'Pitch Perfect 2' Is As Manufactured And Terrible As The Talent Shows It Portrays

PITCH PERFECT 2

The sound of Pitch Perfect 2 isn’t the sound of a cappella, of human voices mingling in the air as they have since time immemorial. It’s, rather, the sound of the grind of the wheel, the gears of the Hollywood machine turning; a profitable property —modest original spawns more-heavily-advertised sequel— being squeezed for every last dollar.

The sound of Pitch Perfect 2 isn’t the sound of human voices mingling in the air, too, because they never do. Instead, it’s the sound of pre-recorded, digitally-compressed, edit-and-splice playback, which arises whenever any of the performance groups, herein, are supposedly singing, yet’re merely mouthing the words whilst performing elaborate choreography routines, a perfect symbol of light-TV-variety-show-esque entertainment for a year that’s welcomed the return of lip-syncing contests.

In turn, even Pitch Perfect 2’s musical ambitions —in narrative or cross-promotional OST-selling marketing— are, essentially, awful. Anna Kendrick, who, merely one film ago, played the black-sheep, rebel-who’s-too-cool-for-this-shit role, is, in Pitch Perfect 2, chasing her rock dreams not by recording jams, but by interning at a fantasised version of a production studio, a place where hits are made and a vast staff sit around watching (here, Key & Peele —in uncredited cameo mode— bring their comic brio to a showbiz-satirical scenario that isn’t particularly comic).

Kendrick impresses her boss (Key) by —for real— coming up with an ‘inspired’ carol-mash-up for a Snoop Dogg Christmas album; an idea half played for laughs, and as horrifying as it sounds. Eventually, she collaborates with Barden Bellas newcomer/budding-songwriter Hailee Steinfeld (a preternaturally-gifted, Oscar-nominated teen thesp kinda slumming, really) on a demo, and turns out generic EDM-tinged tween-pop dross in the process. And, then, in the fringes, there’s Adam DeVine’s brought-back bozo Bumper, whose great dream —answered in a closing-credits crossover-promotional sting— is to go on The Voice.

This is a film made by —and for— the Television-Talent-Show Industrial Complex; in which amusingly outdated ideas like art or personal expression are happily abandoned for various narrative conceits involving competitions. Whether they’re wacky underground-a-cappella-riff-off extravaganzas involving David Cross, the Green Bay Packers, and a game-show set-up (there, dissonantly, no home-viewing-audience, but an illuminated Jeopardy! category board), or the World A Cappella championships —a big grand finale that’s like a Eurovision populated by endless ranks of identikit Hooray For Everythings— there always has to be crowds squealing, a crowned winner, and absolutely awful Michael-Winslow-meets-Glee-meets-endless-layers-of-Pro-Tools-filters music.

When Pitch Perfect 2 turns, tentatively, towards the business of storytelling, there’s the story of every sports movie ever —a rag-tag group of misfits, a public humiliation, an unorthodox training montage, a heroic victory at the Big Game— told, once again. And, once again, Rebel Wilson does all the film’s heavy lifting, the only reliable option when, as comedy, Pitch Perfect 2 needs to actually make an audience laugh; something that, sadly, happens rarely.

The original had enough B-grade-Bring-It-On charms to justify its existence; but Pitch Perfect 2 plays more like all those supermarket-check-out grade, straight-to-video Bring It On sequels. The sound of monetisation goes, here, hand-in-hand with the law of diminishing returns. Pitch Perfect 2 is a needless sequel to a mediocre film, but, hey, the imminent Pitch Perfect 3 will probably be worse.

COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK

In Cobain: Montage Of Heck, we see a page torn from Kurt Cobain’s journal: “When you wake up, please read my diary. Look through my things, and figure me out.” This is, essentially, the MO of Brett Morgen’s documentary, a sustained —an unexpectedly excellent— exercise in rifling through the diary of a dead man. Taking its name from a mixtape the late Nirvana frontman made in 1988, Montage Of Heck came into being when Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, having seen Morgen’s 2002 documentary The Kid Stays In The Picture, sent him a box of the rocker’s ephemera: 108 audio cassettes, 4000 pages of diaries, home videos from his childhood. Morgen, in turn, spent eight years effectively reading Cobain’s diary, trying to figure him out.

