Baking & the Big Screen: Pizza & Little Italy
To get back into baking mode after a long, hot summer, I decided to ease into it. I had been given a super basic pizza dough recipe (I’d link it but it’s just a google doc she shared with me) and figured homemade pizza would be the perfect opportunity. A friend of mine had some homemade sauce so when our powers combined, we made one hell of a pizza. Then it was time to narrow down the movie to go with it. Pizza felt like an incredibly easy baked item to find in films. Any movie that takes place even 1/5 in New York City, the cast will definitely be indulging in a slice. But I didn’t want just any old pizza movie. A friend reminded me of the perfect film: Little Italy.
Little Italy
Starring Emma Roberts, Hayden Christensen, Danny Aiello, Andrea Martin, Alyssa Milano, Jane Seymour
Director: Donald Petrie
Released in 2018
Available to watch on Amazon Prime
Let me just put this out there on the front end of things: this movie is terrible. It’s not even remotely good. Actors who we have evidence of being actually talented manage to fall apart in this movie. The writing is stilted and clunky and filled with every stereotype and inappropriate joke or innuendo that a 17-year-old boy would make with his buddies in school. And as my friend pointed out, we’re supposed to believe the two leads are the same age despite having a real life 10-year age gap. It’s Romeo and Juliet meets….Toronto’s Little Italy district. Because of course it is. I’m not sure Billy Shakes would be thrilled to see what this work has inspired, but I’m so here for it.
I love, and I mean truly love, crappy movies. They have to be just good enough to have some semblance of a plot, but the rest has to suck. Because a mediocre movie isn’t fun at all. But Little Italy has a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I had listened to a How Did This Get Made? podcast episode on it, so I knew I was going to be sold immediately. If you have any heart for bad movies, this is as good of a recent one as you can get. It may not be worse than Dolittle or Cats, but it’s up there. And since as this is being published, it’s free on Prime, it’s well worth the time.
You know what was good, though? The pizza. It was an effortless dough - took all of 17 minutes to make and 17 minutes to cook, and my friend’s homemade sauce really added to it. We topped it simply with some fresh mozzarella, parmesan and basil, and I’m already looking forward to making it again. As long as you have some bread flour, pizza dough is one of the easiest things to throw together last minute. It’s one thing that I believe is truly worth the effort - especially if you have a so-bad-it’s-good movie to go along with it.