Mystic Pizza, 1988

Mystic Pizza, 1988
Director: Donald Petrie
Cast: Annabeth Gish, Julia Roberts, Lili Taylor




Stage: Home TV selection. Luckily that night at least croatian TV had some choice


Mystic Pizza in short: Sisters Kat and Daisy work along with Jojo at the pizza parlour in Mystic, Connecticut. Kat, shortly off to Yale, finds herself drawn to a local architect she is babysitting for, while her more tearaway sister starts dating a guy from the money side of the tracks. Jojo leaves her man at the altar; she loves him but shies away from commitment. Meanwhile the fame of the pizza continues to spread; it seems to contain something almost ..... mystic.


Preps: One of the first movies I saw when my mother bought the VCR. It stood in my memory as a sad drama and nothing nice to remember.. now let's see.




Reality: This is an oldie. Not really goldie, but everything in this piece appears in a way you need to switch to a mindset of the eighties. If you do that you don't mind. A similar story to the one we saw in The perfect storm. A small city where you need to get a good reason or mindset to escape, either by yourself or with the marriage. An oldie, because it poses the issue most young girls had and the challenge - to get the right guy, get married, maybe finish off college, and obviously.. how to get acquainted with your own romantic expectations and the reality you end up with.
How important it really is to divide between standards the society poses and your own ego /self conscience, is maybe the best shown with one of the best movies on the topic so far - also with Julia Roberts, Mona Lisa Smile.
In any case, we follow the story of three friends, two sisters and the third waitress at Mystic Pizza. The famous pizza is only a side story for the bigger bang upon a relationship versus career debate, which is going on all the time. When is the time to get married, should you even get married, should you get involved with a taken guy.. should you take care of a career? A very suitable movie with the right taglines for a girl, who is in the middle of same decisions, best if she is thinking of college. Keep in mind, she needs to derive with a mindset of the 80ies, because nowadays, such a movie couldn't make a dive at all, because it would be swallowed by better and more original pieces.
Still, a catch to the eye, seeing Julia in her early roles, because later on she got notorious. This is one of the rare times the director doesn't use her smile yet, therefore worth seeing also in this sense. Always admire when the cast is praised for the acting abilities and women aren't just some sort of sex symbols.


My personal rating: 5,5 (not bad, a memory well surpassing the real image of the piece. Still, a good Sunday night entertainment).


Mystic on IMDB