The Movie Digest

  • Pitch Perfect

    Beca (Anna Kendrick) unwillingly starts college at Barden University, where her father works as a professor. If it were up to Beca she would be living in Los Angeles to further her career as a music producer but her dad insisted on her getting a college education before she pursued this career choice… because he doesn’t think her music career will work out.

    Beca peruses the activities fair and ends up meeting Chloe and Aubrey, the leaders of the Barden Bellas an acapella music group on campus. Beca quickly turns them down when they ask her to audition. Later, Beca is discussing quitting school with her father and he makes her a deal. Her father says she needs to join one group on campus and if she still hates college at the end of the school year he will let her quit school and help pay for her move to Los Angeles.

    Beca ends up auditioning for the Barden Bellas and makes it in! There is also a rival group called the “Treblemakers” the much more popular all-male acapella group. Within this group, there is Jesse (Skylar Astin) who clearly has a crush on Beca. But, a relationship between a Barden Bella and a Trebelmaker is forbidden by the Bella’s oath.

    As the Barden Bellas prepare for their regional competition, Beca is making an effort to update some of their music choices and use her music knowledge to improve their scores seeing as the Bellas are often described as, “talented but boring” but Aubrey wants no part of it and wants to stick to tradition. The Bellas make it through their regional competition and just barely scrape by in the nationals qualifier so when it comes to preparing for nationals the pressure is on.

    After the Bella’s performance at the national qualifier, they are met with the Tonehangers, an acapella group specifically for singers that are no longer in college and no longer allowed to perform. They get into a verbal argument with Fat Amy (another member of the Barden Bellas) which turns physical as they struggle to grab the trophy from each other. Beca gets involved and accidentally throws the trophy through the window of the performing arts center and she’s put in jail. Jesse is the one who bails her out and he also calls her dad, Beca gets extremely upset that Jesse called her dad and claimed it seemed like he was trying to babysit her, which isn’t what she wanted. Beca told Jesse to leave her alone and that she isn’t into him in any way other than as a friend, so he leaves her alone completely.

    Beca begins to watch all of the movies Jesse had recommended to her when she realizes that she misses him, she goes to see him but he refuses to come out of his room to talk to her. Beca creates an entirely new arrangement for nationals (where the Treblemakers are also competing) that includes all of the prominent songs from all of Jesse’s favorite movies. The crowd is engaged and loves the Bella’s performance but Jesse is the only one who realizes the entire thing is dedicated to him. The movie ends with Jesse and Beca sharing their first kiss and Beca being in charge of auditioning new members the following school year, meaning she chose not to take her dad’s deal and instead stay at Barden University.

    Pitch Perfect has recurring themes of female empowerment, the power of friendship, and living in the present rather than the future or the past. While Fat Amy’s witty jokes might lead people to believe Pitch Perfect is a comedy movie but if you really pay attention to the underlying themes of the movie, you’ll realize it’s so much more.

  • Clouds

    Clouds, a Disney+ original movie features Zach Sobiech. Zach is an aspiring young music artist who writes songs with his best friend Sammy Brown. Except, Zach has cancer. What he doesn’t know is the cancer is quickly spreading throughout his body.

    Zach has a love interest named Amy Adamle, she knows about Zach’s cancer and it doesn’t matter to her because she knows he beat it the first time and assumes he’ll beat it the second time. After his beautiful acoustic rendition of “I’m Sexy and I Know It” at the school talent show, Zach asks Amy out on their first date.

    As Zach begins to get ready for his date he starts coughing a lot and struggling to breathe his mother rushes him to the hospital where the doctors discover a hole in his lung that is slowly leaking air, and he requires emergency surgery. While he’s in surgery, Amy is just sitting at the park waiting for Zach to show up with no clue he’s fighting for his life. After the surgery, the doctors inform Zach and his family that his cancer has now become terminal. This leads Zach to make the decision to stop Chemotherapy and live his last few months as the best version of himself instead of being pumped full of drugs.

