Pitch Perfect (2012)

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Skylar Astin, Alexis Knapp, Adam DeVine, Ester Dean

Director: Jason Moore

Genre: Comedy, Music

Rating: A

"Nothing makes a girl feel more like a woman than a man who sings like a boy."

 I was really excited about this movie.  I figure it would be a lame comedy that I would love, just another one of those bad movies that you watch and really enjoy but know are bad.  I was really wrong: this ended up being a really amazing movie that I absolutely loved, and despite the fact that it was a cheesy comedy it was also legitimately good.  I laughed so hard during Pitch Perfect, despite the film's inclusion of period moments of bodily fluid humour.  I'm not sure if I've said it before, but I'll say it now: I hate humour that involves some sort of human waste or bodily fluid.

Pitch Perfect follows Beca (Kendrick), an anti-social music lover who dreams of being a music producer but is being forced by her father to attend Barden College, where he works.  While at first she fulfils the anti-social requirements eventually she is pushed into joining the Barden Bellas, one of the campus' four acapella singing groups - other groups include the Bellas' primary rival, the all male Treble Makers, lead by Bumper (DeVine).  The Bellas are lead by seniors Aubrey (Camp), who believes that the group can win it all using traditional methods, and Chloe (Snow), who's more inclined to make some changes.  Rounding out things is Treble Maker and fellow freshman Jesse (Astin), who very quickly takes an interest in Beca.

The thing I liked most about Pitch Perfect was that this movie knew exactly what it was and just went with it.  It was a lame comedy and never once tried to be anything other than that.  There were a few more dramatic moments - notably when it came to Beca's relationship with her father - but for the most part it was one liner after one liner. Rebel Wilson and Elizabeth Banks in particular were awesome, with just about everything that the two of them said being a joke.  What I really liked about the humour, though, was that there were a lot of moments where the joke completely took me by surprise and left me thinking "wait, what'd they just say?" then laughing once it sunk in - and I wasn't the only person in the theatre reacting like that.  The other thing that worked about it was the fact that even in the more dramatic moments, or even just the singing, they did a lot of cutaways to other jokes.  Elizabeth Banks' character, very minor role, is one of the commentators of the competitions and one of my favourite moments is a cutaway to her and the other commentator rocking out to the song.  It was just perfect.

One thing that has the potential to take away from the overall film is the fact that a lot of the characters fill a stereotype of some sort.  I found that it worked and I didn't personally need more development on any of the characters, but I'm sure that others might have a problem with this. Jason Moore took some stereotypical people and had fun with them, and I applaud it.

Sparkle (2012)

Starring: Jordin Sparks, Whitney Houston, Derek Luke, Mike Epps, Cameron Ejogo, Tika Sumpter, Omari Hardwick, Cee-Lo Green

Director: Salim Akil

Genre: Drama, Music

Rating: C

Have you ever gone on Wikipedia and read the reviews or reception section of a movie and found yourself thinking "wow, this is incredibly biased"?  That's how I felt about Sparkle.  While a good portion of the reception section of Sparkle's Wikipedia page acknowledges the fact that it's not exactly the best movie, the way that it starts really implies that people think otherwise.  People should not think otherwise.  While Sparkle is an enjoyable movie and definitely has its great aspects it's not a particularly good movie.  The music is there - Sparks, Ejogo, and Sumpter each have great voices and Houston is a legend - but the plot itself is unoriginal, cliched, and predictable.  If I could think of another way to say something along those lines, I'd totally say it.

Sparkle tells the tale of Sparkle Anderson (Sparks), her sisters, Sister (Ejogo) and Dee (Sumpter), and their journey into fame, despite the opposition of their mother, Emma (Houston).  Sister is acknowledged as the best singer of the group, as well as the most reckless, and basically a whore.  Dee is the smart one of the trio; she mostly stays out of trouble and is attempting to get into medical school.  Sparkle, however, is somewhere in between - she acts demure and innocent and has horrible self esteem, but has the potential to be a talented songwriter and singer.  All of this, however, is disapproved of by their mother, who once attempted to become a singer as well, but failed rather miserably, and is now a uber religious, uper proper, respectable woman.