The result is a film that goes against the standard rockumentary hagiography; out to paint a portrait not of Cobain the genius, but Cobain the human-being. It does hit all the rock-doc topics —The jams! The fame! The drugs!— but artfully, tilting into them; gathering talking heads but keeping them friends-and-family (not fawning celebrity fandom); positioning itself outside the media hysteria of back-in-the-day (tabloid coverage of the couple’s “drug baby”) so as to discuss its subjects’ demise calmly, rationally. Its vision of its rock’n’roll saint —one of the all-time great dead-rockstars, definitive member of the 27 club— is rarely flattering; presenting him, at varying moments, as self-destructive, selfish, silly, ridiculous, tempestuous, naïve, nasty, vindictive, a dick. Music from Cobain’s home-recording archives and Nirvana’s vast catalogue plays throughout, but there’s no Scorsese-esque stop-and-show-off moments for their hits.

Instead there’s super-8 footage of Cobain as a kid, grainy VHS of an early Nirvana rehearsal, and home video of Cobain and Love and their new-born daughter —now Montage Of Heck executive producer— Frances. As if watching some dread-inducing Boyhood —where we know the future holds fame, heroin, suicide— Cobain grows up before our eyes. When we hear him spilling secrets about childhood abuse or teenage rebellion, it’s like being invited inside a confessional confidence; like we’re going through the therapy that Cobain never got; all his insecurity and vanity, his neuroses and weakness, laid out to bear. It’s impossibly intimate; in a way that’s both generous and voyeuristic.

In one of the film’s least-flattering moments, a very-strung-out Cobain rails against the parasitic gossip press, claiming they feed off of his life out of jealousy and envy, conjuring half-imagined fantasies of his life inside the bubble of celebrity. Some may wonder how Montage Of Heck is different; how this isn’t just another chapter in a cottage industry of parasitism, of products out to extract the cash from Nirvana’s fans. It escapes feeling like another product —another remastered album, another box-set, another collection of interviews or photographs— because it barely seems made for the fans.

It’s the first-ever “authorised” film about Cobain, and whilst that usually means upholding the brand, here it feels different, the film made with the participation of the family seemingly made for the family. Frances Cobain described the experience of watching it as spending two hours with a father she doesn’t remember, and that’s its essential quality for viewers, too.

The myth reality television peddles is that you’re getting to know the people in front of the camera; even as these walking caricatures are shoe-horned into established narratives, lives edited —or, indeed, written— to hit familiar by-the-ad-break beats. But that myth, seemingly, really comes to life, here; Cobain truly celebrity laid bare. Whether or not you loved Nirvana’s music —or cared about his tabloid romance and string of suicide attempts— doesn’t matter.

Flipping through a scrapbook assembled from his diaries, we see Cobain as man, lover, husband, father, friend, son, brat. The rock legend is razed away, and in its place is a kind of cinematic humanism, that throbs with nostalgia’s ache from old wounds. It feels like a cry for help, two decades too late. It’s profoundly emotional stuff because of the rawness of that emotion, the nakedness on display, but also because of how it makes you feel the pull of time, the years passing. Time —cinema’s currency— slips away before your eyes: the bright-eyed boy turning troubled teen turning suicidal man turning evaporative ghost; a whole life flashing by in one montage.

EX MACHINA

Ex Machina seems to be fighting a losing battle from the beginning. There’s nothing wrong with its set-up: with the tautness of a stageplay, it locks billionaire-recluse-cum-mad-genius Oscar Isaac in the one rich-man’s-compound with audience-surrogate Domhnall Gleeson, and then unveils Isaac’s magical-creation, an advanced AI played by Alicia Vikander. But, surely, Vikander’s robot form is an insult to viewer’s intelligence, right? Why would any self-respecting mad-genius-engineer have spent so much time fashioning a curvaceous bosom? Why does a film about robots have to be about a sexy robot?

But, then, in an unexpected turn far more thrilling than any of its later thriller machinations, writer/director Alex Garland invites those unanswered questions into the text itself. Gleeson, audience-surrogate, actually wonders those same things aloud. It’s not the only time the script introduces a trope into the film, only to call it into question, and this is Ex Machina’s particularly-trenchant take on genre. It’s not about mad-geniuses-playing-God, or even that liminal grey area where high-functioning computers brush up against sentience. It’s a film about science-fiction clichés, the eternal adolescent-male impulse driving them, and how that impulse extends to invention.

