Mermaid dancing, toners, and riff-offs

This is just an ode to Pitch Perfect and nothing else

I have a confession to make. I’ve watched Pitch Perfect three times in the past week.

I don’t really know how it happened. I turned on number 1 on my long plane ride back from Japan a few weeks ago. One thing led to another and the credits for movie three were rolling before I knew it. A looooot of a cappella time and I wasn’t mad about a single minute of it. I was actually trying incredibly hard not to sing to the finale song from the first movie in seat 22K — I still know every single word. Completely imprinted on my brain. It is EASILY one of my top 5 favorite movies of all time.

So I watched it once on the plane, and then I sincerely could not stop singing the songs once I got home, so I put it on again last week while I was cleaning my room. THEN I realized on watch number two how genius the entire script is — it’s a bit “Mean Girls” vibes, every single line just honed and great. So of course I had to watch it again for research for this Park It post. I’m just trying to do a good job for my readers here, really.

I was in 8th grade when Pitch Perfect came out. I watched it for the first time at a sleepover, everyone’s eyes glued to the TV in my friend’s attic behind our side bangs. It immediately became my whole personality. I’m not even joking. I learned the Cup Song that night (wish I still knew it) and karaoked the finale song on repeat in every car ride when I got my license a few years later. I’m minorly confident that there’s a LOT of Pitch Perfect content on my old Tumblr, wherever that thing may be (just kidding, I know the handle…but I’ll never tell). 2012 was a biiiig time for those very aesthetic looking quote stickers from Etsy, so half of my laptop was covered in Fat Amy (“don’t put me down for cardio”) and Lily (“I ate my twin in the womb”) quotes.

I legitimately thought this movie was the shit. This and Bridesmaids coming out back to back in 2011 and 2012 really locked in my love for an ensemble female cast. To this day, don’t think that a movie can be truly funny if it doesn’t meet that criteria. I appreciated that these movies were so smart and didn’t prioritize romance as the end-all-be-all. Even though I was in looooove with Jesse from the Treblemakers and went through a brief phase where I tried really hard to love the Breakfast Club, just for him. Just because the movie wasn’t prioritizing romance didn’t mean I couldn’t pine.

I have seen Pitch Perfect SO many times since 2012 that sometimes I find scenes playing in my brain when I’m bored. The TV won’t even be on. I literally watch it on the back of my eyelids (the only two other movies I do this with are Princess Diaries and Bride Wars. Perfect movies.)

And, quite frankly, I think the movie completely holds up, 13 years later!! It’s an hour and a half of bar-for-bar banger. It definitely DOES feel incredibly 2012. That’s all I could think about when I was watching it. Everything from their outfits (Chloe’s riding boots, Aubrey’s tiny little peacoat, Beca’s infinity scarves) to the fact that Beca keeps calling them “awesome nerds,” which gives me the vibes of a girl wearing neon green sunglasses and going :P Any time anyone makes an “aca” joke — “aca-awesome” or “aca-scuse me” — I want to go curl up in a hole (even though I had to lean into it for the bit for this post’s title). Every single song that they’re mashing up felt like a time capsule. “Bulletproof!” “Price Tag!” “Just the Way You Are!” C’mon. Literally 2012 top 40 hits. It reminds me a bit of the vibes I get when I play Cards Against Humanity with my family at Thanksgiving — I’m having a blast and some of the things in there are a little too cringe, but I’m not really mad about it. It’s a product of a weird time, where we all simply could not stop bumping “Gangham Style.”

not the drapey scarf!

And I feel the same way about the second movie — it really holds up. Baby Hailee Steinfeld!! They had an incredibly tough first act to follow and they killed it. I cry every. single. time. they’re performing at Worlds and all of the other Bellas come out on stage to sing “Flashlight.” The third movie is organized mass chaos. Actually, watching it on the plane last weekend was my first time ever seeing it. I really thought I’d hate it, mostly because I started to watch it once, caught the escape artist/action sequence opening of it, and promptly turned it off so that I wouldn’t run the risk of ruining the franchise. But a 9 hour flight leaves lots of time to kill so … and honestly, I didn’t hate it at all. It’s nowhere near comparable to the first two movies. It’s not as funny and the songs aren’t as good and the story gets so incredibly far-fetched with Fat Amy’s dad that it lost me a bit. But it’s fun! There’s a cappella! And the Bellas are back. That’s all that matters.

Pitch Perfect also kinda gives me Parks and Rec vibes with how much the cast loves to talk about it and how fondly they all feel about it. I recently was listening to both Anna Kendrick and Brittany Snow in different interviews and they both have nothing but rave reviews of their time on Pitch Perfect. They both talk about how the cast is like a family and call the movies “magical.” Which is so damn cute, because the whole vibe of the Bellas is that they’re sisters and they have each others’ backs, regardless of how different they are. Brittany Snow even at one point says something like “I was talking to one of the other Bellas and…” which truly just warmed my little heart, the fact that they call each other that in real life. I seem to really have a soft spot for these little cult classics that no one thought they’d be talking about 15 years later, but they formed the cast into a family and shaped pop culture :,)

Soooo my overall take on Pitch Perfect is that it’s an absolutely perfect movie and I would recommend a rewatch asap. Please report back on how many 2012 specific references you find and I would like to hear them. The more hyperspecific, the better (this isn’t 2012, but like the fact that Keegan-Michael Key calls someone a “hipster” in movie two). And please apologize in advance to your friends from me. Once you hear the riff-off song again, I feel very confident you’ll be singing it for days.