The Big Sick (2017)

We're in the midst of July, the month in which Americans are supposed to be at their most patriotic! With barbecues, beach trips, and fireworks galore, this is the month where we celebrate our country. For Incluvie, that primarily means diving into the wonderful "melting pot" of the diversity of American film! In between celebrating and feasting, it's important to remember the very basis this country is founded on: "liberty and justice for all."

So, here are just a few films celebrating the lives and accomplishments of Americans of every race, gender, and ability.

Premise: This is the untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—brilliant African American women at NASA working on the launch of astronaut John Glenn.

After months of nonstop excitement, the moment is finally here. I finally get to talk about The Lovebirds. I’m not saying this ironically. I have been dying for this movie to come out, along with My Spy. Why these films in particular? Because something awakened in me when I saw last year’s Stuber. I sat by myself in a nearly abandoned movie theater and got to enjoy a movie that wasn’t a remake or reboot, wasn’t a 2.5 hour blockbuster, wasn’t a safe approach Disney film, and as much as I love them, wasn’t a superhero film. It was something fresh, as fresh as a buddy comedy can be. I love Kumail Nanjiani, and likewise, I love Dave Bautista.

Stuber was…OK, but over time, I’ve sort of grown to love it, and it was a much-needed change of pace, as I said. So yes, Bautista’s My Spy and Nanjiani’s My Spy showed promising signs of originality, even if they aren’t stellar masterpieces. I want to relive the terrifying lows and the dizzying highs that Stuber gave me. With the COVID-19 outbreak, both movies escaped my hungry clutches by a few weeks, and I was furious. But The Lovebirds found its way to Netflix today, and My Spy is set to be released on Amazon sometime.

So, in my determination to support a bit of originality, I went out of my way to claim The Lovebirds for myself, using my position as head editor of Incluvie to ensure I would be the first critic on the team talking about the film. I told my poor beleaguered fellow writers, hungry for new releases, that The Lovebirds was mine, and mine alone. I even threatened to assign them to review painfully bad movies like Garbage Pail Kids if they so much as glanced at The Lovebirds with a critical lens. Is this abuse of power?

Yes.