“You bet she can fuck!” Isaac boasts, when Gleeson asks after the sexiness of the sexy robot, and finds she’s been programmed with desire, flirtation, flattery, and a pleasure-sensor-lined slot just waiting for male penetration. As the founder of a Google-esque company —one who’s casually hacked the world’s mobile-phone cameras for help in programming facial recognition into his AI— Isaac’s genius is more likely in marketing than hard science; and, sure enough, when human-like robots roll off the production line, their most-desired uses will be as slaves and sex slaves. Just as pornography and the internet have evolved in symbiosis, so, too, is male lust endemic to the boy’s-club frontierism of robotics.

Science-fiction has long come with visions of the future, and far-flung galaxies, seen from the male gaze. Other planets oft seem like wank-session fantasias; Star Trek a booty-call roll-call of interplanetary babes bedded by philandering colonialist Captain Kirk. Garland’s smart screenplay takes all that in, then turns it on itself; introducing a near-feminist wrinkle when the sexy-robot creation turns on its blowhard-dude creator, and Savages’ Husbands blares out over the closing credits. Ex Machina isn’t a film fantasising a glittering future in which there’ll be fuck-bots awaiting every cashed-up IT nerd, but a dry mockery of the limits of male inspiration.

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Clouds Of Sils Maria came into being when Juliette Binoche challenged Olivier Assayas, with whom she’d worked on 2008’s Summer Hours, to make a film about women, and complex relationships between them. Assayas wasn’t a stranger to working with iconic actresses —Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Asia Argento, Chloë Sevigny; and, of course, one-time wife/muse Maggie Cheung— but Binoche saw that, often, he made films in which his leading women were navigating a man’s world, not inhabiting their own.

Inspired by her challenge, Assayas wrote the fascinating, multi-layered, thoughtful, soulful, elegantly-staged Clouds Of Sils Maria, in which Binoche plays an actress who returns to the play that made her famous —which chronicles a self-destructive affair between two women, a boss and her personal secretary— only, this time, as the older woman. We see her courted for the project, then rehearsing the role with her own personal secretary, Kristen Stewart, and then meeting the tabloid-bait starlet, Chloë Grace Moretz, brought on board to play her old role; ending, of course, in that moment in which, finally, she’s back on stage.

Considering its genesis, it feels weird, then, comparing Clouds Of Sils Maria to something as inherently macho and show-offy as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman. But both films are essentially kicking around the same themes: the theatre as artistic refuge; the comic-bookisation of commercial filmmaking; aging in an industry that fetishises youth; actors playing roles on stage that are indivisible from their life and career; and life and art imitating each other in a spectral dance. Birdman played, essentially, as broad, ridiculous, swinging-for-the-fences satire flirting with magic realism and loaded with Hollywood back-patting; Clouds Of Sils Maria, instead, is something smaller, denser, more personal, profound, feminine.

Assayas’ script may call for scenes in which Binoche and Stewart watch —from behind 3D glasses— Moretz in a mock-blockbuster, but, even as Binoche laughs at its absurdity, the film-within-a-film is shot not for instant mockery. Art, herein, is sacrosanct: our eternal forum for discussion, ideas, interpretation; our species’ attempt to deal with its own sentience —to capture the human condition— and mortality. After Binoche and Stewart leave the cinema, they end up in a fearsome debate about the worthiness of acting in a genre setting, about the emotional truths that can be found in cinematic depictions of other worlds.

The film is filled with scenes like this; all of them expertly acted by actors relishing their roles. So much of its running-time is dedicated to discussing the play, Maloja Snake (named for the clouds that blow through the Swiss Alps, in Sils Maria, as if like a serpent slithering through the valley), that exists at its centre. “The text is like an object, it’s gonna change perspective based on where you’re standing,” Stewart says, in the most incisive instant of such discussion; effectively crystalising the thematic ideas Assayas is circling around.

In turn, Clouds Of Sils Maria is a film open for interpretation, whose perspective changes on how you look at it. Like the production within —which is viewed through the old history of Binoche and its late playwright, the original production and the revival, and the contemporaneous scandal of Moretz’s ongoing existence— there’s so many perspectives from which the film’s own text can be viewed.

The relationship between life and art is alive in the play-within-the-film, but it spills beyond the frame: Assayas directing a film about a director and his muse; Binoche playing a leading-lady dealing with leaving behind her youth; Stewart delivering lines about tabloid scandal and adulterous actresses and acting within the constraints of a franchise. But, unlike so many films that fold real life into its tales of imagined celebrity, Clouds Of Sils Maria never smirks, never winks, never invites the knowing viewer to be in on the joke, nor even makes one. It’s a film that seeks not to flatter its audience for its smarts, but to challenge them to think.