PIZZA
Directed & Written by: Mark Christopher.
Produced by: Howard Gertler, Tim Perell, Gary Winick & Jake Abraham.
Director of Photography: Ken Ferris.
Edited by: Michelle Botticelli.
Music by: John Kimbrough.
Released by: IFC.
Country of Origin: USA. 80 min. Not Rated.
With: Ethan Embry, Kylie Sparks, Julie Haggerty, Martin Campetta, Joey Kern & Alexis Dziena.

Between the spinning animated pizzas that transition each scene, Pizza follows chubby Cara-Ethyl (Kylie Sparks) after she meet Matt (Ethan Embry) at her 18th birthday party, which her blind mother has thrown for her. A thirty-something slacker, he’s the delivery boy of four large pizzas (which she accepts with a little too much glee). Seeing that no one came to the party, Matt invites her into his truck for a night of deliveries and personal revelations.

Someone should nominate an official Netflix subgenre in which overweight, lower-middle-class Caucasian girls make all the wrong decisions in their awkward lives for an hour and a half of ours. Giving them a proper context, at the very least, would help explain why Pizza doesn’t work.

In the genre’s major successes, Muriel’s Wedding and Fat Girl, both derive their strength from the idiocy of their protagonists. They don’t begin their cinematic journeys as heroes but as genuinely flawed people, connecting, then, the struggle to have a better life with the struggle to gain self-awareness. It seems like a small difference that Pizza’s endearingly chunky lead is merely inexperienced, but it’s not. We’re meant to cringe but root for her when she readily accepts a line of coke from the popular girls, treats her mother like a fool, and berates her newfound companion for not living up to his potential. Instead, we just cringe because her growth is more along the lines of Can’t Hardly Wait.

While Sparks and Embry are energetic and convincing, their characters are written as flat and incredulous. Their dialogue rarely gets past the hokey problems of their immediate situation long enough to validate the supposed connection that fuels their night long companionship. What makes the film interesting enough to watch - when it reaches the IFC Channel - is its occasional darkness. The humor is upbeat but hints at an interesting dynamic between an avowed “weird, fat girl” and her self-esteem that this subgenre typically illustrates to an extreme. Zachary Jones
January 20, 2006