My text editor is filled with around a half-dozen starts to this blog post, so I’ve decided to forgo an elegant opening and jump right to my point: this is a post about Pizza Movie.
Pizza Movie has a fairly simple plot, summed up in a Variety article as “a group of college students who order a pizza to their dorm, but after accidentally ingesting a homemade drug, their simple journey down two flights of stairs to retrieve it turns into a mind-bendingly transformative quest.” Though it sounds like a stoner movie, it’s much less interested in that than it is in using the psychedelic as a means for surreal comedy. Very much like how Monty Python and The Holy Grail uses the its Grail Quest as device to get its cast from moment to moment and not, say, an epic journey or mediation on piety.
The comparison to The Holy Grail feels particularly apt since Pizza Movie’s main goal is to be as funny as possible. Everything else falls by the wayside — logical world building, questions of time travel, and any character development besides that of the central trio. It’s not interested in being funny and surprisingly heartfelt, or funny and insightful of the world, or funny and action packed. It’s just a very funny, very silly comedy.
It’s rare to find an out-an-out comedy these days. A cursory browse for comedies from last year reveals a list that includes the dramatic Is This Thing On?, the pensive The Materialists, and Wake Up Dead Man (which is many things, but calling it a comedy feels… reductive at best). Comedies aren’t just comedies any more, perhaps contemporary audiences are too sophisticated for that. The Naked Gun coming out last year was enough of an anomaly that there was a GQ article wondering, well, where are all the comedies? I’m not too interested in discussing the point (suffice to say I think they suffered the same fate romcoms and mid-budget sci-fi did: undone by execs who only want movies that make all the money and not just a lot of money), but for someone who holds up Hot Rod as one of his favorite movies and still quotes Anchorman, yeah, I miss comedy movies.
So getting Pizza Movie, is such a delightful treat — especially since it’s a movie written and directed by the sketch duo BriTANicK. I’ve been following BriTANicK for years, gone to their live shows, and hoped for ages to see a feature-length movie by them. Getting to finally watch one that feels so much like them with their particular brand of irreverent humor intact makes me feel like I’m getting away with something. Between that and February’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and last year’s The Naked Gun, and I feel like I’m being spoiled. Maybe comedy movies aren’t quite dead, maybe this is a fluke. Either way, I’m eating well.
Note: In full disclosure, I worked on the ad campaign for Pizza Movie and edited one of the digital spots. This would probably constitute a conflict of interest, were this the sort of website where that would be an issue. And if I wasn’t already very much predisposed to like a BriTANicK movie.
Essays, Not Rants! 