Video Corner - GIGANTIC, Gigantic Disappointment

Ah, the quirky indie romantic comedy. There've been good ones throughout film history (ANNIE HALL, THE GRADUATE, I even enjoyed most of GARDEN STATE). And then there are the ones that seem to just be quirky for quirky's sake (500 DAYS OF SUMMER). GIGANTIC falls squarely into the latter category.

BIG-ASS SPOILERS BELOW

GIGANTIC tells the tale of Paul Dano's Brian Weathersby. We're introduced to Dano visiting his friend doing experiments on rats in a lab. Then he gets the crap beaten out of him by a crazy homeless guy. Then he goes to his job, selling high-end mattresses, where obnoxious millionaire John Goodman comes in to buy one. Later, he sends his daughter, Happy (yes, happy) to pick up the mattress. She falls asleep on the bed for hours. Happy and Brian start dating, or more specifically, start having sex in odd places. Brian's dream since he was a little child was to adopt a Chinese baby, something he's on a waiting list for. He hangs out with his elderly father and brothers, taking mushrooms and gathering wild mushrooms in a field. He's shot at, then shot, by the homeless guy. He eats a fancy French dinner. He gets approved for a baby. He stabs and kills the homeless guy, who turns out to be a figment of his imagination. Happy gets freaked out and breaks up with him. And some more stuff happens.

This movie was highly annoying, despite the fact that Zooey Deschanel gets completely nude in it. I have no idea why anyone in it, including Deschanel, Goodman, Dano, even Ed Asner, wanted to be in it. It's just plain weird. The protagonist is an oddball, the love interest is an oddball, and there's absolutely nothing driving the movie. It's not the story of a guy who had a jacked-up family, so he has to do whatever he can to provide a home for his incoming baby. It's not about how a woman comes to find the man she loves in the most unexpected of ways and how she gets the family she's not looking for. Things just happen for no reason whatsoever.

Why does Brian sell weird mattresses? Why is he taking drugs with his family? Why does he want a Chinese baby (he's wanted one since he was 7 is not a good backstory or proper motivation)? About the only thing that happens that makes any sense is that Happy freaks out and breaks up with Brian because it's too much too fast. But then she comes around again later anyway, having seemingly changed her mind for no discernible reason.

The film's filled with some truly unique scenes and characters, but none of them are grounded in any sort of coherent reality. There's no throughline to the plot, just a bunch of stuff happening. And the whole subplot with the homeless guy and Brian's imagination is odd and jarring. If he's insane, this guy shouldn't have a baby.

It's one thing to do an unconventional take on a romantic comedy. New characters provide a new perspective, and interesting settings and plot turns can tweak stale genre tropes. But you can't just make a movie where everything's weird, there's no logic behind anything, and the film's just a collection of oddness slapped together on the editing table. Well, I guess you can, but what you get is GIGANTIC.

PAPER HEART - This One's Shredded

The girlfriend and I went to go see PAPER HEART. I like Michael Cera, she's in love with him. I appreciate quirky, unconventional narratives. She's a fan of talky, meandering films that are light on plot. We should've both gotten paper arrows through our paper hearts for this film. But we didn't.

CUPID SHOOTS SOME SPOILER ARROWS BELOW




















The film's an odd blend of documentary and narrative/fiction. But this isn't used in an interesting way like REAL LIFE (where Albert Brooks plays a documentarian named Albert Brooks), instead, it's used in a confusing way. The film has "Written by" credits. And the real life director is played by an actor. So did Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi have an actual relationship? Or is that all bullshit concocted for the sake of the film? Wondering about those questions is actually the most interesting part of the movie. Which makes the film fascinating, but only in a meta sense.

Nothing really drives the story. We learn that Charlyne doesn't believe in love (through a phone call with a friend and some dialogue with her parents and actor friends), but we don't see anything about her past relationships to better set this up. She travels around the country, interviewing various people -- high school sweethearts, old married couples, bikers, scientists, a divorcee -- about love and relationships. And there are occasionally amusing puppet recreations of key moments in the interviewees lives. And then Charlyne starts to fall for Michael and vice-versa. Michael becomes uncomfortable having his entire relationship play out under the eyes of a film crew. Will she come to love him? Or is she incapable of it? Will he get fed up with always being watched?

Well, we get a tiny bit of her not being able to say she loves Michael. But in terms of an overall plot structure, it basically boils down to one line of dialogue in the film, when an interviewee (a romance novelist) says that it always comes down to love being that one person makes a sacrifice for the other, showing s/he loves them. And then in the end, Charlyne tells the crew to shut down the cameras. And then we get a puppet recreation of a fake, bigger ending. Which is just strange, because it has nothing do with the film and isn't particularly funny.

Another part of the film that's wearying is that after a while, all the alt-comic quirkiness tends to wear a bit thin. Between the two leads painting pictures of each other, the puppet show recreations, the playing goofy songs for each other, and shooting BB guns and setting off fireworks for no reason, it's too much twee crap. A little quirk goes a long way.

