And then there are the super cool and super talented idiots like Snoop Dogg. I just watched the first part of the HBO documentary, The Defiant Ones, and one of the last scenes in that episode involved Snoop’s reaction to being asked about posing for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Here is what the Doggfather had to say at the time "Man bleep Keith Richards and the bleeping Rolling Stones. I don’t know those bleepers. Put me on the cover of The Source bleep! That’s bleeping king in hip hop bleep! Man, bleep Rolling Stone!" And then of course he appeared on Rolling Stone’s cover and the rest is history!
Well thankfully for The Big Sick’s Kumail Nanjani it looks as though his rise to stardom is a nice mix of hard work and unbelievable luck as getting cast on HBO’s Silicon Valley has helped skyrocket his career! I say hard work because he’s been grinding for years now to get where he is but it’s also luck because we are in a country that hates everything brown. The President is brown? Call him a terrorist, accuse him of not being from this country and make fun of the fact that he likes Grey Poupon on his sandwiches! Too many brown people expected to come to the show? Put up metal detectors everywhere and have the SWAT team on standby just in case! Snickers bars are getting a little too dark? Come up with a new flavor called Almond and put it in a white wrapper! Problem solved.
So it’s a modern day miracle that a romantic dramedy starring a Pakistani male was given a wide release. I’m personally crazy excited about this; not because it has the chance to quell any stereotypes people have about Pakistani people but because of what it can do for skinny non athletic black scrubs like me! Sure black guys have been pulling cute white girls for decades now but you either have to be jacked and play sports or have the ability to spit dope rhymes to do so. Now my jump shot can be lethal on a good day and I did get lucky and spat out a cool freestyle flow once but let’s be real, the only thing I really have going for me is the fact that I can make girls laugh from time to time; and even that’s hit or miss. So come on Kumail, take this movie all the way to the Oscars as all of nerdy brown nation is counting on you! Anyway, this is the longest intro to a review ever, so I’ll get to the movie now.
The Big Sick tells the unbelievable story of how Kumail met his real life wife Emily (played by Zoe Kazan) and how they had to battle through their huge cultural differences just to make their relationship work. Kumail, as mentioned earlier, is Pakistani and in his culture you were expected to marry within your own ethnicity. And to ensure that this happened, you were set up with an arranged marriage of some sort. So every family dinner they had, Kumail’s mother would invite a random girl over to meet her son. They would be forced to interact with one another in front of the family and she would drop off her resume’, so to speak, as well as a photo of herself for him to remember her by. Now on the surface, having your mom pimp you out to hot girls sounds kind of fresh but the problem is, if you don’t wind up marrying one of these girls, you’ll be banned from the family forever. That’s obviously a cause of concern for anyone Kumail dates if they aren’t Pakistani; so he decides to hide this from Emily.
Emily on the other hand is a free spirit who meets Kumail at one of his stand up acts. The two of them hit it off right away in spite of Kumail’s lame attempt at a pickup line and despite the fact that she claims to not be looking for a relationship at the time. She tells her parents everything so there’s really no issues on her end that is until one day she finds Kumail’s box of potential wives. Now Kumail is forced to choose between Emily and his family; and he initially chooses his family until one day Emily is put into a medically induced coma. And it’s in this moment that he comes to realize the mistake he made and wonders if he will ever get the chance to win her back. Not to mention the fact that he now must also win over her parents who know what took place between the two of them.
Kumail is his normal and casually hilarious self as he somehow founds a way to inject humor in even the most awkward of situations. I won’t ruin the joke for you but there is a moment when Emily’s dad asks Kumail his thoughts on 9/11 and his response to that ridiculous question is absolutely classic. That moment alone helped him win over Emily’s dad who was played wonderfully by Ray Romano. Now her mother (Holly Hunter) was a little tougher as the only thing that mattered to her was her daughter but you can’t help but love Hunter and everything that she does in this film. And I have been crazy over Zoe Kazan ever since she played Leo DiCaprio’s side piece in the depressing movie Revolutionary Road and she certainly does deliver here when she’s not in a coma (which is over half of the movie).
What I loved most about this film is that never wallowed in the land of depression like so many of Judd Apatow’s productions normally do. They are typically sold under the guise of being a comedy but really the vast majority of his movies are just dramas with people yelling at one another the entire time. And while that does exist in this film, for the most part you are able to laugh as the characters experience pain, love, and loss. And that’s ultimately what we want when we go to the movies, to cathartically deal with our day to day problems but to do so in a pleasurable manner.
This movie will at least be nominated for quite a few awards once that season is upon us and I can’t help but give it a rating of very FRESH!
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