Customer Reviews

Pizza

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I saw this movie in the theater and bought the DVD - have watched it twice. Kara Ethyl is a 17 year old intelligent, obnoxious, overweight and outcast teenager, thinking that turning 18 is going to make everything in her life better. Matt is a 30 something pizza delivery "man", intelligent, who is trying very hard to believe he has made something important out of his life. They meet when Matt delivers pizza to Kara Ethyl's birthday party - noone came!
Matt, feeling sorry for her, invites her to deliver pizza with him for the evening. During the course of the evening, they go to Matt's bachelor pad, meet some of Kara's high school bullies, meet some of Matt's friends and girlfriends,etc. - events which are funny and poignant.
The two main characters, totally opposite personalities, take care of each other during the evening and its hard to tell which one learned the most from the other.
The casting of the other characters was done very well with each character bringing their own personality into the movie. There is someone in this movie everyone can relate to - either as being that person or knowing someone similar. (I have since seen one actor on the new hit tv program "30 Rock".)
I do agree with the previous reviewer that this will turn out to have a cult following.
This if a fun and enjoyable movie to watch and at times made me laugh and other times was sad.

Seven years after his ambitious attempt at depicting the high life of the mid-70's Manhattan disco scene in "54", writer-director Mark Christopher has come back most modestly with this elliptical low-budget 2005 coming-of-age comedy that seems to be a cross between a 1980's John Hughes movie and "Napoleon Dynamite". It actually plays out a bit like a teen version of Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" as it follows two disparate characters on an all-night adventure hinging on a series of pizza deliveries. The focus is on a lonely overweight girl, Cara-Ethyl (obscurely named after Irene Cara and Ethel Mertz from "I Love Lucy"). A social outcast forced to make up an imaginary friend to appease her temporarily blinded mother, Cara-Ethyl celebrates her 18th birthday with lots of food but no one to share in the festivities.

Enter Matt Firenze, a thirty-year old failed political activist with his own pizza delivery truck and a prolific track record with women but little else to show for himself. He feels sorry for her plight and invites her on his runs for the night. While Matt attempts to give her lessons on self-acceptance, Cara-Ethyl inevitably experiences deeper feelings that lead to revelations about both their lives. The idea is sound if rather unoriginal, but Christopher's off-kilter, episodic approach feels contrived for all the wrong reasons in spite of a smattering of well-earned laughs. Kylie Sparks certainly gets all of Cara-Ethyl's eccentricities and precociousness down pat, but her character is conceived in ill-fitting clichés over how an awkward, friendless teen finds her identity. As Matt, a cast-against-type Ethan Embry has moments of resonance, but he mainly appears to be channeling Matthew McConaughey's laconic slacker in "Dazed and Confused". The two leads never seem to gel since the contrivance of the situation is too overwhelming.

Familiar faces show up in the supporting cast - Julie Hagerty with her eyes excessively bandaged as Cara-Ethyl's not-so-clueless mom, Marylouise Burke (Paul Giamatti's drunken mother in "Sideways") as Aunt Grandma, and Alexis Dziena (Sharon Stone's oversexed daughter in "Broken Flowers") as a hairball-producing tart. The film clips by quickly at eighty minutes, and I have to admit some of the music used was entertaining - a karaoke number from "Bye Bye Birdie", Lulu's throaty voice on "To Sir With Love" in a strangely disco-oriented club, and Embry's plaintive guitar number. With middling picture quality due to the digital filming, the 2006 DVD has a few extras worth noting. With some help from producer Howard Gertler, Christopher provides unobtrusive commentary on an alternate track and on an eight-minute featurette about some of the scenes.

Nice little movie - very touching in some parts and way too close to real life in others.

It's Cara's 18th birthday and she has no friends, the pizza guy shows up and they go for a night of adventure.

I was eager to see what "adventures" the two main characters would get into, but nothing that exciting ever happened. But, this makes the story more believable, and it shows how people would really act in the situations they get into. This movie may gain a cult following, but I don't think the characters were that memorable.

