GIGANTIC is the debut feature from director Mark Aselton and writer Adam Nagata. It's a refreshingly ambitious, original, bizarre romantic-comedy. That said, it's a complete failure, and is only worth watching insofar as it whets your appetite for what this film-maker will do when he gets a proper editor and starts to better structure his whacky ideas. The movies sees Paul Dano's mattress salesman sell a high-end mattress to John Goodman's back-pain afflicted millionaire. His daughter (Zooey Deschanel) picks it up, and wants to start a romance, but the salesman is too busy avoiding a madman and trying to adopt a Chinese baby. So, we trudge through 100 minutes and the movie never coheres and never engages. It's a tremendous shame, because the film-makers are obviously trying to break with the Hollywood identikit rom-com and the performances are great.
GIGANTIC played Toronto 2008 and was released in the US and UK earlier this year. It is available on DVD. It will be released in Portugal on October 22nd, in France on November 18th and in the Netherlands on March 25th 2010.
Eventual tags: adam nagata, clarke peters, daniel stewart sherman, edward asner, ian roberts, jane alexander, john goodman, matt aselton, paul dano, peter donahue, robert stanton, zach galifianakis, zooey deschanel
