Pizzás

I stumbled upon this move by accident. Even though it's a Hungarian movie, I never heard of it before, there was no hype or even a poster about it anywhere. Now I'm glad I watched it. Pizzás (or Pizzaman) is not for the average movie audience, it's more like an art-film. Very surreal and sometimes confusing. The whole plot is revolving around Pizzás, the main character, if can be called a plot though, because as I see it, there is none. It is just a queue of scenes following each other seemingly in a random pattern, and it seem as if most of the scenes could be rearranged and the movie would still be the same. The best part of Pizzás is the humor. Not the average joke kinda humor, but it's something that only some people understand and can laugh at. I had some friends over to watch Pizzás, and some of them laughed their head off, some of them just stared at the screen confused. Most of the humorous parts cannot even be translated to other languages because of the cultural and lingual differences. The directing is very...um...I dunno. I don't know the point of the film, but I guess it was to present a half-witted action comedy-drama that mimes some American stereotypes, makes fun of the whole concept.

I don't want to write any spoilers, so I cannot bring up any examples. This makes it very hard to review this movie at all. I can only say, that if you have what it takes to watch this film, you have to watch it.

Pizzaman delivers the pizza and experiences life. I don't agree with those who blame the directing or the actors and the whole film. This film is rather a vision than a simple story. A vision about different things in life, included love.

The actress playing Mannácska is a very attractive woman, it's a pity we cannot see her in other Hungarian movies. OK, she's not an excellent actress, but she has her charm and she was OK in this movie. The actor playing Pizzaman was OK, too, although he's not an actor either.

The movie is rather a puzzle of different video flicks (different visions), which at the end happen to meet. Every flick has something to tell us, but don't expect moral lesson or such, it might be just a joke or a satire or a parody of our consumer society or just a parody of itself. I liked the dialogs very much. The characters speak in untranslatable word-pictures throughout the movie, which I've found very funny sometimes. If you ask about the location of the story, there's no obvious answer. It's Budapest, of course, but sometimes it suddenly changes to a city in USA or to a seaside resort (and Hungary doesn't have seaside). This has its hidden meaning, of course.

All in all, this is a good Hungarian film. Don't watch it like you would watch an ordinary movie.

This is a very special film about love as opposed to pure sex without love. The pizza man meets the girl who he really falls into love.

There are also a lot of other meanings in the film for me. This is especially funny for one who knows Budapest how they drive on the street. The drive paths are cut together from different parts of the city. Some time they start to drive on a street of Budapest and they come out in Florida from the street. For me it means that the life is just life no matter where you live.

This is a type of film that has some special European humor. Especially it is full of word jokes that can not be translated to any other language from Hungarian.

This is a funny film and I like it a lot.

This is one of the few movies I couldn't watch for more than 30 minutes. Not because it's gross, violent or something like that. It's just plain BAD! And when I say bad, I mean ANNOYINGLY bad! I like bad movies: Ed Wood movies (very entertaining), Lucio Fulci movies (visually great, otherwise trash), etc. But the makers of this movie wanted it look like a big-budget American movie and the result is laughable! For example: the "car chase" at the beginning. The cars were SLOW! The editor could have helped with some close shots of the wheels, or something like that, but nobody cared! Two slow cars race each other and the audience should feel like they were watching "Bullitt" or "The French Connection" at least! The "star" of the movie has no acting talent at all, but the bigger problem is that he has no charisma as well. He's just a weird looking, annoying guy, who makes Freddie Prinze, jr. look like Marlon Brando! The makers also wanted to fill the dialogues with one-liners and "language-jokes", which are hard or impossible to translate. And the result is shameful as well.

But the biggest problem with the movie is that it's generally not credible. The tone is fake (as hungarians say: "mumajer"). The makers are not dumb or without talent (some kind of limited talent, mainly in music video-making and commercials), but they want their product to look really COOL. They fail.

I used to think that "Magyar Vándor" was bad. I've changed my mind: that "Monty Python and The Holy Grail"-ripoff was a carefully made art-comedy compared to this sh*t!