The old maxim, “Write what you know,” holds true for comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon who turned their personal relationship into the new film “The Big Sick.”
When we first meet Kumail (“Silicon Valley’s” Kumail Nanjiani) he is an aspiring comic and Uber driver with a traditional Muslim family who wants him to settle down and give up stand up. He strings them along, agreeing to dinners with women his mother (Zenobia Shroff) chooses for him—“Be a good Muslim and marry a Pakistani girl,” she says—while pretending to be a dutiful son, but his passion is comedy.
One night, at an open mic in a small club, an audience member interrupts his show. Later he confronts her at the bar. “You shouldn’t heckle comics,” he says. “I didn’t heckle, I woo-hooed,” says Emily (Zoe Kazan) and the flirting begins.
What begins as a casual fling—“I’m not really dating right now,” she says. “School and work. A lot on my plate.”—soon turns serious as they both admit they are overwhelmed by one another. Still, he is reluctant to meet her parents and disappears once a week for dinners with his family and his mother’s meet-and-greets with prospective wives.
Kumail loves Emily but can’t find the way to tell his parents he is dating someone outside their faith. When Emily discovers this she asks, “Can you imagine a world where we end up together?” Unsatisfied with his namby-pamby answer, she breaks up with him.
Months later he’s woken from a deep sleep. He’s told Emily is in the hospital and needs someone to stay with her. She has a massive infection in lungs, needs to be put in a medically induced coma and until her parents, Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano) arrive, Kumail has to make some difficult decisions.
Calling “The Big Sick” a rom com doesn’t do it justice. It is much more than that.
There are no major revelations here, just a carefully balanced look at the immigrant experience—“ The rules don’t make sense to me,” Kumail says to his parents. “Why did you bring me here if you didn’t want me to have an American life?”—ambition, family and the nature of true love. It’s funny, but not laugh-a-minute funny, just comfortably charming as it navigates the cultural and medical landmines in Kumail and Emily’s path.
It works so well because of the chemistry between the leads. Kumail and Emily do the heavy lifting for the first half until she becomes ill. They spark in the most natural and sweetest of ways as their relationship goes from casual to serious, from good to bad.
The second half explores the chemistry between Kumail and Beth and Terry. What begins as a contentious relationship—“You don’t need to commit to anything here,” snarls Beth. “You didn’t while she was awake and you don’t have to now.”—to heartfelt and loving. Hunter and Romano bring considerable warmth as well as honest humour, finding a balance between the drama of the situation and the rom com elements.
Even when “The Big Sick” is making jokes about terrorism and the “X-Files” it is all heart, a crowd-pleaser that still feels personal and intimate.
The old maxim, “Write what you know,” holds true for comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon who turned their personal relationship into the new film “The Big Sick.”
When we first meet Kumail (“Silicon Valley’s” Kumail Nanjiani) he is an aspiring comic and Uber driver with a traditional Muslim family who wants him to settle down and give up stand up. He strings them along, agreeing to dinners with women his mother (Zenobia Shroff) chooses for him—“Be a good Muslim and marry a Pakistani girl,” she says—while pretending to be a dutiful son, but his passion is comedy.
One night, at an open mic in a small club, an audience member interrupts his show. Later he confronts her at the bar. “You shouldn’t heckle comics,” he says. “I didn’t heckle, I woo-hooed,” says Emily (Zoe Kazan) and the flirting begins.
What begins as a casual fling—“I’m not really dating right now,” she says. “School and work. A lot on my plate.”—soon turns serious as they both admit they are overwhelmed by one another. Still, he is reluctant to meet her parents and disappears once a week for dinners with his family and his mother’s meet-and-greets with prospective wives.
Kumail loves Emily but can’t find the way to tell his parents he is dating someone outside their faith. When Emily discovers this she asks, “Can you imagine a world where we end up together?” Unsatisfied with his namby-pamby answer, she breaks up with him.
Months later he’s woken from a deep sleep. He’s told Emily is in the hospital and needs someone to stay with her. She has a massive infection in lungs, needs to be put in a medically induced coma and until her parents, Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano) arrive, Kumail has to make some difficult decisions.
Calling “The Big Sick” a rom com doesn’t do it justice. It is much more than that.
