BEFORE: Before I start my final 100 films of 2015, it's time for a quick TV update. We usually think of summer as a dead time for TV, but that's just not true any more. I would like this to be my time to catch up on the May season finales I haven't gotten to yet, but it's hard when there are new shows I want to watch, too. Losing a week to Comic-Con hasn't helped either - and they started some new series while I was gone, so I missed the first episodes of a few things. Turns out the DVRs only help you catch things when you KNOW they're going to be on, and you can't program the DVR to record a title if it's not airing within the next 2 weeks.
I picked up the new season of "True Detective", and I've managed to stay current after my wife bailed on it. "Wayward Pines" is another new show I caught, it switched genres twice in 9 weeks, which is no mean feat, but finding out that M. Night Shyamalan was behind it explained why the payoff ultimately wasn't there. And my wife and I are almost caught up on the two shows we watch together over dinner, "Master Chef" and "The Next Food Network Star". Other returning shows: "Welcome to Sweden", "Penn & Teller: Fool Us", "Food Fighters", "Last Comic Standing", "Little People, Big World", "Mythbusters", and when you add those to my regular line-up of "The Daily Show", "@Midnight", Conan and Seth Meyers, I have to spend most of my weekend clearing the week's shows. (My thanks to ABC for finally not bringing back "Wipeout" this summer...)
I'm busy during the week trying to clear May's shows off of VHS - I got to the season finale of "Gotham", but not "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D" just yet. Still two weeks of "The Voice" to go for me, plus a couple episodes each of "Law & Order: SVU", "CSI: Cyber", "Shark Tank", "Storage Wars" and "Restaurant: Impossible" before I can declare the 2014-15 season over for me.
Gabriel Byrne carries over from "A Simple Twist of Fate", joining a couple TV stars here, and after this, it's just 99 films to go until "Star Wars: Episode VII".
THE PLOT: A suburban housewife chokes to death and is brought back to life by a spell cast by her wacky sister.
FOLLOW-UP TO: Practical Magic (Movie #2,083)
AFTER: I knew going in that this film wouldn't be great, but you have to take the bad with the good, right? How else would we know that other films are good, unless we can point to what a film should NOT do. Seriously, though, I got this to put on a DVD with "Night Shift", and I'm really only using it here because it links to my new themed chain, which starts tomorrow. It's a poor excuse, I know. To be fair, this film doesn't seem to belong in October with horror movies, or in February with straight romances - so it doesn't really fit anywhere, all the more reason to watch it and get it off the damn list.
But it's just not enough for me to say, "Oh, this is a terrible film." I have to explain WHY it's a terrible film, or else I've learned nothing from the experience. This is a bad concept, bad execution, and I'd point to bad writing, if not for the fact that most of the time, the actors don't even act like they know what to say, so I wonder if anyone wrote a screenplay for this at all, or if they were just winging it. You can tell a script is bad if characters say each other's names much too often, or if a character REALLY needs to tell someone a piece of information, yet never really gets around to saying it, though there are ample opportunities.
You can also tell the story is going nowhere if, just as someone seems like they're about to come to a decision or a conclusion about something, there's a pratfall or someone bumps into someone. There's some appropriate slapstick at the start of this film, before our heroine dies, where we can tell that she doesn't fit in at a fancy dinner party because her skirt falls down, or that she feels embarrassed after spilling something on her blouse, and this causes her to fall down on to the table when she stands up. Bad slapstick happens when she's asked a question during a press conference, and before she can answer, she stumbles into the microphones and knocks them down. There's just no reason for this, other than to distract the viewer from the fact that she hasn't answered the question coherently.
Another screenwriting sin - the film spends about 30 minutes with a woman brought back from the dead, who refuses to believe this fact, or can't quite understand it, so her sister needs to tell her this again, and again, and again. The sister runs some kind of occult bookstore, and finds a magic spell that will bring someone back from the dead one year later, assuming that the earth, moon and a specific star form a perfect isoceles triangle. Which taken together is impossible according to medicine, physical science, and also astronomy.
To even discuss this film we have to move past this impossible point - I mean, magic has its place in movies like "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter", but those are different worlds, with different rules. This is set on regular Earth - and this spell brings her spirit back from beyond, and then suddenly her whole body is above ground, sitting on her tombstone. So wait, didn't her body decay over the course of a year? Is it still in the coffin below the ground, while she's sitting above ground? Shouldn't someone have had to dig her up, so her spirit had some place to go? Nope, because magic, that's why.
She returns to find out her husband has remarried - OK, so in a way this is similar to those romantic comedies like "My Favorite Wife", where a woman was stranded on an island and came back 7 years later, right? Oh, I wish. At least there was some conflict there, but here a woman finds out her best friend married her widowed husband, and she's not only OK with it, she's delusional enough to think that everything's OK, she'll just get her marriage reinstated, her old job back, and her husband will fall back into line. And nobody will be freaked out at all that mom's a zombie, or was dead and somehow restored.
She goes back and re-meets cute with the doctor who was there when she died, and he orders a bunch of medical tests to determine how this medical miracle came to pass - and we never see the results of those tests or get any explanation for what happened, because writing that would be hard. And then when the press finds out about a dead woman's return, they make no attempt to prove or disprove it, other than taking either her word for it, or that of her husband's new wife. Because reporters are just a bunch of sheep who ask questions and hound people for photos, they have no way to check or confirm things.
The big push at the end isn't even to prove what took place, it just seems way more important to get another character to admit she told a lie. Are you kidding? A woman came back from the dead, and all the movie can focus on is whether another woman told a lie about it. I think maybe someone's screenplay drifted pretty far out of control here, missing the big picture. It's kind of like that tour guide in "White House Down" who was being held hostage by terrorists and he was concerned about the antiques in the room.
I think what's worse is that this woman comes back from the dead, and then has no focus, or any clue what to do with her life. One would hope that after being dead, a person would realize that life is precious, and short, and she better accomplish something with her second chance. Nope, here once she realizes she can't get back her old job or old husband, she stars a daycare center and falls in love again, that's it. There's zero thought to what it all means, or using the experience to inform or educate or gain any kind of insight to the workings of the universe. What a damn waste.
Also starring Shelley Long (last seen in "Outrageous Fortune"), Corbin Bernsen (last seen in "The Big Year"), Judith Ivey (last seen in "A Life Less Ordinary"), Sela Ward, Austin Pendleton (last seen in "The Notorious Bettie Page"), with cameos from Lynne Thigpen (last seen in "Novocaine"), Tony Sirico, John Rothman (last seen in "Copycat"), Illeana Douglas.
RATING: 2 out of 10 dog biscuits
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