Showing posts with label magic realism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magic realism. Show all posts

Pizza Movie: A surreal update of the teen nerd genre, with no heterosexism or homophobia, lots of butts, and Daniel Radcliffe as a butterfly

 


Pizza Movie (2026), on Hulu, stars Sean Giambrone of The Goldbergs and Gaten Matarazzo of Stranger Things as college boys who accidentally get stoned on a weird drug.  I haven't seen a teen nerd movie for awhile; I wonder if they're still about the nerd winning the Girl of His Dreams with the help of his flamboyantly feminine best friend, while everyone throws homophobic slurs about.  It appears on a list of "The Top LGBTQ Movies to Watch This Spring," so maybe not. 

Scene 1: Room check in a college dorm.  A student stashes her drugs in a tin in the ceiling tiles. 

 Ten years later,  Montgomery (Sean) is frantically running across campus with a laundry basket.  He reaches the laundromat just in time to take all the quarters in the change machine.  When the Girl of His Dreams (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) arrives, he's  reading a book on How to Lower Your Testosterone, so he can impress her with his studliness when she asks for quarters.  Or you could just say hello.

"We're always here at the same time," she notes.  

"Well, nobody has dirtier underwear than me.  But not from poop...or piss, or cum.  I'm not weird."  I'm just wondering what else could soil your underwear.


Scene 2:
Montage of two guys chugging beer (outside, in the daytime); a girl thinking that a guy is sketchng her, but he's actuallly sketchng himself; and Jack (Gaten) being chased and bullied because he ruined the football team.  He tries to apologize, but they tape him to the clock tower and pelt him with water balloons full of piss (his suggestion).

Scene 3: The guys return to their dorm. Montgomery wants to "drown their sorrows" in a good night's sleep, while Jack wants to get drunk.  They're a superego/id  pair, got it.  I'm going to keep calling them Sean and Gaten, to make identification easier.

The housing requests for next year are due tonight.  They can choose from Orrick Tower, Stonewell Courts, or..ugh...the scary, crumbling Gralk Hall. 

Suddenly Sean is distracted by the Girl of His Dreams. "Just ask her out!" Gaten exclaims, no doubt for the 300th time.

"No way!  Hot girls only date Alpha guys, so I can't ask her out until I trick her into thinking that I'm an ALpha."  I'll bet she really likes the quiet, shy geeky types.

"But you don't know her.  How do you know that you have compatible interests?"

"Who cares?  She makes me feel like I'm floating on a cloud of lavender, being sung to by lollipop pixies."   Ugh.


Up to their room.  No posters of nekkid ladies.  They're just getting ready to drink, when  six bullies burst in, three girls and three guys, including Kevin Matthew Reyes (left).

 "What's up, dildos?", the leader, Logan, announces.  A creative slur.  Not homophobic, which is a good sign.  

They come in every week to hold the guys down and fart in their faces in retaliation for the football incident.  In the struggle the drug tin from the ceiling falls down.

While sitting on the guys' faces waiting to fart, they discuss the "pajama party tonight."  They have beer and weed, and Lizzy (Lulu Wilson) is bringing Wizard's Oath, a Dungeon's and Dragons-style board game.  The others dismiss this idea.

As they leave, Lizzy looks back, sympathetic. 

 I like the way that the guys have no problem with physical contact, even with Gaten's face two inches from Sean's cock, a welcome relief from the usual: "We accidentally touched hands!!!!  I'm going to be sick!!!!!"

Scene 4: The guys discuss how they are failures at college.  They should be popular, going to keggers and pajama parties, but everybody hates them.  Sean tries to make things better by ordering a pizza.  

Suddenly Gaten sees the tin that fell from the ceiling: it says "Mints," with a green, toothy smile.  Inside, tablets with a starburst image.  An internet search gets one hit, a youtube video with a "psychedelic adventurer" tell us about Mind Igniting Neural Tuning Stimulants (MINTS, get it?).  Sean is hesitant, but then she uses his "cloud of lavender" fantasy, and he's in.


Scene 5:
The evil Head RA (Jack Martin) tells his subordinates about the "debauchery" infesting their school.  Is this RAs for the whole campus?  There are like 30 of them, all wearing black berets.

