Those of you who know me know that I have an abiding affection for Stranger Things that has only grown over time. It is incredibly hard to find a bunch of good child actors (ask either of the Harry Potter movie or tv franchises) and then on top of that continue to rely on them over time (ask Season 2 of Wednesday, yeesh) and the fact that ST was able to act as a talent farm and renaissance for some of the most talented actors of the decade is so cool. Finn Wolfhard’s Hell of a Summer was one of my absolute favorite comedies of last year. MBB is the GOAT of Sherlock adaptations and not so much of monster movies but that’s okay. Cara Buono gets to Ridley her way through her golden years and SAG president Sean Astin got a second crack at riding the tiger. Mad About You, my daytime TV crush at nine years old, got its triumphal return Joe Chrest got to cement himself as Everyone’s Inattentive Dad. Stranger Things let Brett Gelman play basically the same character he plays in Netflix’s Love. It let Maya Hawke establish herself as gay icon, and Jamie Campbell Bower establish himself as an erotic audiobook icon.
So, yeah, it seems only right that Gaten Matarazzo, whose character Dustin Henderson gets a weirdly central role in the final season, I guess because of the traumatic rise and fall of his transgressive nerd hero and crowd favorite in the previous season?, should at some point get his flowers. Matarazzo seems to be maybe the nicest guy imaginable in real life, despite a decade of brain damage caused by growing up on set and then living your most formative penultimate childhood years in isolation because of the pandemic. This is (maybe?) what enables him to play such an abrasive and unlikable character on the show–in the age of off camera lore, your Netflix casting can directly be made in apposition to your social media presence.
So with this maiden voyage away from the mothership, Matarazzo is all about the uncomfortable growing pains of becoming a young adult in college. We get one of the sickest choreographed dance sequences of the year, to be sure, as our introduction to him as a character, undeterably cheerful even in the face of an apparently college-wide fatwa on him because of an unexplained injury to the football team. The comic sensibility of Matarazzo’s back and forth with Sean Giambrone (Montgomery, “Monty” for short”) is going to unavoidably find comparisons with Hell of a Summer and his ST’s peer Finn Wolfhard, despite the fact that Pizza Movie is actually the comedy duo BriTANick, Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, two NYU buddies who cut their teeth on SNL together and then made another movie to debut in the same month Over Your Dead Body with Samara Weaving and Jason Siegel.
Apples to oranges, Pizza Movie veers more often into the absurdist with repeat takes for a simple, stupid joke, an almost live action Family Guy sketch stretched out to movie length, which maybe sounds like a knock but is actually pretty effective. Both Hell of a Summer and Pizza movie are interested in generational gaps. Hell of a Summer leans hard into the millennial cringe and spiritually hangdog look of White Lotus’s Fred Hechinger, summoning an eternal optimist with no mirror with which to inspect himself, to acknowledge that he has outgrown his snakeskin–channeling the millennial’s ur cringe god Michael Scott, the cthulu whose bingeable antics almost single-handedly created the market for Netflix and at times buttressed the mnemonic foundations of many a tumblr fan community for a time. Pizza Movie has a character that nods to millennial (or maybe a cusp hybrid?) but spends a lot more time stewing in the eternal optimist Candide trope. Pizza Movie complicates the trope a little by letting Matarazzo’s Jack and Giambrone’s Monty pass off optimism to one another in the same way that Wolfhard and Bill Bryk so effortlessly rizz each other up throughout Hell of a Summer, something that we see the roots of in Olivia Wilde’s freshman movie Booksmart, as protagonists Amy and Molly, haplessly self important and yet completely unashamedly themselves, talk each other out of self-deprecating spirals.
I’ve mentioned recently the movie marketing strategy of making movies for Tiktok recently and I think this movie is a good example of the way that sometimes that strategy undermines the very thing it’s trying to promote, when a bad Tiktok meme can really torpedo the hype behind a movie before its even had time to cook. Part of what makes this movie so easily translated to Tiktok is the rapid fire reset scenes that let the actors endlessly improvise funnier lines to the same setup, but, just as one example, the way that Jack reacts when Monty is finally able to get a smooth word in after multiple gruesome failures is weirdly heartfelt and proud in a way that might not land at the end of a fifteen second clip, but are actually weirdly disciplined well-earned jokes that have their emotional stakes planted a lot earlier in the movie. This is where I’m supposed to push my glasses up on the bridge of my nose and intone, “You have you understand, man, the missiles hitting Godzilla are a symbol” or something like that to really get at how militantly charmed you can get about this dumb pizza movie, the Pizza Movie, but it just works.
The exposition is very carefully positioned into the structure of the story, with decisions to actively occlude certain details for comic effect. As someone who recently saw the gay heist movie The Handmaiden from 2024–and I’m not saying that these movies are the same in any way–both of these movies are obscuring certain facts in a scene or in the backstory of a character for structural complexity and audience enjoyment. Information is flirty. It’s playful. Even little things like the way that BriTANick finds to dunk on the ancient aesthetics of the year 2016 in a cult video on YouTube, as if that is some aeon buried beneath the debris of civilizations and not approximately four long blinks away. The cast is secretly dynamo: Daniel Radcliffe plays the voice of Giambrone’s pet butterfly Lysander; Sarah Sherman plays the drug’s inventor; Peyton Elizabeth Lee, who plays a suspiciously manic pixie dream girl, is of Disney princess fame and about to catapult into the stratosphere later this year with Laika’s adaptation of Wildwood in October (let the Colin Meloy adaptations never cease and let Carson Ellis’s illustrations runneth over); Marcus Scribner was in both Black-ish and She-Ra; Jack Martin Bake, a–and I did not know this was possible to say–younger brother lookalike to Nick Galatzine has some chaotic energy and tantalizingly little else on his resume; but probably the most surprising and exciting casting is Lulu Wilson from 2020’s Becky! She’s really compelling as a secret companion hidden in plain sight, who’s able to hold her own during a body swap scene and chameleon shapeshift from glamorous and exuberant to awkward and anxious.
Where Hell of a Summer interests itself with genre homages, Pizza Movie gives space for young actors to try stupid shit again and again and let its freak flag fly. It is probably my favorite pizza movie.
