Bene Cumb
I had no prior knowledge of this movie, I decided to watch it because of Paul Dano - he is definitely in my Top10 actors list and I do not know a movie with him in the lead which is bad or boring (and I have seen most of them with his participation). Of course, the plot is sometimes absurd and the characters are strange, behaving often in a peculiar manner, but still - I giggled a lot, although it is no real comedy (background is dramatic, at times tragic), but the characters are well elaborated and convincing. And the cast is even and great - especially Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman - but all the others provide strong and versatile performances. Well, if you are fond of movies with a difference where important topics are handled through twisted events - then Gigantic is a must-see!
Ruadhan McElroy
This film had a promising premise, a dry-comedy examination of relationships through two quirky hipsters and their eccentric families. That's what I went in expecting, cos that's really all the copy on the back of the DVD box says.The film introduces Brian, and it's established that his father was in his fifties when the 28-year-old Brian was born, and Brian is hoping to adopt a baby. Then there's a bizarre scene wherein Brian is beaten pretty badly by The Hobo as he's heading toward a ferry. Then we meet Al Lolly, who's apparently wealthy enough to buy a $14K mattress from Brian, and who is just kind of used to saying whatever pops into his head, even if he knows it's offensive. After "ribbing" his ostensibly gay assistant, Al reserves the mattress and mentions that he'll be sending down "his girl" to pay for it, speaking as if she's some kind of secretary. When his girl, who identifies herself as Al's daughter, Harriet a.k.a. "Happy", arrives, she's almost inaudibly soft-spoken and implied to have less of a verbal filter than her father (though in her own way) and soon falls asleep on the mattress; when she wakes up, over two hours later, they arrange to have the mattress delivered, but the next day, the delivery driver calls in sick and Brian is assigned to go deliver, and is then almost immediately suckered in to driving Al, who is laying down on the hardwood floor, to his back specialist cos Harriet "can't drive in NYC". Brian and Harriet make the most emotionless small- talk since some of Burt I Gordon's stinkers in the clinic's waiting room, then Harriet emotionlessly propositions Brian for sex, and then they immediately duck back out to the parking garage for a quickie while Al is told that his back problem is stress-related.Brian's father is equally quirky and it's implied all over the place that his brothers are self-made millionaires. In fact, save for The Hobo, who inexplicably beats down Brian four times in the film, with no established pattern as to why, there's not a single character in this film who isn't incredibly privileged; even Brian's prospective adoption is of a Chinese baby, and absolutely no reason is ever divulged as to why a single and apparently heterosexual young man is so hell-bent on adopting a baby other than an anecdote from Brian's father that, on Brian's eighth birthday, his parents got him some toy or another, and Brian retreated to his room, crying, because "he wanted us to get him a baby, a Chinese baby".Wow. Just wow. And when he finally does get his baby (after ample strings pulled by a friend of his with the agency), his entire family treat the poor little girl like a Pomeranian puppy, Brian's father commenting to his mother "we gotta get one of these".One of the only two scenes with realistic emotion are when Harriet attempts to break up with Brian, for some vague reason I've already forgotten, and Brian is broken-hearted about it. When he leaves the Lollys' apartment afterward, he's encountered by his Hobo for the fourth and final time, and stabs the guy in self-defense. When Brian staggers up from the body, the shot of the alley from a distance reveals no body, which is either a technical goof, or an implication that there never was a Hobo -- in which case, why is Brian sporting bruises almost consistently from the first beating onward? I have absolutely no idea what this character was supposed to be representing, if anything, though his regular appearances which include an implication that he's followed Brian from NYC to somewhere upstate, my money is on "figment of the imagination" -- in which case, FIGHT CLUB did that kind of imaginary- abuser/friend-gone-wild thing twenty times better; there was some consistency to Tyler Durden, there is none with GIGANTIC's Hobo. The second with real emotion is when Brian's mother talks Harriet out of a panic episode and explains that "nothing's normal".Apparently the scriptwriters are "from literary backgrounds" and thought they were writing a film like a novel, forgetting that novels (like FIGHT CLUB) are typically better than the films that are made from them simply because of the time that is taken to carefully explain certain things; there is little to no explanation of anything in GIGANTIC; while it seems to aim for a character-driven rather than plot-driven film, the end result is that it just kind of meanders about without much to really endear the characters to, much less make one care about what happens to them. By the time Brian finally got his baby, I was more annoyed that yet another privileged, upper-middle-class white boy has scored a seat on the Trendy Foreign Baby bandwagon and, like so many before him, is content to treat the kid like an accessory rather than a person.It has kind of an absurd charm in places, but in the end, its grasps at straws of pseudo-existentialism ends up with those moments just petering out as kind of stupid. It's a promising idea, but obviously the writing failed this idea; the direction seemed fine, cos there's only so much you can do with some of these lines.I'm giving it 5/10 cos like I said, it has a decent premise, and the direction is fine; the actors do well, all of them, really, but there was only so much that could have been done with the apparent script that I have to blame the film's problems on writing alone. I usually like these quirky little character pieces, but this simply didn't deliver on such promises; the leads, who are the focus of the film, are ultimately kind of bland, and their families seem like caricatures of eccentricity.
mvpetri
It isn't a good movie. Paul Dano is too boring in Gigantic. Zooey is Zooey. I wonder if she is exactly the same in real life. In all movies of her that I saw she was like all the other. Fortunely I like her a lot but if I didn't I wouldn't have guts to see any other movies with her.I started to see this movie only to see Zoey and, sadly, I finished by the same reason. The movie has no motivation. She said she loves he, but I can not imagine how. His character is boring. Both do nothing to know each other. After, she missed a dinner and everything collapsed.A bunch of things was forgotten too. The research and the hot blonde, for example. An homeless try to kick his ass out. Seemingly with no reason at all.Well, that is how I define this movie. Nothing has a reason. I don't know what was in the director's mind, what the writer was thinking when made this script, but they thought we could find out. Well, I can't. Like me, watch if you don't have any plans at 4a.m. and like Zooey DeschannelFor now, I'm sorry about my bad English.