    When Zach tells Amy he’s terminal, he tells her this thinking that it would keep her from falling in love with him (because who wants to fall in love with somebody you know is going to die?) But, this doesn’t stop Amy and she spends as much time as she possibly can with Zach, attempting to experience all the things he wants to experience before he dies with him. Zach’s best friend Sammy has some things she wants to experience with Zach too, like writing an entire album together.

    To keep Zach’s memory alive Sammy wants to have videos of them playing together and songs that she can continue to listen to, what Sammy doesn’t know is that Zach uploaded the videos of them singing together to Youtube and they went viral. Zach and Sammy are contacted to come into a record label and professionally record their songs to be played on the radio and published for everybody to hear.

    Zach and Sammy’s most famous song is their single, “Clouds” which talks about what it’ll be like after Zach goes to heaven. Knowing that Zach won’t make it to graduation, prom or his birthday the school decides to throw an entire event wrapping all 3 holidays into one night and they ask Zach to perform. While on stage performing Zach loses his breath and collapses, is driven to the hospital where he later passed away.

    The most interesting part about the whole movie is that this isn’t fiction, Zach Sobiech was a real kid who wrote the original version of “Clouds” which is now available to stream on Apple Music and Spotify to keep his memory alive.

  • Purple Hearts

    Cassie, an aspiring musician, and a strongly opinionated democrat with diabetes marries a soon-to-deploy marine, but not for love, for survival. The movie’s opening scene shows Cassie singing in a bar with her band, you soon find out she also works at the bar. Late one night after her band’s performance, she’s selling drinks when a large group of Marines walks in, all betting on who can get Cassie’s number first.

    Cassie is extremely independent and wants nothing to do with having a man in her life, so she turns every single one of them down. Later in the movie, Cassie discovers she has diabetes but doesn’t make enough money to pay for enough Insulin for the month. Her solution is to find a Marine to marry, and she settles on trying to get Luke.

    Luke is the child of a Marine Police Officer, so he is a stickler for the rules. When Cassie asks him to marry her his immediate answer is no. Luke knows how illegal this marriage would be, and how much trouble both he and Cassie would be in if it was discovered. After a rough part of his past life is revealed to the audience Luke finally agrees to the fake marriage with Cassie. Luke is revealed to owe thousands of dollars to his former drug dealer, money that he could easily repay with the extra money he gains for being married to a civilian while he is deployed.

    Luke then marries Cassie and ships out the very next day, over the next couple of months Luke and Cassie video call and email as much as they possibly can to convince the Marine officials that their love is real. Cassie uses her musical talent to write songs about how much she misses her husband which she plays for Luke and all of his Marine friends and also submits to different record labels. It becomes clear to the viewers that there is some chemistry between Luke and Cassie, a part of them that isn’t pretending to want to be with each other. After submitting her song it is picked up by a very popular record label and goes viral, soon Cassie is contacted to be informed that Luke was in a bombing accident and his legs were heavily injured.

    Cassie rushes to the hospital and learns that Luke will not ever be able to redeploy, he cannot walk and needs help doing everyday tasks. Cassie and Luke might have some chemistry but nothing prepared them for being each other’s caretakers and living in the same house, they assumed Luke would stay deployed for a large amount of time. Cassie has to help Luke learn to walk again, cook food, manage her own health issues (which she now has under control with the good insurance the military had provided), and manage her own career which is quickly taking off.

    Luke and Cassie begin to fall for each other and the marriage begins to have actual feelings involved, during this time Luke didn’t realize that because he wasn’t deployed he was not getting the extra money to pay his former drug dealer. Because his former drug dealer wasn’t getting any money he contacted the Marine Police Officers to alert them about the marriage for insurance, Luke and Cassie were then both detained for insurance fraud.

    At the court hearing, Luke said that everything was his idea and that Cassie had no clue that what they were doing was illegal. Luke was then sentenced to 6 months in military prison. Before Luke walked into the Detainment Center Cassie told him that she loved him and will wait for him while he was in prison. The movie ends with them happily together after Luke’s sentence ends.

    I would recommend this movie to anybody who loves romance movies with multiple different plot twists as well as music!

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