Return to Camp Firewood – Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp

Jason Schwartzman and Janeane Garofalo in Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, on Netflix.

It’s been fourteen years since David Wain and Michael Showalter’s film Wet Hot American Summer achieved thoroughly “meh” ticket sales at the box office and forever split the world’s population into two rival camps (and I’m not sorry for the pun): people that loved Wet Hot American Summer and people who just didn’t. This July, Netflix gave us the opportunity to go back to camp and start the debate anew with the eight-episode exclusive series, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp. The setting, both temporally and geographically, is the same. The unflattering costumes are the same. Even the adult cast members, some of which have risen to meteoric stardom in the years since the original feature film, are the same and it’s worth noting that every single one of them returned to reprise their roles. If that isn’t a testament to the intensely positive filming experience they had in 2001 (no lie: it’s detailed in the completely charming documentary Hurricane of Fun: The Making of Wet Hot American Summer), I don’t know what is.

Love Craft: The Big Sick

Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan in The Big Sick.

The Big Sick, which chronicles a barely fictionalized version of the real-life romance between comedian Kumail Nanjiani (playing himself) and therapist/writer Emily V. Gordon (played by Zoe Kazan), has to be one of the best romantic comedies I’ve ever seen. Applying the label of that genre, and all the baggage that comes with it, feels wrong in this case, because part of what makes The Big Sick so brilliant are the ways in which it subverts and elevates the genre it belongs to. It’s a romantic comedy in the sense that it’s hopelessly romantic and ruthlessly funny, but it’s also much more than those surface-level elements, so I’m not sure what else to call it. I guess it’s enough to say that it’s one of the more finely crafted films, full stop, that I’ve seen all year.