It's Not Quite Pitch Perfect, But Still An Enjoyable Movie

My friend Libbie and I have watched GLEE together many times, so the 2012 movie Pitch Perfect seemed like a natural movie choice for a recent girls’ night in. This Jason Moore-directed comedy based on the book by Mickey Rapkin is set on the campus of a college where some of the students take music very seriously. The primary focus is on the Bellas, a girls’ a cappella group struggling to rebound from a disastrous national performance the year before.

While the movie zeroes in on various students at different points, the central character is rebellious freshman Beca (Anna Kendrick), who dreams of being a music producer. It takes a lot of persuasion to get her to join the group, but once she does, she becomes a major source of energy and innovation, much to the displeasure of controlling group leader Aubrey (Anna Camp), whose mishap necessitated a fresh approach this year.

Brittany Snow is quite charming as Aubrey’s best friend Chloe, the only other returning Bella and the one who quickly recognizes Beca’s skill as a vocalist. Easily the sweetest of the bunch, she is much easier to take than Aubrey, whose obnoxious attitude usually cancels out sympathy for her unfortunate tendency to throw up when nervous. This running gag is probably my least favorite aspect of the movie, since they go to great pains to make the barf as absurdly exaggerated as possible, a la Airplane. The result is too gross to be funny, at least to me.

While none of the other humor is that grotesque, I did find a lot of it too low-brow or catty to really make me laugh, but there are some genuinely funny moments, particularly involving Australian breakout star Rebel Wilson as self-assured vocalist Fat Amy and Hana Mae Lee as the quiet, creepy Lilly. The film also has some sweet moments of blossoming friendship among fellow outcasts, as well as the slow-building romance between Beca and movie enthusiast Jesse (Skylar Astin), whose uber-geeky roommate Benji (Ben Platt), avid magician and collector of Star Wars memorabilia, is probably my favorite character in the movie.

Of course, given the theme of the movie, there’s a lot of singing here, and most of it is quite good despite the fact that there are a couple of songs we hear ad nauseam. A rivalry between the Bellas and the all-male Treblemakers, of which Jesse is a part, adds drama to the movie, and it’s fun to hear the arrangements that they come up with. As a penner of filksong lyrics, I was also fascinated to hear Beca discuss the process of creating mash-ups, which similarly involves finding the common ground between two seemingly unrelated things and fusing them together. In the case of mash-ups, both song theme and chord progressions come into play, often with very creative and pleasing results.

A cappella music and choral groups in general have experienced increased popularity in recent years thanks to shows like GLEE and groups like Straight No Chaser, and those who get a kick out of those tight-knit harmonies might want to give this movie a try, though they should be warned that much of the comedy is crude, albeit only at a PG-13 level. Additionally, it definitely feels informed by GLEE, but it’s hard to say whether it spends more time celebrating or mocking the spirit of that show. There’s certainly a tongue-in-cheek tone to the movie, but at its most earnest, it demonstrates the power of music to unite even the most different of individuals.

Alice Helps Make New Moon Less Dreary On Film Than On Paper

I am not a fan of Romeo and Juliet. I suppose this means that I’m not much of a romantic, though I frankly don’t see what’s so swoonworthy about committing suicide in the wake of a loved one’s death. Especially when you’ve only known that person for a short period of time. In any case, I think the more romantic thing is to find a way of honoring the life of the one who has been lost. The only thing that makes Romeo and Juliet bearable for me is that the desperate actions of these two silly teenagers lead to the end of an equally silly feud between their families.

New Moon, the second installment in the Twilight movie series, makes the allusions to this Shakespeare tragedy apparent by showing Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) watching a movie version in class and discussing it. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, Edward starts in with the morbid talk, confessing how jealous he is of Romeo’s fragility. He comes right out and announces that if Bella ever dies - which she eventually will, as her birthday reminds her, since he steadfastly refuses to transform her into a vampire like him - he will kill himself.

Perhaps I should give him a break, since he’s lived more than a century and some world-weariness is bound to set in. But Edward has half a dozen people who care deeply about him, so it’s just as selfish for him to consider taking his own life as it would be for Bella, especially knowing that virtually the only way it could be done would be to go to the Volturi, the governing body of vampires to reside in Italy, and request that they tear him limb from limb, a pretty gruesome image for the rest of the Cullens to have to live with. But then when one is in love, there is a tendency to do things that don’t make a lot of sense, including tossing away life in the midst of despair.

