Pitch Perfect

It was adapted from Mickey Rapkin’s 2008 book of reportage. Rapkin, an editor at GQ, spent a season inside competitive collegiate a cappella, following the Beelzebubs at Tufts and Divisi at Oregon, the loose model for the Bellas. Its most quoted sequence is in neither the book nor the real world. Kay Cannon built the riff-off from an improv exercise called last word, first word, and the music producer Ed Boyer says it did not exist before this film. It was shot at night in a drained pool picked for its acoustics, and the arrangements were roughed up after recording so they would sound found, not rehearsed. The cast went through a month long a cappella boot camp run by Deke Sharon and Ed Boyer before work began in Baton Rouge. The cup routine was not scripted either: Kendrick learned the song from a video she found online and did it at her audition, so the producers dropped the number planned for it. It later reached sixth on the singles chart, months after the film opened. A good fit if knowing the riff-off has no counterpart in real campus a cappella makes the scene more enjoyable. Not for anyone who will count it against the film that the Beca and Jesse thread is squeezed into gaps the competition calendar leaves.