Paul Aufiero loves the New York Giants. Without his football team, he doesn’t amount to much. He’s portly and middle-aged, and he lives at home with his mother. She yells at Paul for calling his favorite sports talk radio station under the name “Paul from Staten Island” in the middle of the night. He works the night shift as a parking garage attendant and spends his works hours toiling over his laboriously preconceived rebuttals to his talk radio call-in enemy, an Eagles fan named “Philadelphia Phil”. But when he makes those calls, Paul feels alive for a minute of airtime. Robert Siegel, writer of The Wrestler, makes his directorial debut with Big Fan, an indie movie and character study about the most overblown level of sports fandom. Though the structure seems to represent a drama, hidden inside Siegel’s movie is a comedy—a very, very dark comedy. In fact, you may not even realize the movie is trying to be funny until the finale. Despite this tonal elusiveness, the presence of stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt as Paul suggests that the movie isn’t merely a psychological drama about an obsessive sports enthusiast. While Oswalt, who’s amazing here, joins the growing list of […]
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