This is a tale about a young girl who is seen as an outsider because of her looks and her behaviors, who has to spend her 18th birthday alone at home with her mother. Just as the "party" is getting started, the pizza boy comes. But he's the longest running pizza boy in town, for the past 12 years. He is "The Pizza King", but what else does he have? In their brief interaction, they make a connection, and she decides to join him on the rout of deliveries that night. Follow these two in their journey to find out what is important to them both as they push each other's buttons all night long. I was pleasently surprised by this, can relate aspects of each of the characters to someone I know, easy to identify with. Some pretty funny parts. Tough to belive this came from the same director of "54". Worth a viewing.

Pizza (Mark Christopher, 2005)

In 1998, Mark Christopher directed 54. It became one of the sleeper hits of the year and has turned into a bona fide cult sensation since. And then he disappeared. Vanished into the wind like Keyser Soze until 2005, when Pizza appeared. I don't know where Christopher was that entire seven years. Surfing off the coast of Bora Bora, maybe? He certainly couldn't have been trying to get Pizza made for that entire length of time. Even if it was a pet project, he had to have seen how mediocre it is. Didn't he? In any case, it finally did get made, and the end result is a movie chock full of very talented, yet underutilized, Hollywood stars playing quirky characters. But I have gotten ahead of myself.

Cara-Ethyl (Complete Savages' Kylie Sparks in her only big-screen appearance) is just about to turn eighteen and doesn't have a friend in the world. Her mother (Confessions of a Shopaholic's Julie Hagerty) has thrown her a big birthday party, but since she blinded herself temporarily while frying doughnuts, is unaware that no one came. No one, that is, until Matt (FreakyLinks' Ethan Embry) shows up with a pizza delivery. Cara-Ethyl latches onto him immediately, to the point of convincing him to take her on the rest of his deliveries for the evening. The expected episodic mode with quirky characters ensues, with pieces of Cara-Ethyl's high school career interweaved into the story.

It's not a bad idea. In fact, it's a rather likable idea. But it's summed up quite nicely by a scene where Matt and Cara-Ethyl deliver a couple of pizzas to Cara-Ethyl's high school drama teacher, who's been listening to Cara-Ethyl audition for school plays for three years, always dismissing her with a "nice voice" and never calling back. Well, he's drunk, so he has her audition again in the living room. And there's the potential there; you can see that if she could let go of her extreme self-consciousness, she could probably belt out show tunes with the best of them. But she gets the same "nice voice, nice voice," and when they leave, she turns to Matt and says, "I suck, don't I?" You see, she knows. And so, I think, does Christopher.

It could be a lot worse, though. The movie's problems lie entirely in its script, which forces its characters to be quirky, rather than letting them develop naturally as quirky characters (viz. The Safety of Objects, for example). The cast does the best they can with the material they've got. Embry is very good in whatever he turns his mind to, and Sparks nails the part of the whiny teenager who just thinks that if she can get out on her own, she will suddenly blossom into maturity (and who consistently makes bad decisions as a result). The rest of the cast includes such indie stalwarts as Judah Friedlander, Mary Birdsong, Jesse McCartney, and Alexis Dziena (sultry as ever), and all of them are relatively good. Christopher's mistake, I think, was trying to shoehorn a screwball comedy formula into the oh-so-hip ironic-meta comedy frame. We do have evidence that such a thing can work (viz. Zombieland and The Hangover), but it is rare at best. Pizza has its moments, but ultimately fails. **

Watch for Eric's debut performance as the streetwalker's trick. Also see him dancing at the club. What a dreamboat!

One of the best movies i have seen in a long time! Honestly i didn't really expect very much from the title, but it turned out to have a great "feel good" theme that wasn't to cheesy :) A great reason to stay home on a friday night and order pizza!

I though this movie was fantastic, it really shpwed that even the most unpopular people can make a friend and did this is in a humorous way. i give this movie 2 thumbs up, everyone should watch it!

i got dis movie wit a red lobster gif card from xmas from my brothas man (he gauy). this movie mad me hungry 4 shamp, but the seafud her is wack. it cold as hel out so i ditten get it.