Vonia Mystic Pizza (1988) Director: Donald Petrie Watched: April 2018 8/10 {Clue: An individual claiming supernatural powers or Where you can find a quaint Slice of Heaven} Might you be wondering why this romantic comedy rises above the rest (pizza making pun intended)? Young girls coming of age with all around commendable performances (pre-Hollywood Julia Roberts & did you spot Matt Damon?), Scenes that make you laugh, cry, or sing along ("The Fireside Gourmet", Kat's first introduction to the pain of love, Aretha's "R-E-S-P-E-C-T"), Their stories feels genuine, without using sex or violence for cheap entertainment (Kat's love for astronomy, Jojo's cold feet, the Arujos' sibling rivalry, Charles's insecurities with law school and wealthy family), Inventive situational or character comedy rather than the typical sophomoric or slapstick kind ("I fucked up," "... but you gave it a 100% effort!"; "What the hell do you think Leona really puts in that pizza?"), Community easy to fall in love with (Who wouldn't want to live in a town charmingly named Mystic, Connecticut?) Acrostic is a form of poetry where the first letters in each line, paragraph, or word are doubly used to spell a name, phrase, or word. The word "acrostic" comes from the Greek words "akros" (outermost) and "stichos" (line of verse). Read the appropriate letters in the poem vertically to reveal the extra message, called the "acrostich"!

JackCerf There is a genre known as the Three Girls Movie, in which, you guessed it, three girls learn about Life, which really means Men, and about themselves along the way. There is always a heroine, a naive, vulnerable one who gets hurt, and an eccentric one, who might be either wild or salty. Three Coins In a Fountain is a Three Girls Movie; so is The Best of Everything, and Where The Boys Are (although they threw in Connie Francis as a fourth so that she could sing). How to Marry a Millionaire is also a Three Girls Movie, with the twist that the three girls are grown women -- fashion models -- who already consider themselves fully wised up about Life and Men and find out they are wrong.Mystic Pizza is a very good Three Girls Movie, notable for launching the careers of the Three Actresses: Julia Roberts, of course, and to a lesser extent Lily Taylor and Annabeth Gish. They play three working class waitresses in a New England fishing town. Gish, the smart but naive one, gets hurt but will go off to college better armored against the snares of the world. Taylor, the eccentric one, finally accepts marriage and domesticity with the guy who has loved her all along. Roberts, the gorgeous, hot tempered but deeply sensible heroine, finds a rich guy who turns out to be flawed, but curably flawed; at the end she is making him over into the man who will deserve her. There are no real surprises here (except for one involving a misunderstanding and a parked convertible with the top down), and it's not great art by any means, but it is a well-executed variation of a reliable formula that should entertain anyone, or at least any female, from 13 on up.

Mark Watson Even Julia Roberts skived off the Premiere by pretending she was ill. This was just as well because if she had turned up she would have found the auditorium empty as everybody else from the cast and crew had also pulled 'sickes'. In a further twist, a lorry carrying twenty-five thousand copies of this terrible film on DVD crashed into the outside wall of Julia Robert's house shortly after release, spilling it's contents onto a main thoroughfare. Not a single copy was taken, either in broad daylight or darkest night and eventually, after about a month or so, the council had to come round and burn them. Julia Robert's own mother didn't bother picking up a copy even though she passed the giant pile hundreds of times walking the dog and the council workers tasked with burning it couldn't even be arsed filching one either.

James Hitchcock The title sounds intriguing, a sort of "Zen and the Art of Pizza Making". "Mystic Pizza", however, has nothing to do with mysticism. The "mystic" is a reference to the small town of Mystic, Connecticut, and the three main characters all work as waitresses at the town's pizza restaurant. The three are sisters Kat and Daisy Araujo and their friend Jojo Barboza. All come from the town's large Portuguese-American community, and all are in their late teens or early twenties. All are romantically involved, and the film traces the stories of their romances. Kat is the intellectual of the group; she has been accepted to attend Yale University and, besides her work at the restaurant, also acts as babysitter for a thirty-something Yale graduate named Tim whose wife is currently in Europe. She falls heavily for Tim after discovering that they have intellectual interests in common and cherishes the hope that he will leave his wife for her. · Daisy's love-interest is Charles Gordon Winsor junior, the son of a wealthy WASP family. Although the Winsors are "new" rather than "old" money, they have all the snobbish instincts of the most aristocratic blue-bloods, and disapprove of their son's romance with a girl who is "ethnic", a Roman Catholic and from a working-class background. (The comments about Daisy's ethnicity did not really ring true; the Winsors seem to regard Portuguese-Americans in much the same light as particularly unenlightened British colonialists used to regard the "natives", even though there have been Portuguese communities in the New England fishing ports for several generations). This sort of conflict is a commonplace in romantic dramas; the relationship between Charles and Daisy parallels almost exactly that between the rich WASP boy Oliver and the poor Italian Catholic girl Jenny in "Love Story". Here, however, the situation is given an unusual twist. After Charles engineers a confrontation with his family over a perceived insult to Daisy, she is perceptive enough to realise that his interest in her has less to do with love than with a self-conscious act of rebellion against his privileged background. Unwilling to be used as a weapon in his private battle against his family, she ends the relationship, although a more conventional romance would have presented Charles' outburst as something admirable and provided the expected "happy-ever-after" ending. Of the three romances, in fact, two end unhappily. Rather more predictably, at least in terms of adherence to dramatic conventions, Kat discovers too late that Tim has simply been using her and has no intention of leaving his wife for her. The one story that does end happily is that of Jojo, although even here normal Hollywood conventions are given a new twist. Jojo is engaged to Bill, a local fisherman, but is reluctant to commit herself to him in marriage. This is a reversal of the normal movie cliché in which it is the male characters who are portrayed as being frightened of emotional commitment. Bill (whose strong religious beliefs preclude sex before marriage) wants to get married as soon as possible, but Jojo doesn't believe she is ready. In his review of the film, written when it first came out in1988, Roger Ebert stated "I have a feeling that "Mystic Pizza" may someday become known for the movie stars it showcased back before they became stars." Of the three leads it was Annabeth Gish as Kat, whom he singled out for special mention, comparing her to a "young Katharine Hepburn." Gish is certainly good, but for me the star of the film was the still little-known Julia Roberts, who shows here not only the looks and the talent but also the charisma which were to make her a major star a couple of years later in films like "Pretty Woman" and "Sleeping with the Enemy". Lili Taylor as Jojo does not perhaps have quite the same impact, but there are some good contributions from some of the minor characters, especially Conchata Ferrell as Leona, the owner of the restaurant who claims to be in possession of a secret recipe for pizza sauce which she has inherited from her forebears on the Algarve. (And there was me thinking pizza was an Italian dish rather than a Portuguese one). Adam Storke as the spoilt rich boy Charles is the best of the male stars. The film has been described as a romantic comedy, although it does not follow the normal format of the standard Hollywood rom-com. A better description would probably be a coming-of-age story, set against a well-realised background of small- town life. In a traditional romantic comedy the main focus of interest would be Jojo finding the love of her life; here the focus is on all three characters learning lessons about life. As Ebert put it, it's about three girls discovering what their standards for love are going to be. This is not exactly an original theme, but "Mystic Pizza" adds enough original touches to keep it interesting. 6/10