There are no major revelations here, just a carefully balanced look at the immigrant experience—“ The rules don’t make sense to me,” Kumail says to his parents. “Why did you bring me here if you didn’t want me to have an American life?”—ambition, family and the nature of true love. It’s funny, but not laugh-a-minute funny, just comfortably charming as it navigates the cultural and medical landmines in Kumail and Emily’s path.
It works so well because of the chemistry between the leads. Kumail and Emily do the heavy lifting for the first half until she becomes ill. They spark in the most natural and sweetest of ways as their relationship goes from casual to serious, from good to bad.
The second half explores the chemistry between Kumail and Beth and Terry. What begins as a contentious relationship—“You don’t need to commit to anything here,” snarls Beth. “You didn’t while she was awake and you don’t have to now.”—to heartfelt and loving. Hunter and Romano bring considerable warmth as well as honest humour, finding a balance between the drama of the situation and the rom com elements.
Even when “The Big Sick” is making jokes about terrorism and the “X-Files” it is all heart, a crowd-pleaser that still feels personal and intimate.
Richard sits in with Marcia McMillan to have a look at the continuing adventures of the USS Enterprise “Star Trek Beyond,” the family-friendly “Ice Age: Collision Course,” Edina and Patsy’s drunken adventures in “Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie” and the ‘are you afraid of the dark’ movie, “Lights Out.”
An outer space acorn adventure begins the earthbound struggle for survival in “Ice Age: Collision Course,” the fifth instalment in the popular animated series.
Fans of the franchise will recognize Scrat (Chris Wedge), the dogged squirrel whose endless pursuit of an acorn is at the heart of each of the movies. He is the “Ice Age’s” equivalent of Wile E. Coyote, a lovable but psychics defying acorn hunter often humiliated but never daunted in his quest for the elusive nut. This time his journey leads him to deep space where he puts a series of event in motion that endangers the lives of Manny and Ellie, the Wooly Mammoth couple voiced by Ray Romano and Queen Latifah, macho tiger Diego (Denis Leary), the annoyingly unlucky sloth named Sid (John Leguizamo) and the rest of the gang.
On earth the mammals are preparing to celebrate Manny and Ellie’s anniversary. All is going well except that Manny forgot to get Ellie a gift. Then, when the sky fills with beautiful colours it looks like Manny has arranged a fireworks display for his bride. In fact, the well-timed meteor shower that got Manny out of an anniversary pickle will lead to other world changing problems for he and his friends. “Manny’s love is killing us,” squeals opossum Crash (Seann William Scott). Enter Buck (Simon Pegg), a one-eyed weasel and a dinosaur hunter (“You may be Jurassic,” he sings to the dinosaurs in a Gilbert and Sullivan inspired tune, “but I’m fantastic.”), who has a plan to go toward the “planet killing space rock” rather than running away from it. “I know it sounds a sub-optional,” he says, “but we can change our fate.”
Mixed in with this story of survival are Peaches’s (Keke Palmer) upcoming nuptials, hockey lessons, a dance number and even a science lesson from Neil Degrasse Tyson. Each of these digressions from the main story does little more than bulk out the running time to a feature length of 94 minutes.
Like the other movies in the series “Ice Age: Collision Course” is less concerned with telling a story as it is with coming up with premises they can populate with characters that can be spun off into videogames and toys. Episodic and disjointed, there is none of the elegance of Pixar’s storytelling, just one event loosely connected with the one before it, after another. The result is a movie with few laughs and too many subplots masquerading as a story.
The best thing in the movie is Scrat who lives in perpetual desperation, always hankering for an acorn to call his own. He’s a classic cartoon creation, an elastic faced throwback to the Looney Tunes era. If they make another one of these let’s have more of him please, and less of the other mammoth bores that fill the screen.
It might be time to put the “Ice Age” movies on ice.
I loved “The Longest Daycare,” the Simpson’s short that plays before Ice Age. It’s a funny, gently paced thriller for kids with jokes that parents and film geeks will love. In fact I wanted more of that and less of “Ice Age: Continental Drift.” The main feature is nicely animated but is saddled with a story so by-the-book it feels like it would have been old hat even in the ice age.
The movie begins when Ice Age regular, the saber-toothed squirrel Scrat’s efforts to protect his only possession—his prized acorn—lead to the great Continental Drift. As the earth shifts and breaks apart woolly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano), Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego the sarcastic smilodon (Dennis Leary) get separated from their families. Their journey to reunite with their kin puts them directly into the path of ape pirate Captain Gutt (Peter Dinklage) and his murderous band of misfits, including Shira (Jenifer Lopez), a female saber-toothed tiger who learns the meaning of friendship and love.