There’s a lot of despair in New Moon, making it easily the hardest of the books for me to get through. The movie retains plenty of that, but it’s a little more tolerable, since we don’t have to put up with chapter after chapter of Bella’s morose narration.  Most of the voiceovers we do get are in the form of e-mails Bella writes to Edward’s “sister,” Alice, my favorite character in the series.  Although Bella isn’t actually sending them out, the very fact that she is framing these thoughts as writing to a friend - and such a relentlessly cheerful one at that - instead of wallowing in self-pity in complete isolation gives her musings a hopeful edge.

New Moon takes place three or four months after the conclusion of Twilight. Edward and Bella have spent every spare summer moment in each other’s company, often with Alice in tow, and now a new school year - Bella’s senior year - has begun. With it comes Bella’s birthday, which makes her despondent, since it means that she will now be older than Edward. Bella’s dad Charlie (Billy Burke) ribs her about her unsettled response to aging, as does Edward, while Alice is just overjoyed to be able to throw a birthday party for someone.

Bella’s misgivings about this plan stem from her own aversion to growing older, but it’s soon apparent that a birthday party in a house full of vampires is inadvisable for other reasons. A minor mishap leaves Bella bleeding and nearly lunch for Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), who hasn’t quite mastered the ability to control himself around human blood. It’s enough to convince Edward that she is fundamentally unsafe in his company, so he leaves, icily informing her that the family will be moving on, that she isn’t invited to join them and that she will never hear from them again.

The bulk of the movie involves Bella gradually moving away from her soul-deadened state. At first she moves through her days on auto-pilot, and night terrors torture her - and frighten her concerned dad - when the sun goes down. Still, somewhere deep down, she clings to the thought that Edward and Alice, who she misses nearly as much, will return one day. So when Charlie tells her he thinks she should move to Jacksonville to be with her mother and get away from the environment associated with so much sadness, she realizes that she needs to snap out of it if she ever wants to see them again.

On an outing with bubble-headed frenemy Jessica (Anna Kendrick), she discovers that when she is in a dangerous situation, Edward appears to her. Whether it’s just a product of her own imagination matters little, so deep is her craving for just the tiniest hint of Edward. This leads her to motorcycle mechanic Jacob (Taylor Lautner), the family friend who is as warm and jovial as Edward is cold and stiff. Lautner bulked up quite noticeably between the first two movies. There was talk of replacing the actor because he didn’t seem grown-up enough, but Lautner proves his mettle here in a performance that allows him to be both vulnerable and masculine while balancing his love for Bella with his strange new brotherhood with other members of the Quileute tribe. Like LOST’s Sawyer, he has a habit of taking his shirt off at every opportunity, and he’s got the muscles and the tan to pull it off. When Edward’s shirt comes off after we finally see him again toward the end of the movie, it’s not such a pretty sight.

This movie switches directors to Chris Weitz, which changes the tone a bit. In some cases, that’s good. For instance, the green-tinted scenery problem of Twilight is not present here; the cinematography looks much more natural, except during the action sequences, and then the special effects look pretty cheesy. Sadly, the sound mixing is, if anything, even worse in this second movie; not only does the music drown out the dialogue, but so do rainstorms and other ambient sounds. I wish I’d had the subtitles on because I know I missed a few things.

Speaking of which, my parents, whose knowledge of the books is limited to what little I’ve told them, frequently found the movie confusing, and I had to explain plot points to them. This suggests to me that the screenplay did not do a very good job of laying things out for those who don’t have book knowledge to help them connect the dots. And as in the book, the misunderstanding that precipitates Edward’s decision to seek out the Volturi is a pretty flimsy thing to hang the climax on. Additionally, while the violence is still pretty limited, there is a bit more of it than in the first movie.

On the plus side, we get a lot more of Alice in this movie, even if Ashley Greene still is only on the screen for maybe a quarter of the movie. This funky, effervescent counterpoint to all of Bella and Edward’s brooding just makes me smile every time she appears, even when she makes a couple of less than gracious remarks about Jacob, whose tribe has long been at odds with vampires. Just the device of Bella’s imaginary correspondence brings Alice’s character into greater prominence, which I appreciated.

I continued to enjoy Burke’s performance as the gruff but doting Charlie and, despite the brevity of his scenes, quickly grew fond of The Red Green Show’s Graham Greene’s chummy Harry Clearwater, one of Charlie’s closest friends. I also liked the introduction of Michael Sheen as the intriguing Aro, the member of the Volturi who does the most talking in the electrifying scene in which Edward, Bella and Alice have a private audience with them. He’s charming and has a giddy quality about him that almost reminds me of Arthur Weasley, Ron’s Muggle-loving dad in the Harry Potter series, but there’s also something deeply dangerous about him, as we see most plainly in an almost blink-and-you-miss-it scene that marks the conclusion of Bella’s whirlwind trip to Italy.

