Film reviews: Gigantic | Miss March

Published on Saturday 13 June 2009 13:38

GIGANTIC (15) **

Sometimes I wonder if low-budget indie filmmaking has become the equivalent of the shed at the bottom of the garden where filmmakers can retreat and potter. How else to explain the self-conscious comedy Gigantic, which piles up quirky character the way some of us store old plant pots and elastic bands?

There's Brian (Little Miss Sunshine/There Will Be Blood's Paul Dano, above), a mattress salesman whose life ambition is to adopt a Chinese baby, an angry homeless man who stalks him and occasionally shoots him in the leg, a father who builds piatas in the likeness of dictators, and a kooky depressive girl called Happy (Zooey Deschanel) who falls for Brian after falling asleep on his merchandise.

It's saying something when John Goodman plays a relative straight man in the middle of all this. Yet despite the zaniness, not much happens in Gigantic; the episodic narrative threads never really connect and the result, like Brian's mattresses, is a little too restful and occasionally a bit of a snore.

MISS MARCH (15)

*

A virginal young man (Zach Cregger) awakens from a four-year coma to discover that his equally virginal girlfriend (Raquel Alessi) has become a successful Playboy model. So, with the help of an idiot buddy (Trevor Moore), he hits the road to find and confront her. En route, forlorn attempts at hilarity include explosive incontinence, encounters with randy lesbians and dogs peeing into champagne glasses. Rarely has coma seemed more inviting. Towards the end, Hugh Hefner himself shows up to read out a Yoda-ish speech about true love but mostly to plug the bacchanal lifestyle of Playboy Inc, an ad that would be more convincing if the wizened Hef didn't look as if he needs Viagra and a pair of bellows to raise his coffee mug nowadays.

On general release from Friday