BEFORE: Ellen Geer carries over from "Harold and Maude", providing me with a neat link to a small Nicole Kidman chain that will get me through the holiday weekend. I'm taking tomorrow off, but I already watched the film for July 4, so I can just post the review and enjoy the day.
You might wonder, why this film here? It's not even close to Halloween. Well, it's all about the linking, and this film didn't link to anything else in the horror chain, and I'm not really getting a horror vibe from it anyway, and if it's some kind of romantic comedy, I missed the chance to link it to "Hope Floats" or "Two Weeks Notice" in February, then I had it next to "Stakeout" for a long while because of the Aidan Quinn connection, but during my last list shake-up, it ended up here, which seems to be as good a place as any.
THE PLOT: The Owens sisters, Sally and Gillian, struggle to use their hereditary gift for practical magic to overcome the obstacles in discovering true love.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bewitched" (Movie #1,611)
AFTER: Ugh, this was a dreadful film. It was just as bad as "Bewitched" was, maybe even worse, so I should try to remember to stay away from light comedies where Nicole Kidman plays a witch. It's not even a novel idea that modern witches are beautiful instead of ugly, I think that's a tired trope by now, which probably started when Hollywood executives realized ugly witches wouldn't put as many asses in the theater seats as attractive ones would.
Because, in the end, there's nothing more important than being a pretty girl, and it's almost as important that those pretty girls also be happy girls, because that's what fairy tales are made of, and that's what female audiences want to see (allegedly) - pretty girls being happy. You feminists talk a good game, sure, but then why are so many movies made about pretty girls being unfulfilled and searching for love?
I think what pissed me off even more here, though, was the fact that this movie had no sense of internal logic whatsoever. No point that was made at any time remained consistent - it's almost like a new screenwriter took over every 20 minutes or so, and didn't read what any of the other people wrote. Let's start with the messed-up logic of a "love spell" - if there were a potion or a combination of ingredients that could make someone fall in love with a person, that's one thing. But using a spell or a potion to create that feeling means that it's NOT love, it's just a reaction to the suggestion or the chemicals. By magicking this process, you bring about exactly the opposite result. If date-rape drugs are wrong, then logically so are love spells.
Next we've got this "curse" on a whole family of women witches, which states that any man who loves them will die tragically. (I guess I don't need to say "tragically", because no one really dies comically, or positively - it sort of goes without saying, I think.) First off, death is a part of life, and everyone dies, so this doesn't really seem like much of a curse, it seems more like stating an obvious fact. Yes, everyone who loves you will someday die, unless you die first, which is worse. So, is there really a curse or are these women just hyper-aware of their partner's mortality?
The two lead sisters are socially different - one stays at home with the aunts who raised them and gets married, and the other leaves home and plays the field, but ends up in a situation with an abusive boyfriend. But see, right here, it's like both of them forgot about the curse - why would one girl get married if she knows her husband is doomed to die? The one with the abusive boyfriend raises two questions - 1) why the heck does she stay with him? and 2) all things being equal, if she can't leave him, won't the curse make everything right in due time? I mean, if there is a curse, he'll soon be dead, problem solved, right?
Every plot complication that's introduced SHOULD carry within itself the germ of a solution - but this film chooses to introduce complications, then veer off in some strange, random direction. So the married one leaves her two daughters with her aunts and flies across the country to help her sister, but only succeeds in making things - worse? Better? Geez, I can't even tell. Every time I thought they'd arrived at a solution to a problem, creating a good stopping point for that particular plot thread, they just can't seem to accept that, so they use magic to create another unnecessary solution, which leads to another problem.
This film also had the bad fortune to be released in 1998, just three years before the "Harry Potter" films made witchcraft cool again, and I don't think I'm way off base here in making the comparison. The Harry Potter series created a whole bunch of spells and potions that did very specific things, and then these spells and potions were used in creative ways to solve larger quests or mysteries - but these witches don't seem to have any idea what they're doing at some times, and then other times they're experts. So, which is it? Are they talented or incompetent, and they really shouldn't be both, but somehow they are.
Other inconsistencies abound - everyone in town seems to either hate the witches or be suspicious of them, until the sisters need the help of other people near the end, and then suddenly the other women in town are there for them. Huh? What changed everyone's minds? Then everyone in town loves them during the Halloween celebration, but the turn-around is never explained.
On top of it all, there are a few dozen plot points that go absolutely nowhere. So the aunts serve chocolate cake for breakfast, so what? That doesn't make them magical, it just makes them bad parental figures. So the abusive boyfriend likes to heat up his ring and brand women with it - so what? This does nothing but proves he's sadistic, which we already knew. Wasting my time with dead-end threads is even worse than using magic to do whatever needs to be done. "Oh, we'll just magic it!" Plotwise, magic is the new computer hacking, I guess.
Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "Two Weeks Notice"), Dianne Wiest (last seen in "September"), Stockard Channing (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Aidan Quinn (last seen in "Stakeout"), Goran Visnjic (last seen in "Rounders"), Mark Feuerstein, Margo Martindale (last seen in "Sabrina"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "The Conspirator"), Chloe Webb, with a cameo from Mary Gross.
RATING: 2 out of 10 pancakes
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