At the end of the day, in choosing to blend reality and fiction, the film fails on both counts. It's not a particularly great documentary about love because there's so much falseness. And it's not a particularly great romantic comedy, because that part of the film's underwritten and doesn't amount to much.

JULIE & JULIA - Who Cares About Julie?

Nora Ephron is one of the most inconsistent writers around. She's responsible for WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, one of the best romantic comedies of all time. And other works of varying quality. JULIE & JULIA held some interest for me, as it's about cooking (a passion), blogging (something I do), and Julia Child (a woman I admire). Based partially on Julie Powell's food blog/book of the same name and partially on the life of Julia Child, J&J tells the story of how both women came to find purpose in their lives. Unfortunately, it's yet another mediocre movie by Ms. Ephron.

COOKIN' UP A FRESH BATCH OF SPOILERS BELOW

First, let me say that Meryl Streep is amazing. After about a minute, you forget that she's doing a Julia Child impression and become lost in her flawless portrayal of a big, loud woman who loves food. She's by far the best thing about this movie, and she's almsot entirely wasted in it. Anything good about the film belongs solely to Meryl Streep.

The film has several problems. Chief among them is that Julia Child's life is so much more interesting than Julie Powell's. Child worked for the OSS in WWII, lived abroad with the love of her life in several countries (he was a diplomat), became the first woman chef in the Cordon Bleu, brought French cooking to America and changed American cuisine in the process, and became a famous author, chef, and TV personality. Julie Powell wrote a novel she didn't finish, bitched about her job (helping people try to collect 9/11 benefits, mainly), and then cooked her way through Julia Child's famous book in a year. While the last is a clever blog topic (obviously so because of the interest it engendered and the publicity, book deal, and film deal that followed), it doesn't compare to the groundbreaking nature of Child's life. And because Child's story is so much more inherently interesting, because her character is much more interesting than that of Julie Powell, and because Meryl Streep blows Amy Adams out of the water, the Child portion of the film is much better than the Powell chunk. The film would have been much more interesting if it was just a biofilm about Julia Child. It could have also focused on some of the more problematic areas of Child's life (her inability to have a child; her constant moving around due to her husband's job; her search for purpose; her butting heads with the head of the Cordon Bleu, a lazy co-author, and some publishing dunderheads who didn't get how novel and fantastic her cookbook was) instead of glossing over them.

I'm going to assume that like most "Based on a true story" films, liberties were taken with the sequencing and nature of certain events in both women's lives. Which is all the more puzzling that Powell's life is so doggone boring. There's nothing at stake -- the central question is will she follow through on something (she never does). She has a decent job and a loving husband. So if she doesn't follow through on her food blog/challenge, who cares? There are also no real conflicts. The major plot points in her story are: Julia's publisher is supposed to come to dinner and cancels because it's raining (Oh no!); her boss finds out she called in sick to cook/blog (He tells her he's not going to fire her and doesn't want to show up in her blog. Big deal.); and one evening, her adoring husband gets sick of her being a bitch and ignoring him and sleeps away for the night (he comes back in the morning); and Julia Child isn't happy about Julie's blog (which we hear about thirdhand via a phone call we hear one side of). None of these are major conflicts; in fact, they minimize the potential sources of conflict. It would've been easy to torque these up a bit so they're a real source of conflict -- Julie builds up the publisher visit, thinking she's going to get a book deal; she needs the money due to some debt, her husband losing his job, whatever; then the publisher doesn't show and she's heartbroken. Her boss does in fact fire her; now she's out a job and money. What can she do? She and her husband almost do split up.

The film's structure is weak. Instead of alternating/juxtaposing scenes in the women's lives and playing them off of each other, we get a little of that and then apparently randomly ordered scenes that don't enforce/comment on each other at all.

There are also some lazy bits of writing, including a scene where Julie dines with her more successful friends (which is incredibly sloppy because one of the friends relies on her incompetent assistant to negotiate a $190m real estate deal), some exposition in which we're told Julie wrote half a novel she's not going to finish, some more exposition where we're told she doesn't finish anything, and an abrupt, non-motivated 180-degree character turn from Julie's mother from unsupportive to supportive. We also get the most overstated monologue of all time in which Julie states that Julie "saved" her. From what? Her moderately unhappy life? Being lazy and not writing?

The film also asserts, via Julie's dialogue, that in order for a writer to write, you have to be published. No you don't. You can just write. Van Gogh is one of the best painters of all time. He didn't sell shit while he was alive. That didn't make him less of a painter.

So what are we left with? A woman who came up with a clever idea for a blog and did very well by it, intercut with the fascinating story of a great woman's story of finding a purpose in life. The two aren't even remotely equal, and the film suffers greatly as a result.