The Big Sick (2017, Michael Showalter)

The Big Sick is the true story of lead and co-writer Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, also co-writer Emily V. Gordon. Nanjiani plays himself in Sick because it’s a star vehicle explicitly for him. Gordon doesn’t appear. Zoe Kazan plays her. Gordon co-writing the film adds a couple of extra layers to the film; the most obvious is how much of a Nanjiani vehicle it’s supposed to be, and the second is how it portrays the couples’ parents.

While the actual events of Sick took place in 2007, the film came out ten years later with the latest in laptop and mobile phone technologies. The visual voicemail scene isn’t true! But it also makes the anti-Brown person racism Nanjiani experiences different than it would’ve been ten years earlier. The always hilarious (not kidding, every one is a winner) 9/11 gags would play so much differently earlier. Big Sick did not forecast the future very well with white male bigots either.

Anyway.

The film starts with Nanjiani as a burgeoning stand-up comic. The film’s never clear who’s supposed to be the funniest on stage, making it a little like a Godzilla movie where there’s no rhyme or reason to why the supporting kaiju can beat up the other supporting kaiju. He’s not supposed to be the funniest, but he’s definitely the funniest. And then some of the people who are supposed to be funny aren’t?

He regularly goes to dinner at his parents’ house, and they’re devout Pakistani Muslims. Well, devout, but there’s swearing. Anupam Kher plays the dad, Zenobia Shroff plays the mom. Shroff’s an overbearing Muslim mom who’s just trying to get Nanjiani to go to law school and marry a Pakistani girl. She brings them over to dinner to audition; Nanjiani keeps all their headshots in a cigar box. Kher’s bit is he thinks he’s cooler than his sons.

They’re not going to ever get anything. Kher at least doesn’t get a cold diss; Shroff gets a cold diss.

However, as the white parents, Holly Hunter and Ray Romano get best supporting bait. Hunter’s fantastic, especially as she and Nanjiani bond. Romano’s excellent, too; it’s simultaneously more impressive than Hunter (because of course she can do this part) while not technically being better. Good thing they wouldn’t be competing for the same nomination.

So, one night in the club, Kazan heckles Nanjiani, and when he sees her at the bar later, he picks her up. She’s a manic pixie dream girl who goes to the University of Chicago for a therapy master’s; she can keep up with Nanjiani’s constant comedian barbs, just like his pals (even better than his doofus roommate, Kurt Braunohler, who’s never as funny as the film thinks). After what she intended to be a one-night stand, they start dating.

Only Nanjiani doesn’t tell his family about her and doesn’t tell her about his family. He definitely doesn’t tell Kazan how mom Shroff wouldn’t stand for him dating a white girl and how he’s actively in the arranged marriage market.

Once Kazan finds out, she ends the relationship, leading to Nanjiani using what he’s learned picking her up to use on other comedy club patrons. Meanwhile, Kazan gets a mystery illness, and eventually, Nanjiani comes up on the phone list for potential support staff. When he gets to the hospital, Kazan crashes, and Nanjiani has to falsify a medical release to allow her intubation. It saves her life, so I guess there are no repercussions.

He calls Hunter and Romano to come into town from North Carolina (they’re apparently North Carolina liberals). After realizing they know how the relationship ended, Nanjiani eventually bonds with Hunter and Romano through a shared intense experience. Lots of great scenes for the three of them, easily the best written in the film.

Does Gordon wake up? Does Nanjiani’s “House M.D.” impression save the day? Oddly, it might, but the film entirely glosses over it.

The third act’s a mess, with Nanjiani making big life decisions and everything related to them playing out off-screen. The film’s got a problem with presenting time passing (odd, since Nanjiani has strict time-based dating rules to juggle white girls and disapproving family), and there’s not anywhere near enough character development on the supporting cast. Given the film’s got two extremely well-paced acts, first with Nanjiani and Kazan, second with Nanjiani, Hunter, and Romano, it’s even more disappointing when the third fumbles.

There’s a nothing subplot about Nanjiani’s one-person show about growing up Pakistani, which ought to be important but isn’t. Though, given Kazan’s not important either, nor are Shroff and Kher, so it going nowhere is par for the course.

Then the end credits post-script reveal the real story—for Kazan (and Gordon), anyway—came after the movie’s events. And then, when you see the actual timeline, it’s even worse.

As a vehicle for Nanjiani, The Big Sick’s perfect. Ditto as Oscar bait for Holly Hunter and Roy Romano. But it’s just a disaffected male redemption movie.

And Showalter’s direction is exceptionally pedestrian. The film’s technically competent and all, but it’s a good thing it’s got a well-written, talky script; otherwise, there’d be nothing doing.

Eternals (2021, Chloé Zhao)

The nice thing about Eternals is the film’s most damaging element is obvious. Richard Madden is terrible. He’s not the lead—when Eternals has a lead, it’s Gemma Chan—but he’s top gun, so he gets a lot of screen time. And he’s terrible. What’s even funnier about Madden being terrible is the film leans into him being a “Game of Thrones” star. He’s got a love triangle with fellow “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington, who’s ostensibly in the movie but really just for a handful of cameos.

Harington is Chan’s adorable British boyfriend. Madden is her Scottish-accented alien super-being ex-husband. It’s a big flex when Harington and Madden face-off, and it’s clear not just Harington’s much better as a movie star than Madden, but Madden sucks the life out of scenes. He might be playing a Superman riff, but it’s an energy vampire Superman. He makes scenes worse. On the one hand, director Zhao can’t do anything with the performance, which has all the screen charisma of molded bread; on the other, she never compensates for it either.

Eternals rises and falls with Madden.

