Pun Salad

A decent little musical comedy. It's Maine (heh) attraction is Anna Kendrick, a very good young actress born up in Portland. She got an Oscar nomination a few years back for her role in Up in the Air. I forsee more, albeit not for this.

Ms Kendrick plays Beca, whose life ambition is to go out to LA and get into the music business, specializing in her mad DJ mixes. You can, in theory, make a living doing that, I guess. But her professor dad insists that she get a college education first, and she enrolls unenthusiastically at Barden College.

In addition to DJ skills, Beca is a decent singer, and she gets recruited into an all-female a capella group. Its leader, Aubrey, is a bit of a tyrant, obsessed with winning the a capella competition held yearly at Lincoln Center in NYC. (They were cruelly denied the previous year when Aubrey regurgitated impressively in the midst of their performance.)

So, yeah: it's like every other musical-competition movie you've seen. Or, for that matter, every other sports movie you've seen. Will the underdogs triumph?

But it's PG13-funny along the way, doesn't take itself seriously, and—see above—Ms Kendrick is always worth watching even when she's in a clichéd role in a clichéd movie. Also good is Australian Rebel Wilson playing Tasmanian "Fat Amy". (She calls herself that "so twig bitches like you don't do it behind my back.")

In addition, John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks pop in on occasion as ESPN-style announcers for the televised a-capella competitions; their banter is hilarious. The competitions actually exist, although the finals weren't at Lincoln Center this year, and I can't find any evidence they are televised.