Until I saw him in Little Miss Sunshine, I’d never even heard of Paul Dano but after a couple of good performances (his creepy role in There Will Be Blood still haunts me whenever I think of televangelists) the young actor seems to be popping up everywhere including in two films that will open later this year.
Gigantic features Dano as a mattress salesman who becomes involved with a woman he meets at his shop. The romantic comedy from first time director Matt Aselton also stars Zooey Deschanel as the love interest, John Goodman (who is really showing his age) as her father, along with Edward Asner and Jane Alexander along for the ride.
Seems to have the “quirkiness” bit down packed but I did like the trailer which me smile with Deschanel asking “Can you see my underwear?” Look for it in theatres on April 3rd.
Mark Webber’s directorial debut Explicit Ills has been sitting on a shelf since it premiered and won a number of prizes at SXSW last year. An interconnected story line brings together the lives of a number of individuals struggling to etch out a living in the streets of Philadelphia. I’m not totally sold on this trailer; it seems a bit too disconnected, but I do love this cast which, outside of Dano, also includes Rosario Dawson and Lou Taylor Pucci.
Explicit Ills is scheduled to open in limited release on March 6th.
Gigantic looks good. Great cast, that is for sure. I like the use of that strange variation of DeVotchKa’s hauntingly epic song from Little Miss Sunshine in this trailer. Very appropriate.
Big fan of Paul Dano. As far back as The Girl Next Door (a very underrated sex comedy that also introduced me to Emile Hirsch and Timothy Olyphant), I have really liked the kid, and he has only gotten better with each film – The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The King, Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood… all these great performances and he is still in his mid-20s.
NOW! Toronto, the alternative weekly, didn’t like Gigantic at all when it played at TIFF last year. Their review:
“This whimsy-soaked indie stars Dano as a withdrawn New York mattress salesman trying to adopt a Chinese baby, and Deschanel as the quirky sexpot who offers him a different kind of love. It piles on so many eccentric supporting characters and inexplicable subplots that you can’t help but wish everyone dead by the one-hour mark. (Fortunately, one of those subplots involves a hobo violently attacking Dano at regular intervals.)
Incidentally, the only way Deschanel’s performance makes sense is if she’s playing some kind of sex robot who knows nothing of our hu-man ways, but that’s obviously beyond Aselton’s budget.
http://www.nowtoronto.com/guides/tiff/2008/play_details.cfm?play_id=1807
Personally, I don’t think it looks *that* bad. I too like Dano, though I dislike all the movies he’s been in save Sunshine. Haven’t see Jack and Rose, forgot he was in Girl Next Door, which I only saw parts of.
I like Deschanel too, but is she going to wear herself a little thin with the quirky thing? Surely she can do something else …
I thought Gigantic looked pretty good just now until I saw Explicit Ills and realized that looks pretty great. I see some Naomi Harris in there and anything with Rosario immediately has my attention (and, no, not just for the looks). This second trailer looks a lot more interesting in terms of the human drama and a little less rote than that previous trailer. They both look good, but something about that second one is really magnetic.
I looked at a couple of reviews of Gigantic and none are particularly good. I saw The Girl Next Door free streaming on Hulu before Christmas and was surprised – not as mindless and stupid as I’d expected. Who knew?
the girl next door was a very smart teen comedy. very refreshing in this day an age. a modern day Risky Business.
Love,love,love Paul Dano. He’s brilliant.I don’t know how he pulls it off. He seems sooo familiar, like the star down the street.Can’t wait til these films are released on dvd, because I sure can’t see them in my neck of the woods!