it a shot by renting it.  Pitch Perfect gets “I set fires to feel joy” out of “I can’t concentrate on anything you’re saying until you cover your junk.”

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The Hunger Games (2012)

The Hunger Games Can Eat Me

No one person requested today’s movie.  It was overly talked about on Facebook until I finally felt like I was definitely going to have to see it.  When my days off gave me the opportunity to catch the movie for cheap, I finally decided that it was necessary.  The movie is based on a novel by Suzanne Collins that I have not/will never read, but it’s really popular.  The movie was so popular that I walked past the second longest line for a movie’s opening night on my way to my last theatrical disappointment, John Carter.  Since it came out, I’ve heard way too much about it, so it’s now time for you to hear a little more about it in my review of The Hunger Games, based on a novel by Suzanne Collins, written by Gary Ross and Billy Ray, directed by Gary Ross, and starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland, Wes Bentley, Alexander Ludwig, Isabelle Fuhrman, Amandla Stenberg, Liam Hemsworth, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci, and Willow Shields.

In post-apocalyptic North America, the government has decided that it’s a super good idea to collect one boy and one girl from 11 districts to fight to the death in a battle called the Hunger Games.  For the 74^th Hunger Games, 12-year-old Primrose Everdeen (Willow Shields) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are chosen from District 12, but Primrose’s sister Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) – herein referred to as Catness – steps in and volunteers to take part in the games instead of her sister.  They’re taken by Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) to meet their mentor, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) – herein referred to as Sammitch – who helps them learn how to play the game.  After some training and other nonsense, they get started into the Hunger Games.  Whoever shall survive and be the star of the next two books?  No one will ever know.

I do not understand you women-folk.  I really feel like I should try to figure out why you like the things you like, but I’ll probably just try to either ignore them or just mock them in review form.  I’ve heard this movie compared to Twilight because it’s based on a series of novels and is enjoyed almost exclusively by women, and I can say that this is a better movie than Twilight.  Of course, almost every movie is better than Twilight.  This movie is an interesting enough concept that is ruined by almost everything else.  Sure, it’s an interesting idea to have a bunch of kids try to kill each other, but it’s not when you make us follow a kid that won’t really kill anyone.  The same problems that came up in my review of Japanese Hunger Games (aka Battle Royale) came up in this movie: why is anyone unwilling to kill in this setting, and why would anyone make alliances?  You’ve been told as you enter this game that only one person is going to leave, so fucking kill yourself or throw down.  And why bother making alliances?  You’ll only have to kill them eventually anyways.  Why grow attached to someone you will have to kill eventually?  Knowing how they want us to feel about Catness, you can easily figure out how each character is going to die.  She’s meant to be our hero, so she will not be killing any friendly opponents and will probably only kill the assholes.  Catness takes it one step further by not really killing anyone.  She kills one person on accident, one person out of a reflexive action, and the last person out of mercy.  There were more than a few times in the movie where I had no fucking idea what was going on.  These things caused me to have to turn to my friend and ask him what was happening.  It seemed like there were a lot of things that would’ve been pretty obvious had I read the books, so I say fuck you to this movie for that shit.  You can’t assume that I’ve done my homework before watching your movie!  For a movie that I went into thinking it would be pretty action-heavy, I actually had walked into a movie about a girl sleeping in a tree.  All Catness really does effectively in this movie is sleep in trees, and she does it a lot and the film does not want us to miss one minute of it.  Catness is an exceptional archer, but for strategic purposes she does not pick up a bow and arrow at first.  Instead, she runs into the wilderness and sleeps in a tree.  Then she encounters enemies, so she climbs up into a tree.  Then she drops wasps on them, takes a bow from one, and climbs into a different tree.

The way they told their exceptionally boring story was also very tedious.  The director chose to film the entire thing with shaky cam, making watching the movie nearly impossible but entirely nauseating.  The final fight, for example, was shot so close and so jerky that I could barely see what was happening.  I got excited as the camera stepped back for a second that I might actually be able to see what was happening, but nope.  Right back in.  They also did a weird thing throughout the entire movie where they forgot to put sound in.  You could still figure out what was happening, but I still found it really annoying.  The settings were mostly drab and, when they weren’t, they were mostly just a bunch of trees.  The time in the Capitol had interesting settings, but they weren’t there long.  The futuristic technology that they had was pretty cool.