For a movie that's coming out now, I'm actually kind of embarrassed by how overused so many of the plot points were.  There really wasn't anything original about Sparkle, beyond the music itself.  You've even seen the characters before, although I do give each of the actors credit in doing their best with the roles that were given to them.  I love both Whitney Houston and Cameron Ejogo, who I felt brought the most to their roles.  They might have been characters that you've seen many times before, but I still enjoyed the journeys that they took.  I pretty much knew what was going to happen before it happened, but I still found myself hoping that they would make the right decisions.  I did kind of find something ironic about the fact that Whitney Houston was playing a church going woman with a troubled past, who happened to be the mother of a singer with a drug problem and an abusive husband.  Is Satin (Epps) her husband?  I'm not certain; they do get engaged and it's implied that they might have gotten married, but we never see it and it's never really established.

That lack of establishment is actually part of the problem of the movie.  It washes over the romantic elements of the plot and rushes the more dramatic elements, focusing instead on montages of the girls singing and Sister being beaten.  While the music is the film's strong point, I think Akil forgot that there was more to the movie than just that.  The relationship between Satin and Sister is developed some what, as is the relationships between the girls and their mother, but everything else is kind of left hanging.  It was a bit of a disappointment, really, although the fact that what they did develop was pretty much stereotypical of a music based movie, I guess the lack of development wasn't all that bad.  It might have been interesting to see just how many more cliches they could have tossed in there, though.

Step Up Revolution (2012)

Starring: Kathryn McCormick, Ryan Guzman, Misha Gabriel, Peter Gallagher

Director: Scott Speer

Genre: Drama, Romance, Music

Rating: C

Over the course of four movies the Step Up franchise has shown us how the power of dance can overcome all of the world's evils: poverty, evil overbearing parental figures, and poverty.  What?  There are no other evils in the world, and dancing of course solves all.

Step Up Revolution takes the franchise out of New York and into Miami.  Here longtime friends Sean (Guzman) and Eddie (Gabriel) have formed a flash mob dance group, called The Mob.  The group is part of some sort of Youtube contest, where the first video to get to ten million hits whens a butt load of money.  Enter Emily Anderson (McCormick), the daughter of real-estate tycoon Bill Anderson (Gallagher).  Bill is trying to buy up a lot of land in Miami where the Mob's community lives so that he can build a new fancy hotel.  The Mob is against this and as is Emily - Emily dreams of being a dancer, while her father is trying to push her into entering into business with him.  She chooses dance, and in doing so begins to help The Mob politicize their dance, and embarks on a relationship with Sean.

You don't go to a Step Up movie for the plot.  Really, the plot's been some variation of the same thing for the last three movies (which in turn were only a twist of the plot in the first movie), and the actors are hired more for their dance ability than their acting. Their dance ability, by the way, is awesome.  I mean it, some of these people are phenomenal dancers and the stuff that they do just blows your mind.  In each of the Step Up movies there's one dance that just amazes you - in this one my favourite was when they flash mob the art gallery (and the way the curator reacts made me think that the group could have regularly done that and it'd be fine).  The movie is worth checking out for that one scene.  I did, however, have a problem with the 3D in this movie; it looked a bit shoddy at parts and made some of the shooting a bit shaky.  When the important part about a movie is the dancing it's kind of a bad thing when the effects added to it really take away from said dancing.

What else to say about this movie... the acting is not that great.  This is the first movie for the two leads, McCormick and Guzman, and the first major role for Gabriel, so I guess you can't really expect too much.  I wasn't disappointed in them so much as I was disappointed in Peter Gallagher.  The rest of the cast was a bunch of dancers just venturing into the acting scene.  Peter Gallagher's been around for awhile now and I kind of wonder why he does movies like this - kind of, until I look at his actual filmography and see that most of his movies aren't exactly blockbusters.  Peter, really, just say no to sequels.