There are other big problems with the movie. It’s really boring for the first hour and a half. Eternals is solidly into the second act when it finally starts engaging. The film’s got a lot of expository information to dump, and every dump is a bad one. However, it manages to plod even more when it’s doing flashbacks.

The film opens with a “Star Wars but serious” title crawl explaining the Eternals are alien super-beings who live on Earth to protect the people from the “Deviants.” There are giant space entities out there who make galaxies and blah blah blah. Doesn’t matter. The movie figures out how to integrate these beyond enormous entities once in the entire film, and it’s a gimmick shot done well. So, the giant entities don’t matter. The human-shaped super-beings matter.

They show up on Earth in 5000 BCE. Madden immediately thinks Chan is cute; Chan immediately thinks Earth is charming. Salma Hayek is their leader, but she doesn’t really matter because she doesn’t have good fight scene powers. She’s a healer. Angelina Jolie’s the warrior one. Jolie gives the most amusing performance because she seems to get it more than anyone else. She’s stifling a smirk but still sincere when it counts.

Like when she’s hanging out with best bro Ma Dong-seok. He’s another warrior, the one with the big heart. Ma’s good. He doesn’t have good comic timing—in English, he’s always had it in Korean–but neither does Zhao, so it doesn’t matter.

The other Eternals are Kumail Nanjiani (laser fingers), Lia McHugh (illusion), Brian Tyree Henry (wills technology into existence), Lauren Ridloff (the speedster), and Barry Keoghan (the telepath). We meet them in the past, and then the film reintroduces them in the present when they’ve adjusted to regular human life. Albeit immortal regular human life.

Nanjiani gets the biggest story; he’s a Bollywood star with an amusing videographer sidekick, Harish Patel. McHugh is forever an awkward tween girl with an impossible crush. Yawn. Henry is a family man trying to put immortal meddling behind him. He’s gay, an MCU first, and it’s okay, but he’s most charming with the family, and they rush through having the family around. Ridloff and Keoghan just kind of come into the narrative as needed, even though they’ve got more charm than anyone else. It’s particularly impressive because Keoghan’s character is a twerp.

Bill Skarsgård plays the villain, an evolving man-beast. “Plays” meaning does the voice performance presumably some of the CGI modeling. The character eventually looks something like the monster from The Keep, which doesn’t seem intentional. Why recall one disaster in another.

There are some nearly neat 2001 references but then not really.

It’s unclear if fixing Eternals’s obvious problems would do any significant good. Besides Madden’s entire casting, there’s Chan’s lack of a protagonist arc, the momentum-killing flashbacks, Ramin Djawadi’s weak sauce epic movie score (just give up and hire Hans Zimmer for a Hans Zimmer score), and the awkward superhero references. Not just to the Marvel movies before it, but also to DC superheroes. Because world-building?

It also doesn’t help one of the credits snippets promise a far more amusing sequel, which has a cameo with great promise.

Zhao’s direction is fine. It’s often good. It’s never not fine. Ben Davis’s photography’s solid. There are a handful of composite shots where the foreground doesn’t match the CGI background, but it could be worse. Dylan Tichenor and Craig Wood’s editing’s good. Sammy Sheldon’s costumes. They’re all right.

Eternals could be worse. Madden could be in it a second longer. And it might never be good, but it also could’ve been better. Score alone. Get someone who could do Madden’s acting for him with the music. Whatever. And it could also be a second shorter overall. Any shorter would help.

Eternals is never really disappointing or even frustrating, just inconceivably tedious.

But, if they deliver on the mid-credits promise, the next one should be a blast.

Death to 2020 (2020, Al Campbell and Alice Mathias)

“Death to 2020” has twenty credited writers. And its show creators aren’t among them.

Twenty writers.

It’s seventy minutes and the narration jokes either all flat or so many of them fall flat I can’t remember any not falling flat. Larry Fishburne is the narrator, it’s not his fault, they’re just not good jokes. They maybe should’ve identified what the writers worked on, like who wrote the narration, who wrote the stuff for Sam Jackson, Tracey Ullman, and Samson Kayo because it’s the best stuff.

So “Death to 2020” is a Netflix special—they make a few comical synergy placements but then also less obvious ones like Joe Keery having a part because he’s on “Stranger Things”—recapping 2020 with a bunch of actors pretending to be in the media or otherwise related. Ullman’s the Queen (I’d watch a whole show), Jackson’s a New Yorkerly Times reporter, Kayo’s a scientist, and so on.

The best performance is probably Hugh Grant—in a lot of makeup, presumably—as a British stuffed shirt documentary historian. He just doesn’t have the best material. There’s a whole bit about him confusing movies for reality and they never find the joke. They needed at least two more writers no doubt.

Lisa Kudrow’s the biggest disappointment as one of the white supremacist Barbie Republican talking heads. It seems like she’s going to be great and maybe Kudrow could’ve been great but the writing’s crap. Similarly, Leslie Jones is really funny as a cynical sociologist but the writing’s not good.

Kumail Nanjiani is fine as a tech bro. He’s kind of filler. Given all the events of 2020, you’d think they would’ve had to pad so much—especially when they basically skip the late summer—but they pad away.

Diane Morgan’s “most average person on Earth” is a little less funny when you start to wonder if the average person really is so obtuse. And making Cristin Milioti’s Karen into an actual Neo-Nazi seems a bit too much, like she doesn’t need to be sympathetic but funny Neo-Nazis… I mean, let’s not.

The funniest part of the seventy minutes is the end credits when they have the cast—in character—read 2021 predictions.

It’s not incompetent and there are some decent laughs… but it’s not, I don’t know, any good either. It’s like that “Tiger King” recap special only with a budget, without Joel McHale, and about 2020.