Okay, here’s some more things I hated that had to be prefaced with ::SPOILER ALERT::  There was a point in the movie where Catness finds out that the bad opponents are guarding a stockpile of supplies, hoping that others will come after it and get blown up by the mines they lined it with.  Catness decides to destroy this stockpile, but for some reason has someone else draw them away from it so she can shoot it with arrows and blow it up.  Guess what, Catness, you could’ve blown the thing up with them surrounding it and killed 4 of the assholes at the same time.  At one point (while Catness is sleeping in a tree … go figure), she finds Peeta has been helping the assholes to find her.  One can assume that he was trying to lead them away from her, but they never really deal with this in the movie at all.  At one point, he yells for her to run.  When they reunite later, they never have Catness say, “What the fuck were you doing, dick?”  Near the end, Catness is holding an arrow at the main bad guy, who is holding Peeta in front of him to block her shot.  She shoots him in the hand so that Peeta can push him over.  What bothers me was that Peeta had early helped establish Catness’ archery prowess by remarking on how she could shoot squirrels through the eye every single time.  But apparently she can’t hit a much larger eye under much more important circumstances.  The biggest annoyance I had in the movie (besides the shaky cam) was the resolution.  They had been told that two people from the same district could escape and Catness and Peeta survived.  They then said, “PSYCH!” and said they had to kill each other.  They decide to eat poison berries together and they give in and tell them they can both go home.  The problem with this is that they gave no weight to this dilemma and resolution, both of which were introduced and dissipated within the span of a minute.  ::END SPOILER::

Pretty much all of the performances in the movie were good, and also roughly what I’d expect from the bulk of the cast.  Jennifer Lawrence didn’t get an Oscar nomination for being hot (although that’s why I’d give her one).  She’s a good actress.  But I was curious what genetic experiment is going to come up in later books that caused her to be the only attractive person in her entire district.  She had a good bit of attitude to her.  The fact that she was never able to fully achieve badassdom was the fault of the writing, not the actress.  Neither of the love interests (Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth) did anything spectacular for me to pay them any attention, even though one of them is the brother of Thor.  Hutcherson was a little annoying to me, and usually seemed pretty dumb.  I love Elizabeth Banks, and she was good in the movie, but they made her look so weird that I only recognized her because I had seen it before watching the movie.  I also had no idea Lenny Kravitz was in the movie, but that’s all I have to say about his character.  Woody Harrelson got off to a rough start for me as Sammitch, acting the part of the clichéd guy who’s seen too much, always drunk and rude.  But you warm up to him as the movie goes along.  The only thing I have to say about Wes Bentley is that his facial hair in the movie annoyed the piss out of me.  I don’t even know how his performance was because I kept staring at it.  Also, Donald Sutherland looked like Santa Claus.

I still think you women need to raise your standards.  You’ve stepped up a pretty solid amount from Twilight, but you could still do much better.  The story was predictable, slow, and mostly Catness sleeping up a tree.  The shaky cam was annoying, but their random omission of sound was worse.  The performances were good, though.  There are worse ways to spend two and a half hours than this movie, but you might find it more entertaining to sleep in a tree for yourself.  I don’t really recommend this movie.  I promise not to hate people for liking it as I did with Twilight, but I cannot throw my vote behind others seeing it.  The Hunger Games gets “I guess we try to forget” out of “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

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Our Idiot Brother (2011)

I Won ‘Most Cooperative Inmate’, Four Months Running

Oh man.  I’m on number three of three back to back rom-com reviews and I am feeling pretty exhausted.  This is such hard work.  OW!  Finger cramp.  It’s not from the typing though.  It’s my time of the month.  Well, at least I’m finishing off my reviews with the movie I expected to be the funniest and most enjoyable.  I like the cast so much that I couldn’t possibly not like it, right?  Let’s find out.  This movie is Our Idiot Brother, written by David Schisgall, directed by Jesse Peretz, and starring Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer, Steve Coogan, Rashida Jones, Adam Scott, Shirley Knight, Kathryn Hahn, T.J. Miller, Hugh Dancy, Sterling K. Brown, Janet Montgomery, Matthew Mindler, Bob Stephenson, and Katie Aselton.

