"The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)"

THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME, as you may be able to tell, is a spy action/comedy that is living its best life when leaning on what sets it apart from the spy action movies it is ostensibly lampooning. As a spy movie SWDM is only so-so, featuring the obligatory globe-hopping location changes, "trust no one" attitude and face/heel turns the genre has worn into the ground. On the other hand, as a buddy comedy with two female leads, it soars.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN 4

Hoo boy, it's been hot here in Philly. Welcome to Summer, I guess? More like 'Welcome to Pre-Autumn' as I like to think of it. As a kid, summer always meant a break from school, so that was nice, but I was never a big fan of the heat. I love to swim, despite how often I've seen Jaws (or Deep Rising, hahaha...) but that's about it for me, summer-wise.

Even as a kid I preferred the air-conditioned darkness of a movie theater.

So if you're like me, Everything Old is New Again is here to help! Here at EOiNA, I look into the Remakes, Adaptations and Legacy (or Long-Gap) Sequels making it to theaters in the coming months. But, before we get down to business...

If you're a regular reader of EOiNA, firstly I thank you, but also you may have noticed that I occasionally push the boundaries of what exactly falls under my purview. Well I'm about to do that again when I mention how excited I am that Joe Bob Briggs is coming back to ...well not exactly TV, but close-enough for me!

Though Joe Bob had hosted assorted other, similarly-formatted shows, I first discovered him as the host of TNT's MonsterVision, which he hosted from 1996 - 2000. During his tenure, MV was a late-night showcase of cheesy, drive-in style movies that Joe Bob would tell various anecdotes and give trivia about as the bumpers between commercial breaks. Returning to form (minus the commercials), on Friday, July 13th (how perfect) Joe Bob will be hosting a slightly-more-than-24-hour marathon on horror steaming service SHUDDER called The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs. Some of the titles have been announced, but y'all can look that up for yourselves.

Anyway, here are some movies you may wanna check out if you're gonna be spending some time in a theater this summer. As always, thanks for reading, please share this with your friends and stay cool. I'll see you in September.

Listicle: Best Movies for the First Half of 2018

MovieJawn, the excellent film site that I write for (as you may have noticed) posts a mid-year list of our Top Five favorite movies of the year thus far. Everybody puts their Top Five in and then the results are tallied.

These were my votes, along with a brief explanation why:

"Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)"

Before this evening, before seeing it, I though everything about Sicario: Day of the Soldado was ...a bit of a mess. The sequel to a movie that doesn't need one, Sicario 2 (as it was originally marketed) traded in the numeric for a subtitle, the linguistic hodgepodge "Day of the Soldado" (soldier). Why not just pick a lane and call it either Day of the Soldier or Dia Del Soldado? It probably has to do with Sony wanting to build a franchise on the good Sicario name and worrying that an all-Spanish title would alienate audiences. That might seem pessimistic but it's obviously the direction Sony & co. want to head in. Intellectually, that bothers me. It's an obvious, and somewhat clumsy cash-grab. But if Sicario: Day of the Soldado is what cash-grabs look like in 2018, I'm ...kind of fine with it.

"American Animals (2018)"

To say that American Animals has a complicated relationship with reality would be a fair assessment. From the jump we are to that it both is and is not based on an entirely true story, something I kept in mind as the narrative unfolded before me.

"Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)"

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This piece was written for the excellent MOVIEJAWN.

I'm saving it here for posterity.

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The world needs more people like Fred Rogers in it.

I already held that sentiment before seeing Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Morgan Neville's biographical documentary of Rogers. What I didn't realize until after seeing it was how great that need truly is.

"SOLO: A Star Wars Story (2018)"

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This piece was originally written for the excellent MovieJawn.
Below is my original final draft before and revision / editing.
Plus pictures for added pizzazz.
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Solo: A Star Wars Story is the least satisfying of the new era of Star Wars films.

I wasn't sure what foot I wanted to start my review on, as there is good as well as bad to talk about here, but then I asked myself: "What would Han Solo do?" The answer, famously the subject of much nerd argument, is that Han would shoot first. Shooting first is one of the many things that define who the character of Han Solo is.

What I mean is, were you to make a list of "HAN SOLO AF" qualities and visual trademarks, the phrase "Han shoots first" would most definitely be on there. And that's what this movie is, at its core: a "Han Solo AF" checklist that we watch get crossed off, one box at a time. You knew that's what it would be, deep down. Search your heart. You know it to be true. We all did, right? Maybe not when it initially, but most definitely after the trailer premiered. There's no story here that needed telling to make anything about the Star Wars universe better or fuller or more impactful, it's just: Hey, you wanna see where Han got that blaster? Wanna see him meet Chewbacca? Etc. etc. And the thing with a list like that is, deciding which things are "more important" and should take precedent over others is highly subjective.