In retrospect, I tend to think of the first two books in this series largely as set-up for the last two, which I find much more compelling and less self-involved from Bella’s perspective. I don’t find Bella quite as insufferable in the movie version of New Moon, largely because there’s just not nearly as much time for her to moan about the heart-shaped hole in her chest. The movie only squeezes in two or three references in comparison to the book’s dozens of mentions. By the same token, while she still turns into a bit of an adrenaline junkie in the movie, she only does three really dangerous things before Alice shows up at her door to find out whether the suicide she thought she saw in one of her visions was actually true. So she’s easier to put up with here, though I still find her annoying.

Ultimately, I think I would mostly agree with my dad, who said he didn’t like the second movie as much as the first, but I did like it better than the book, and I think it sets us up nicely for the more interesting story to come in the third. I’m ready when you are, Netflix...

Stephenie Meyer's Story Gets Some Well-Deserved Editing in Twilight

A couple of weeks ago, my friend and I went to see Vampires Suck, a movie that spoofs the first two installments of the Twilight film series. This reminded me that I’d never actually seen the movies myself, though I read the books last year. I decided that it was time to remedy this situation, and not only did I put Twilight at the top of my queue, I told my parents that they had to watch it with me whether they liked it or not. They veered toward “not,” especially my dad, who is disturbed by the way vampires have become such a prominent part of pop culture of late. But when the movie was over, he told me, “Well, that was nothing like what I expected.” And he meant it in a good way.

Twilight, which is directed by Catherine Hardwicke with a screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, is based on the first installment of Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling young adult series about a plain Jane named Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), who moves from sunny Phoenix, Arizona, where she lives with her flighty mother, to rainy Forks, Washington, where her father, Charlie (Billy Burke), is a police chief. They haven’t seen much of each other lately, making the transition especially awkward, though Charlie is a kind man who wants his daughter to be safe and happy, and this comes across well in the movie. Though her insistence on calling him “Charlie” feels a tad disrespectful, Bella and her father have a pretty good rapport, and one of her more admirable traits is her concern about his well-being when she finds herself endangered toward the end of the movie.

Bella is a bit of a morose oddball who immediately reminded my mom of Lydia Deetz, the goth girl at the heart of the movie Beetlejuice and its subsequent animated spin-off series. I hadn’t made that connection before, but it’s pretty apt. One might also draw parallels with Beauty and the Beast, as Bella is an oddball with a self-sacrificial streak who’s close to her father and who falls in love with a man who is, in some sense, a monster. Additionally, her name means “beautiful swan,” calling to mind Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling; Bella is rather awkward and clumsy, but she dreams of one day attaining the otherworldly grace of the Cullens, the strange family of whom she is so enamored.

The trouble is that the Cullens are vampires. She can tell from the start that there’s something different about Edward (Robert Pattinson), who is standoffish to the point of being rude when they first meet in science class. He then vanishes for several days, but when he returns, he is much more polite, and they begin to forge a tenuous friendship that is complicated when he rescues her from a classmate’s out-of-control car. Bella can’t forget the superhuman strength she witnessed, and when he comes to her rescue again, she begins to investigate his idiosyncrasies in earnest, with some help from longtime family friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner).

It isn’t long before Edward confirms her suspicions, confessing himself irresistibly drawn to the scent of her blood. Though he has tried to keep his distance from her for her own safety, Edward is just as smitten as Bella, and soon he agrees to attempt a romantic relationship, which leads to her meeting his adoptive family, all of whom have long sworn off human blood, instead satiating their thirst by hunting animals. Most of them welcome her warmly, but when they meet with a trio of vampires who are passing through the area, leaving a grisly trail in their wake, Bella gets a grim reminder of the fact that most vampires have not gone to such pains to make themselves civilized. Though Edward has sworn to protect her, will he be able to shield her from the vicious tracker who sets his sights upon her?

Perhaps the first adjective that comes to my mind in association with the Twilight series is “melodramatic”. Bella narrates the books, and we really get the sense that we are peeking into the diary of a teenage girl. Meyer isn’t a particularly stellar writer, and she gives us pages upon pages of Bella talking about Edward’s absolute perfection in the most eye-rolling of terms. Thankfully, though Bella does have a truncated narrative presence in the movie, almost all of this extraneous description is cut out, with the result that Bella becomes much more tolerable. The movie distills everything down to two hours, and for me, this is an improvement because, frankly, not all that much happens in Twilight. What does happen is interesting, but you have to read through a lot of rambling to find those nuggets of really compelling story. Some will argue that the movie leaves too much out or that it makes unnecessary changes; these are certainly complaints that I have had about the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies. But as a mere casual fan of this series whose chief complaint was irritation with Bella’s narrative style, I was very happy with how the movie zipped along.