Ned (Paul Rudd) is a farmer who lives with his girlfriend, Janet (Kathryn Hahn), and their dog, Willie Nelson … or at least he does until he sells weed to a uniformed police officer and goes to jail for a little while.  He may not be too bright, or perhaps he’s just a little too optimistic and trusting of others.  When he gets out of jail, Janet has a new boyfriend, Billy (T.J. Miller), and refuses to give Ned his dog back.  Billy tells Ned that, if he’s able to get $1000 together, he will convince Janet to let Ned rent a goat house to live in.  Ned goes to live with his mom (Shirley Knight) for a little while, and then starts doing odd jobs for his three sisters to get money, but he also kind of messes up their lives a little in the process.  For his sister Liz (Emily Mortimer), he goes to help her husband Dylan (Steve Coogan) film his documentary about ballet dancers or some shit, but he ends up catching Dylan having sex with the ballerina.  For Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), he drives her to an interview she has with her client, Lady Arabella (Janet Montgomery).  Miranda gets very little information from Arabella, but Arabella confides some very personal details in Ned, who then lets them slip to Miranda.  Ned also becomes involved in her relationship with Jeremy (Adam Scott), who wants to be more than just friends with her.  For Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), he poses nude for her artist friend, Christian (Hugh Dancy), with whom she cheats on her girlfriend, Cindy (Rashida Jones), and gets knocked up.  Ned just wants to hang out with his family, and get his dog back, but his sisters don’t really want him around.

Did any of that sound like a comedy to you?  Yeah, not really to me either.  This movie is likeable in every way except for the fact that it’s a comedy that is not funny.  Any humor to this movie is like a dull hum that you may not even notice and probably won’t laugh at.  The most it got from me is a smile.  It felt kind of like an artsy version of a comedy, but lead to me thinking it played more as a drama.  Ned does a couple of stupid things throughout the movie that are mildly entertaining, but most of the movie is about the three sister’s lives falling apart and choosing to blame Ned for it because he told people what was going on.  Ned didn’t make Liz’s husband cheat on her, he just told Miranda about it.  Ned didn’t want stories told to him in confidence to get out just so his selfish sister could write a good story, nor did he make Jeremy and Miranda talk shit about the other person behind their back to him.  Ned didn’t make Natalie cheat on Cindy either.  But he gets blamed for all of it.  In a podcast called Doug Loves Movies, Doug Benson suggested that this movie should be called My Three Bitch Sisters because Ned isn’t that stupid, he’s just overly nice and his sisters are bitches.

The performances in this movie were fine as performances, but not that great as comedic performances.  Paul Rudd was about the second funniest person in the movie, but didn’t get a great amount of laughs out of me.  T.J. Miller was the funniest person in the movie, but he was not in the movie very much.  His interactions with Rudd were the occasions that made me chuckle a little.  Rudd plays pretty mellow and uneventful for the whole movie and has only one occasion when he lashes out at his family because they’re ruining a game of charades and he just wants to spend time with his family.  Everyone else had good performances, but they just weren’t funny.  The four main girls, at least, were all very attractive.  Elizabeth Banks didn’t play a very likeable character, which bothered me because I think of her as a very likeable person from the other things I’ve seen her in.  She’s also much better looking as a blonde than as a brunette.  I expected good comedy from Zooey Deschanel because I’ve seen a couple episodes of the New Girl, where she’s very likeable and funny.  But she didn’t really bring any funny to this movie.  She’s even a sort of aspiring stand up comedian, but her sets are more uncomfortably unfunny, which it seems that they intended, but it would’ve been nice to get to laugh in this comedy.  Emily Mortimer is probably the nicest sister, and probably gives the most emotional and comedic performance amongst the sisters, but her comedy is more about her being a little awkward.  Rashida Jones comes close to funny, but I think I was bothered by her in this movie because they made her really lesbian and dressed almost like a guy, when she’s very attractive in real life and they wasted it with lesbo-gear.  Adam Scott didn’t play a douche, as most of his performances I’ve seen him in are, but he also didn’t contribute any funny.  Are we seeing a pattern develop?

This movie is strangely well liked among critics, according to Rotten Tomatoes.  I don’t get it.  It would be a good movie if anything about the movie claimed that it was a drama.  It’s mostly dramatic scenes with a few, sparse laughs.  A drama can have a few laughs, and a comedy can have a few dramatic scenes, but a comedy can’t have only a few comedic scenes.  The performances were good, but not funny.  You may like this movie if you go in expecting a light drama, but instead, I just say you don’t really need to watch it.  Our Idiot Brother gets “Nothing like two dudes and a dog making candles” out of “Such a cliche”.

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