The Pitch Perfect Paradox
I’m not afraid to admit it; I loved Pitch Perfect. Audiences don’t go looking for mind-shattering plot twists and ground-breaking cinematography when they choose to watch a movie where the poster features an ensemble of pretty and young adults looking pretty and young. Pitch Perfect knew that and instead they made a predictable and bubbly movie, which is great! Plot and character stereotypes aside, you cannot deny that Pitch Perfect is fun!
They’re all so young and pretty.
So fun I have the soundtrack on my phone, and the final performance is a go to song till today. Saying aca-excuse me was a real thing real people did for a while. It suddenly made acapela cool!
I can’t get through Pitbull’s Give Me Everything without singing “Don’t you forget about me!” during the chorus. I know how to do “cup” the cup song. I can’t listen to Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA without having that bus scene return to mind.
Pitch Perfect 2 was fine, I guess. It suffered from having too much and too little at the same time. Trying to add; a new character that really does nothing likeable and still try to make her likeable, give three characters their own b-stories and never focus enough time on any of them for them to be interesting, a new enemy group, all that alongside the main story, in a 90 minute comedy is hard and this movie didn’t exactly do it well. Furthermore, the finale is impressive but does not have the replayability of the first one. Listening to it on your iPod doesn’t give you the same levels of excitement as the first one does.
My main problem with pitch perfect 2 is their disapprovals of “originals”. Basically its established as a law that acapella groups do covers and not original pieces. This is highlighted to add conflict between the new characters and some surprise to the finale where they, spoiler alert, do an original. However, by introducing this law, they ruined the Pitch Perfect cannon!
Anna Kendrick stars in both movies as the clichéd arrogant-but-like-in-a-cool-way Beca. Whose character arc consists of thinking acapella is like super lame and then like thinking it’s like not and then being like really good at it. Somewhere along that she auditions for the Barden Bellas acapella group with “the cup song.” Its a cool scene and it introduced the cup routine all good.
After that song begin a super successful hit it was posted on Youtube as the following video.
It is no officially entitled Cups and the credit is given to Anna Kendrick. That is not a fake vevo logo, its the real deal, which means AnnaKendrickVEVO is a real channel.
Understandable and so far all is good.
Then Pitch Perfect 2 comes out and introduces the no originals rule. WHAT?! To add fuel to the fire, they sing “the cup song” in the second movie too. Do you see how this is the biggest paradox in the world!?
If the no originals rule is true, then that means that Pitch Perfect exists in a universe where Beca and Anna Kendrick are two different people, because Beca’s audition couldn’t have been an original! Every other song in that movie is a cover, except for Beca’s cup song.
How has no one ever stopped to ask Beca about it? Sure, Anna Kendrick really wasn’t a big deal in 2012, but it it really believable that no one in the entire Barden University hadn’t seen Up In The Air? George Clooney was the lead! Did no one in the auditorium think, “wow I didn’t know that song that pretty girl who sang well sung, let me quickly google it… OH MY GOD!” Did no one dare to think that Beca was too pretty to be on anything but a silver screen? Did they never try to find each others celebrity dopplegangers during times of study boredom and find a 100% match? Furthermore, the whole ensemble sings the cup song during the second movie, did none of them ever look up the lyrics to Beca’s song and find a picture of Anna Kendrick and then descend in a rabbit hole of google searches?
OR, Pitch Perfect exists in a universe where Anna Kendrick never got her big broadway child role and never rose to fame. The pain of crushed dreams caused her to runaways from home and dramatically change her life, her career path and her name. She gives up on acting and picks up music production and now dreams of being a DJ. She leaves her broadway behind her as she moves into the interior of the US with her new adoptive father. Somewhere along the line she writes the cup song, which no longer about a lost physical love, but it’s actually a love for the personified dream of musical theatre…
Now that’s a backstory.
