The Big Sick (2017)

Directed by: Michael Showalter

Written by: Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani

Starring: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, & Ray Romano




In this true romantic comedy, Kumail (played by himself) and Emily (Kazan) fall in love and break up due to cultural differences.  But once Emily comes on with a lung infection, Kumail is called to check up on her and realizes that despite cultural differences, he still loves her.  Unfortunately, Emily's parents, Beth (Hunter) and Terry (Romano), feel that even so, they broke up and he is unwanted at the hospital.  Will Kumail be able to win his way back to Emily as well as her parents' hearts or will he have to conform to Pakistani culture and have an arranged marriage?

In the film, the story and characters play an intricate similarity to Aziz Ansari's Master of None.  This occurs for the first half of the film, but can Kumail help that this is what happened in his real life?  Probably not.  There is a lot of back and forth about Pakistani and Caucasian cultural differences, which eventually leads to their break up.  But once Emily lands in the hospital, the film takes a shift away from the popular Netflix show and into its own entity.

Hunter and Romano play a great older couple with older couple problems despite having to hold it all together for their daughter.  Both are expressive and add greatly to the story providing great chemistry together, with Nanijiani and Kazan as well as some comedic laughs.

As for the film technicalities there were some cinematography, editing, and continuity problems that were too noticeable in my opinion.  If it's noticeable, I have to talk about it.  A lot of the shots were with no cuts/long takes with a lot of focus in and focus out on who is talking rather than just cutting to a different medium or close up shot.  Most of the time, they were successful, but there were a few times that they should have just had everyone in focus or staged the actors in a different way, because someone ended up being out of focus or the cameraman was too slow to focus on the person talking at the right moment.

Additionally, the editing was lazy.  There were some scenes that had the sound and picture out of sync mostly because they kept doing reaction shots rather than focusing on medium shots of the person talking.  So what I mean is if I'm talking to someone, the camera is focused on the other person while my back is showing to see their reaction.  But in this film, when they did this, the person talking did not look like they were talking in the shot a.k.a. no jaw movement or it was out of sync with what it should be.  Now I can't judge the editor.  It could have been the cinematographer or the director that gave them too few shots to work with.  Or then again, the editor could have poor decision making skills.

Lastly, there was some continuity problems too such as with Holly Hunter's glasses being tangled in one shot with her necklace and then the next, it was untangled with her in the same pose.  Poor observing on their part.

So because of all this it came out to 4 popcorns. The story is a 5, but due to technical errors the film got bumped down to a 4.