Robert D. Siegel
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Connections, in both directions
Robert Siegel' s Big Fan is a dark, daring drama that could be described as a "Taxi Driver-esque” variation on the crazy world of sports fandom but the film isn't nearly that disturbing, nor is it meant to be.
Big Fan, while it holds us right up to the suspenseful simmer of its nerd–Taxi Driver climax, doesn't go where you'd expect.
Written and directed by Siegel - who scripted The Wrestler, another keenly observed portrait of an outcast sports figure - Big Fan shares a nutty kinship with the obsessive-loner pictures of Martin Scorsese, namely Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.
“Big Fan’’ appears headed into the territory of “Taxi Driver’’ and “The King of Comedy,’’ movies I’m sure Siegel has engraved on his heart.
Siegel builds the film to a kind of “King of Comedy”-“Taxi Driver” finale that pits Paul against his primary antagonist, an Eagles-loving mook called Philadelphia Phil (Michael Rappaport).
It’s a modest picture, forcing the filmmaking to turn the “Taxi Driver” inclinations inward, staying tight on Paul and his world of NFL elation, carefully rehearsed and scripted in his trusty notebook -- for Paul to find humiliation during his radio call-in spotlights would be a fate worse than death.
Written and directed by Siegel - who scripted The Wrestler, another keenly observed portrait of an outcast sports figure - Big Fan shares a nutty kinship with the obsessive-loner pictures of Martin Scorsese, namely Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.
“Big Fan’’ appears headed into the territory of “Taxi Driver’’ and “The King of Comedy,’’ movies I’m sure Siegel has engraved on his heart.
Movies about obsessed fans are invariably creepy (Misery, The King of Comedy, Play Misty for Me), but in this one nobody suffers worse than the fan himself.
Her nagging interruption plays like an homage to Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” in which Robert DeNiro’s wanna be stand up comedian lives in his mom’s basement and has his routines interrupted by his mother calling him from upstairs and yelling at him to keep it down.
It's exciting to see a studio take a chance on director Josh Trank, who edited Patton Oswalt's Big Fan (another ballsy, noteworthy film).
It's not the place where Patton Oswalt got into trouble in Robert D. Siegel's Big Fan, and despite the Italian-American connection it's most definitely on a different planet than the one the late James Gandolfini inhabited, either on The Sopranos or in David Chase's sentimental Not Fade Away.
Imagine Pat running into the Patton Oswalt character from " Big Fan ."
The film's decidedly unappealing view of Kroc — this is very much the chronicle of a self-made villain — puts him in line with the fictional protagonists of screenwriter Robert D. Siegel's other films: Mickey Rourke's fading costumed grappler in The Wrestler and Patton Oswalt's obsessive football stalker in Big Fan.
The fault belongs not so much to screenwriter Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler, Big Fan), who includes copious moments of vile behavior, as it does to director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks), who depicts every one of them as some shrewd maneuver.
Robert D. Siegel , whose stellar resume speaks for itself (see: 2008’s The Wrestler, 2009’s Big Fan, and 2013’s Turbo) delivers a meat-and-potatoes screenplay that offers very little nuance and chows down on banner statements that moves the story along at a pace akin to an average McDonald’s counter.
The script, by Big Fan writer-director (and former Onion editor-in-chief) Robert D. Siegel, portrays Kroc as a fairly repellent man who butters up his opponents, then backstabs them.
That The Founder was written by Robert D. Siegel makes sense; Siegel also wrote Big Fan and The Wrestler , movies that look like genre pieces, but are best at pinpointing the insecurities of men who’ve been beaten down by life, following them through desperate attempts to regain their self-respect.
Written by Robert D. Siegel ("The Wrestler," "Big Fan"), directed by John Lee Hancock ("The Blind Side," "Saving Mr. Banks" ), this intriguing, skeptical biopic concerns Ray Kroc, widely admired today as a business genius with vision, a ruthless streak and the legal wherewithal to kick the real founders to the curb.