Manny and friends are not aided by a lazy script which feels like it was run through the Cliche-O-Matic ™ Prehistoric Model. The continental divide device is novel, but the theme–family and friends mean everything–has been done before and better.
There are some funny sitcom gags at the beginning—Manny tells his daughter she’ll be allowed to go out with boys when “I’m dead plus three days to make sure I’m dead”—but may of the jokes in the main part of the film come out of nowhere and feel tacked on. In the middle of the great land divide apropos of nothing a bird asks a mammoth if water tastes like boogers when they drink through their trunks. It has nothing to do with anything, except to insert a laugh to maintain audience interest.
It feels cheap and not nearly as sophisticated as the gags in any of the Pixar movies that are always organic to the story. There is one self-aware comment, however, that works. “We fought dinosaurs in the ice age,” says Sid, “it didn’t make sense, but it was fun.”
The voice work is by-the-book, with the exception of Peter Dinklage whose Caption Gutt brings some life to this museum piece.
He’s a horrifying and ghastly seadog (or, more rightly, ape), but in a good and kid friendly way. But the most horrifying thing about the “Ice Age” series is that they still have 20,000 years of history and sequel potential to go until Manny and company retire.
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs should be titled Ice Age: Pray for Extinction; extinction for this lame animated franchise that has inexplicably limped along since 2002, spawning three movies, a couple of direct-to-video titles and several video games. These well intentioned, but dull movies (Ice Age and Ice Age 2: The Meltdown) are more an excuse to sell stuffed toys than to entertain. The new film is more of the same, introducing several new characters which seem primed and ready to take their place on toy store shelves in the movie swag section.
All the regulars are back—that’s Manny and Ellie, the Wooly Mammoth couple voiced by Ray Romano and Queen Latifah, macho tiger Diego (Denis Leary), the annoyingly unlucky sloth named Sid (John Leguizamo) and Scrat (Chris Wedge) the mute squirrel, and rare highlight in a film that tested my resolve to stay in my seat for the whole movie. Even the kids in the audience I saw this with seemed bored by the story of how life will change for the entire herd when Manny and Ellie’s baby arrives. Leading up to the birth there’s trouble in the pack but when Sid follows three newborn dinosaurs down to a strange and beautiful world underneath the ice the ensuing adventure—and a one-eyed weasel named Buck (Simon Pegg)—brings them together.
I’m almost too bored by this to finish writing the review, but I’ll forge on. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a deeply average animated movie (I didn’t see the 3-D version, but can’t imagine it would make much difference) with some nice messages for kids about the importance of family, loyalty, friendship and cooperation presented in the blandest, most predictable way possible. The voice work is middling, the animation is nice but not as eye catching as the recent work in Monsters vs. Aliens or Up and the story seems an after thought. In fact, the only truly entertaining parts of the movie have nothing to do with the main narrative.
The ubiquitous acorn from the first two movies is back, chased by Scrat, the most dogged squirrel ever seen on film. Scrat is the Ice Age franchise’s equivalent of Wile E. Coyote, a lovable but psychics defying acorn hunter often humiliated but never daunted in his quest for the elusive nut. This time gravity isn’t his greatest enemy. In a story line that seems edited in willy-nilly Scrat has some competition and perhaps even a love match in the form of a female buck-toothed squirrel named Scratte. Played back-to back these segments may have made a good stand alone kid’s short film, and in the process spared us the tedium of the rest of the movie.
Above all Ice Age is a marvel of computer generated animation. The rendering of the bleak ice and snow is truly impressive, too bad the story doesn’t hold up as well. The best bit of business is a running gag with a small cartoony animal trying desperately to store an acorn in his desolate glacial environment. The rest of the film seems to be trying too hard to capture the zany fun of Shrek, or the spark of last year’s Monster’s, Inc, but lacklustre writing and predictable situations cast a chill over the whole thing. John Leguizamo’s voicing of Sid the Sloth is very good, although Ray Romano as Manfred the Mammoth is a monotone bore.
The old maxim, “Write what you know,” holds true for comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon who turned their personal relationship into the new film “The Big Sick.”
