Because I'm here doing this.
Writing about movies on company time.
Yesterday, I went to Cinema Saver (probably my favorite place in Broome County; at least one of the staff knows me by name there).
I got out of work at 3pm. My family was at a family reunion and wouldn't be home. I could go late to the reunion, either smuggling in booze or wishing I had, or I could go to the movies.
I considered seeing The Little Hours at the Art Mission at 3pm, but to be honest I didn't really want to see it and it would have been tight trying to get there on time. The only reason that I wanted to see The Little Hours at all is that I had heard that it was a less raunchy adaptation of our own riotous Boccaccio adaptation from the mid-90s. In one of my early acting roles, I played the silent stranger while my friend Mike played all of the sexy nuns. Also featuring Josh and Nick. Good times.
(poster is a recent mock-up by my friend Josh)
I settled on the 3:30pm showing of The Big Sick at Cinema Saver. I hadn't read any reviews or seen the trailer, but I did know that it was positively received and near-universally loved by critics. I was vaguely familiar with Kumail Nanjiani. I had seen Zoe Kazan in other films, but didn't remember that until I just now looked her up.
The Big Sick is the worst adaptation of The Decameron that I have ever seen. Not even close. Terrible liberties were taken, characters changed or eliminated, and entire plotlines scrambled or removed. It's like no one involved actually read the source material.
It just barely works as a romantic comedy. It's more than a little bit weird that Nanjiani plays himself, acting out past events involving his wife with a woman other than his wife. There is some chemistry between Nanjiani and Kazan, maybe, but maybe it's just that Kazan works her smile for the big-time here and it works, big-time. Romano and Hunter have fun as the magic parents who welcome the outsider. Kher and Schroff have just as much fun as the lovably ethnic Pakistani parents smothering their son.
So, everyone's having fun. There's an undeniable lightness to it and it bounces along mostly harmless.
But because it's so airy, there's no bite to it, nothing to hold onto, no wonder stuff to fall in love with. There are some interesting moments of cultures in conflict ("If you didn't want me to act like an American, why did you bring me to America?"), but none of that is developed. It's all surface gloss, shiny and fun. Everything is so damned nice in the movie. Cheap laughs, surface laughs.
I didn't like it. But of course I liked it. It was movie magic. Everyone got what they wanted. Happily ever after was achieved. And most importantly, I was caught up in it. One of the reasons that I still love the cinema and force myself to go at least once a month is that it really does rejuvenate me in a way that tv at home does not. At the cinema, I can still resist the distraction of that text alert vibrating my pocket. I don't have to talk at all. I walk into a dark theater alone, sometimes with others around me, and I surrender myself to someone else, to other worlds, to other ways of viewing this world.
I find Nanjiani's smarmy niceness a bit nauseating. It's a mask even if maybe he's wearing the same face under the mask. There are raw and real things that he could have explored, but instead we're given the Hollywood version each time. There are occasional glimpses of real pains and frustrations (for instance, in the Pakistani girls who come to audition as brides-to-bes), but every time they are packaged with a tidy Hollywood ribbon and bow.
Eh, meh.
That's all I've got. I don't want to put too much energy into this considering that Brandon has already given up on his new blog. :-)
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