They can’t make ‘Quality has Fallen’ puns when the quality was already pretty low

Keeping most of Angel has Fallen in the eastern backwoods both gives it a nice grimy tinge and mildly suppresses production costs. Images courtesy Lionsgate.

3/10 I really don’t want to think about Gerard Butler as a weirdo-James Woods type who makes movies to deliberately overcorrect for “liberal Hollywood” because he’s so talented, but it’s getting kind of ridiculous. The guy’s from Glasgow, but he’s spent the past decade self-producing these hyper-patriotic Die Hard knockoffs where he personally defends the president that all feel designed more for to deliver a political message and let Butler play out his ‘80s action hero fantasies than to entertain.

They’ve all got moments where a high-ranking official recites something mundane like the pledge of allegiance or the oath of office as a defiant statement against foreign forces, and his character is always thinking about retiring but learns that protecting the political hierarchy is the most important thing in the world, and there’s always more. They’re all full of awkward moments as they go out of their way to incorporate political ideology. Olympus has Fallen is basically all about gun control, and London has Fallen is much less gracefully about nationalism and paranoia, to the point that it drew attention for being kind of racist.

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‘Good Boys’ wins weekend, ‘Mulan’ facing calls for boycott

Universal’s Good Boys outperformed expectations, coming away with the weekend crown with $21.4 million. Of the four other new releases, only The Angry Birds Movie 2 with $10.4 million for a no. 4 place finish drew more than $10 million. Holdovers Hobbs & Shaw and The Lion King kept the nos. 2 and 3 slots with $14.2 million and $12.3 million, respectively- Box Office Mojo

Good Boys is only the third original movie to release at no. 1 in 2019, and the first comedy, a genre studios were reportedly beginning to give up on after numerous hyped releases opened much further down the charts- The New York Times

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‘Kitchen’ not worth watching, and no one did

Now there’s other people in the kitchen serving them, while they wait in the dining room. Get it? Images courtesy Warner Bros.

3/10 The Kitchen is a story about women who stage a hostile takeover of a traditional men’s space. It’s a pun! Get it? Because it’s, when that happens, the traditional response is to tell the woman to “get back in the kitchen,” but now “the kitchen” is the space they’re now in, and it’s the title of the movie, so they’re permanently in “the kitchen,” and it takes place in a neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen!

Get it?

New York City, 1978- mob control is limited to Hell’s Kitchen, where it runs a protection/prostitution racket that doesn’t seem to keep anyone safe. When enforcers Jimmy Brennan (Brian d’Arcy James), Kevin O’Carroll (James Badge Dale) and Rob Walsh (Jeremy Bobb) are arrested and sent away for three years, the mob establishment tells their wives Kathy Brennan (Melissa McCarthy), Ruby O’Carroll (Tiffany Haddish) and Claire Walsh (Elizabeth Moss) that they will be taken care of and nothing will fundamentally change, but the money the mob provides is immediately short. With no other options, the women quickly and easily take over and improve mob operations.

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Decent ‘Scary Stories’ can’t capture books’ magic

There’s several immediately recognizable elements from Stephen Gammell’s iconic drawings in here, even if they don’t capture the nightmarish quality of the medium. Images courtesy Lionsgate.

7/10 Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a film caught between its iconic source material and a risk-averse production that leans heavily on the exhausting, bland choices common in the past decade’s horror. Still, there are significant highlights that separate Scary Stories from the mostly awful movies it resembles.

Halloween night 1968, Mill Valley, Pennsylvania- horror enthusiast Stella Nicholls (Zoe Margaret Colleti) and some friends snoop around a haunted house famous in the area. Legend has it the family who lived there, the Bellows, had a secret daughter, Sarah, left out of all family portraits and confined to a prison-like room in the center of the house, who would tell stories to passers-by – stories that came alive and killed the people who heard their ending. Nicholls and company find Sarah Bellows’ secret chamber and discover her book of scary stories. Upon taking it out of the house, the haunted book begins to autonomously write new stories for them.

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New releases baffle analysts, ‘Business Insider’ tells all on Moviepass

As expected, Hobbs & Shaw spent the second of what could be many weekends atop the box office with $25.3 million, but the bevy of new wide releases surprised analysts last weekend. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark led new releases with$20.9 million, a huge overperformance that secured a no. 2 finish, while Dora the Explorer fell to fourth place with $17.4 million behind The Lion King in its fourth weekend. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in its third weekend finished at no. 5, newcomer The Art of Racing in the Rain came in at no. 6 with $8.1 million, about as expected, and The Kitchen dramatically underperformed, falling to no. 7 with just $5.5 million- Box Office Mojo

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