Meanwhile, in the dorm room, the bullies discuss how much the guys blow.  Hey, the men and women aren't divided into couples!   Sympathetic Lizzy tries to defend them, and is un-invited to the pajama party-- until she offers to provide a party bus. Then she rules.

There are too many plot twists to continue the scene by scene.  Here's the gist:

Turns out that Lizzy used to be the guys' friend.  They played Wizard's Oath every day at lunch.   Then she joined the cool kids and dropped them.  But she took the drug, thinking that it was a mint, now they're in it together.



Everyone hates Gaten because as team mascot, he was leading the football team on their traditional naked run, and decided to prank a professor that he hated.  They chased the guy out of the stadium and onto the street. past the police department on a "bring your daughter to work day."  They all had to register as sex offenders. Wait -- why didn't the guys just stop at the stadium exit?



More after the break

"Son of a Thousand Men": Magic realism from Brazil with fragmented time and space, but there are gay guys and d*cks


Son of a Thousand Men
 (2025) popped up on the nude celebrity website with this well-hung trifecta, playing Nude Man 1, Nude Man 3, and Antonino. 

But what is it about?  

Different reviews give us completely different plots:

1. "A lonely fisherman longing for a son is drawn into an ethereal light," and the boy appears.

2. "A gay guy enters a marriage of convenience with a foundling woman" 

3. "An older couple hires an actor to impersonate their gay son."

4. "A elderly man tells his grandson to stay away from gay men and lesbians" (VOD)

Maybe they're all correct.  I suspect that we are looking at magic realism, like 100 Years of Solitude, The House of the Spirits, and Cortazar's Hopscotch, where people merge into other people, time and space are fragmented, and the subconscious manifests in everyday objects.   

Let's try the trailer:


Scene 1
:  Sometime in the 19th century, an elderly fisherman (Rodrigo Santoro) is living by himself. That's the beginning of a lot of fairy tales.

He has been driven insane by the isolation, so he makes a creepy boy doll that he pretend is  real.   So is the doll going to come to life, like Pinocchio?  

Scene 2: He puts an ad in the village grapevine, "Elderly man seeks a son."  A teenage boy looks at it, but a preteen boy shows up. I think the teen boy turned into the preteen boy, and both are going to become the Fisherman.

Scene 3: The Boy wants the Fisherman to get a girlfriend, so he won't be lonely.  This might be a problem, since they live in the wilderness, a long, arduous journey from the nearest town. Who does he sell the fish to?   

Fortunately, at that moment the Woman of his Dreams appears, wearing a flowing white robe, sitting alone on the rocks. She must be a supernatural being, maybe an eidetic invocation of the Eternal Feminine.

The Boy doesn't think that the Woman of His Dreams is an appropriate partner for the day-to-day life of a fisherman, maye he can't see her at all, so he continues: "There are plenty of girls in the village."  This to a shot of someone who is definitely not a girl. I think he's Antonino from the n*de photos (Johnny Massaro), so maybe he was hanging out on the gay beach. 

Scene 4: Mom tells Antonino that she needs a grandchild, so get busy.


Scene 5: Antonino's wedding, to a woman trapped in a fishing net. Is this standard for Brazilian weddings, or does it signify that she's a sea creature?   This must be Plot #2: he's a gay guy forced to marry "a foundling woman." 

Scene 6: They settle in for their wedding night in separate beds.

Scene 7: In the morning, she leaves, wanders on to the beach, and says "Love ruins everything," just before the Fisherman sees her and is overcome by Girl of His Dreams fervor.  So she's the Net Lady. I thought there were no other houses -- or hotels -- around for hundreds of miles. Maybe she walked through time and space.

Scene 8: Net Lady and Fisherman bond over screaming therapy, laugh, and swim in an ocean full of people, "all children of different mothers and fathers."  Obviously.

Meanwhile Antonino (I think) has a rather painful masturbation.



Scene 9:
The Boy curls into a fetal position as hair drops on him.  So he's been to the barber?

People gaze at the ocean.

Net Lady dies as the Fisherman holds her hand.

There's a giant glowing seashell.

Fisherman: "We're never really alone."

The end.

Still confused?  Me, too.  But I found a complete, detailed plot synopsis, untangled the magic realism fragmentation, and put the events in chronological order.

Unfragmented story after the break.