Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Mark Christopher’s (Boy’s Shorts, 54, Boys Life 2) latest offering, Pizza, is a quirky, off-beat picture about Matt, played by Ethan Embry (Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, Timeline, Sweet Home Alabama), a thirty-something pizza delivery man, once a big man on campus who is now a pizza-holic who can’t seem to move on with his life.
In fact pizza is his life. Matt worships pizza. “Pizza is my buffalo. The Sioux had the buffalo; I have pizza. It provides for all my needs.” When he is feeling flustered or confused, he looks to the back of his delivery truck. “There must be a slice somewhere around here.”
The movie centers around Matt making his nightly deliveries, and one of his stops is at the home of a girl named Cara-Ethyl. Cara-Ethyl is an overweight, brainy girl celebrating her eighteenth birthday by trying to convince her mom, who happens to have been blinded during a doughnut accident, that there is another person at the house celebrating with her. She does this by creating voices for her friend and is quite good at it.
When Matt delivers the pizzas, he is invited in and they become friends. When he has to leave, she asks if she can come with him. He says, “You want to help me with my runs?” and she says, “You have the runs?” It is that type of dry, off-beat humor that sets the tone of this movie.
Throughout the movie, Matt offers Cara visions of all the things that she has been protected from in her life — drinking, dancing, and drugs. This leads to the awareness of the superficial stereotypes that have defined their lives. This leads to humiliation and denial on the part of both characters which provides both of them with the opportunity for personal growth.
Like many of its predecessors in this genre (for example, Napoleon Dynamite and Harold and Kumar) Pizza is a low-budget film with a dry type of humor that is not for everyone. It does have its uneven parts, but there is a lot to like about the interactions between these two misfits. Pizza may not be for everyone, but if you are looking for something different, you should give it a try.
