Pitch Per­fect

Pitch Per­fect has been blue-skyed to an almost sub-atom­ic lev­el in order to meet the enter­tain­ment demands of both the Glee and Brides­maids set. Con­cern­ing the pur­port­ed­ly cut-throat busi­ness of com­pet­i­tive col­le­giate a capel­la vocal groups, Jason Moore’s Auto-Tuned musi­cal com­e­dy is set in a world where every­one has instant recall to the lyrics of Bruno Mars songs (i.e. a con­tem­po­rary dystopia). But it con­tains two moments of note.

The first involves one char­ac­ter hilar­i­ous­ly upturn­ing the twee con­no­ta­tions asso­ci­at­ed with the snow angel, a cin­e­mat­ic device that has become a go-to for cheap wind-chime pathos. The sec­ond is pos­si­bly the most mag­i­cal 60 sec­onds of film you’re like­ly to see in the cin­e­ma this year; a short, out-of-nowhere aside that’s as glo­ri­ous­ly sim­ple and pro­found­ly mov­ing Jeanne More­au fin­ger­pick­ing her way though ​‘Le Tour­bil­lon’ in François Truffaut’s Jules Et Jim.

Fol­low­ing a stan­dard issue mon­tage in which a gallery of twer­py musi­cal wannabes wail along to Kel­ly Clarkson’s ​‘Since U Been Gone’, the film’s star, Anna Kendrick, insou­ciant­ly shuf­fles onto the stage. She pours the sta­tionery from a plas­tic cup, perch­es cross-legged on a stage and – in a sin­gle take – sings a lit­tle dit­ty while using the cup as a per­cus­sion instru­ment. Yes, we know, it hard­ly sounds like cas­cades of star­dust, but it’s a scene that’s so sur­pris­ing and impres­sive that it eas­i­ly over­shad­ows every­thing else the film has to offer.

All of the oth­er rous­ing, close-har­mo­ny work-outs that fea­ture in Pitch Per­fect sound like they’ve been pre-fil­tered through numer­ous audio pro­cess­ing pro­grammes, though we’re see­ing actors singing, the sound com­ing from their mouths is entire­ly synthetic.

The same rule applies to the script. Kendrick’s char­ac­ter is oth­er­wise a tedious­ly haughty alt-type, required to roll her eyes at least twice per minute, while the remain­der of the fun­nies are split between Rebel Wilson’s Fat Amy (no, that’s the joke) and Hana Mae Lee’s Lil­ly, a bare­ly audi­ble Japan­ese psy­cho pix­ie who gets to whis­per all of the fi lm’s sharpest lines.