Film: The Big Sick

 Watched on board Air Canada – Nov 2017

An autobiographical story of an aspiring stand-up comic, Kumail and how his one night stand with Emily turned into something more, including writing this script.However, Kumail has a real issue with telling his Pakistani-Muslim parents about his love and she leaves, only to get ill and fall into a coma. Kumail is the ICE (in case of emergency) contact so gets the call from the hospital and encounters his former girlfriend’s parents for the first time.It’s what you may call a comedy-drama as the storylines cover serious illness, career ups and downs, cultural differences but the film is interwoven with huge amounts of laughs, not from necessarily from the stand-up routines. Kumail feels he should be hospitable to Emily’s parents and awkwardly, starts bonding with them, despite or maybe because of, the strain they are under. Meanwhile, his own parents are setting him up with a ‘nice Muslim girl’ on a seemingly weekly basis and wondering why he isn’t keen on any of them as he builds a stack of all of their photographs in a shoe box.The family scenes are especially great and I love when they say goodbye to him without actually saying goodbye showing there is no greater bond than a family’s.A wonderful and true story about family, loyalty and cultural pressures.8/10