Stewart does a good job of appearing sulky and insecure, while also highlighting some of her better qualities, including love for her parents and intellect. I’m glad that the movie gives us a little time with her schoolmates, who may seem a little bland in comparison to the mysterious Cullens but who allow her to at least enjoy a taste of normal high school life in Forks. Jessica (Anna Kendrick) is a bit of a pill, a rather phony girl who mostly seems drawn to Bella because she’s the new girl, which makes her inherently fascinating. More sincere in her friendship is the quiet Angela (Christian Serratos), whom Bella encourages when her timidity threatens to rob her of a treasured experience. Also part of Bella’s gang of school chums are friendly Eric (Justin Chon), who first welcomes her to school, and Mike, played by Michael Welch of Joan of Arcadia, who channels the same geek chic he brought to that show as a young man vying for Bella’s affections.

But mostly, it’s all about Edward for Bella. Pattinson, best known prior to this as golden boy Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is uptight but chivalrous. He spends much of the movie with a pained expression on his face, but when he smiles, there is genuine sweetness there. When it comes down to it, he and Cedric are pretty similar: drop-dead gorgeous, athletic, intelligent and, most importantly, extremely ethical. Because he is so much stronger than Bella and because, despite having faithfully kept to his diet for decades, there’s still a part of him that thirsts for human blood, there are very practical reasons for the physical boundaries he places upon his relationship with her, but Edward is such an old-fashioned gentleman, I get the sense that even if he were wholly human, he wouldn’t be clamoring to get to second base with Bella. “It’s a movie about self-control,” was my dad’s comment when we had finished watching, and this is something that’s pretty refreshing to see in a teen movie in such a permissive age.

Lautner, who has turned into such a teen heartthrob in the past couple of years, doesn’t have a very large role in this movie, but he does a good job of capturing the boyish enthusiasm of this teen whose friendship with Bella dates back to their toddler years. I also enjoyed Gil Birmingham as his wheelchair-bound father Billy, one of Charlie’s closest friends. We don’t get to see too much of the Cullens either, except for patriarch Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), a deeply compassionate physician. I wouldn’t have minded more time with this clan, especially the effusive Alice (Ashley Greene), my favorite character in the series, but we see enough of them to get a good sense of their personalities. Well, not so much “brothers” Emmet and Jasper, but they’re not particularly well-established in the first book either.

Of the villainous trio who confront the Cullens during a game of baseball, I find the suave Laurent (Edi Gathegi), who speaks with a distinct accent and is the gentlest of the three, to be the most fascinating. James (Cam Gigandet) is sadistic, as is his main squeeze Victoria (Rachelle Lafevre), who vanishes for a while but turns up in the last scene of the movie in a moment that screams “sequel”.

While these three are responsible for some devastating carnage, the movie depicts it in the least gruesome manner possible, usually cutting away before we really see anything. There is one pretty intense scene toward the end, but the bulk of it is reminiscent of the battle between Gandalf and Saruman in Fellowship of the Ring, with two supernatural beings lobbing each other across the room and not really inflicting much severe damage. I appreciated the effort to tone down the violence. Moreover, there’s practically no profanity in the movie, and Bella and Edward’s romance is still all about restraint at this point, as it is for most of the series, so we don’t see anything more intense than a couple of kisses in terms of sensuality. For a PG-13 movie, Twilight is pretty tame.

If I have one major complaint about the movie, it’s the music, which is generally loud and raucous and often threatens to drown out dialogue. I found it incredibly intrusive. I was also distracted by the fact that most of the movie is bathed in a green haze, making it seem as though I was watching through tinted sunglasses. There were other elements of the cinematography I found annoying as well, though I did like the spectacular views of the meadow and of the valley that stretches out far below Edward and Bella when he takes her to a spot that serves as an incredible vantage point.

The special effects are, on the whole, pretty cheesy. When my brother was dragged to see the movie in theaters, he particularly complained about Edward’s sparkly skin. I’m sure it made more of an impression on the big screen, but it really only turns up in one scene, and from where I was sitting, I barely noticed it. More noticeable to me were the pasty complexions of Edward and his fellow vampires. Yes, they’re supposed to be pale, but this almost looked like somebody had just come along and slathered their faces with cream cheese. Not terribly impressive.

But for the most part, I must say that I preferred the movie to the book. It probably helps that this time around, I know exactly where the story is going, and I liked the last two installments in the series much better than the first two. I think that ending gave me a better appreciation of the beginning, as did reading Spotlight, John Granger’s book exploring the literary alchemy and symbolism he believes underpin the books. Mostly, though, I think the movie version of Twilight takes a good but overwrought story and gives it some much-needed editing.