Bewitched, a film remake of the cheesy old sitcom, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, opened over the weekend to
mediocre box office and critical lambasting (
28% positive on RT,
34% average on Metacritic. I haven't seen it and have no opinion of it, other than thinking that the trailer made it look dumb and completely unnecessary. That's how I think 90% of comedies look from their trailers though, so maybe you shouldn't put too much weight on my judgment.
No one seemed to think it was very funny though, so I can virtually guarantee that you'll get more laughs from some of the reviews. This
outright hostile one from the Village Voice, for instance:
I have no idea why Hollywood makes movies derived from TV series that the all-important 15- to 25-year-old ticket-buying demographic has absolutely no firsthand knowledge of, or why those same designated audiences do in fact pay to see them with formidable reliability. But I can tell you this about the new Bewitched: It is an affliction. As if the work of an angry god, the movie collects the perspectives of Nora Ephron (director, co-writer), Delia Ephron (co-writer), and Penny Marshall (producer), coalescing into a showbiz self-suck unrivaled in modern times for smugness, vapidity, and condescension.
It's symptomatic of the recycling-regurgitating Hollywood dynamic that the TV show within the movie doesn't resemble anything a real network would make today -- for all of their navel-gazing insider-ness, Ephron, Ephron, and Marshall are as clueless as farm turkeys.
The film is airy and weightless, not like, say, chiffon, but like the black smoke of burning truck tires. In an ideal world, Marshall and the Ephrons should have to sharecrop, for all the good they've done for the culture.
I've scarcely ever heard the woman's name, but most of the reviews seem to take special glee in sacking the director, Nora Ephron. Exhibit A is above, Exhibit B is found in this identically 0-star review
from the Dallas Observer:
...But nothing is more intolerable than the sight of Will Ferrell being hung out to dry by Nora Ephron, who shouldn't be allowed to direct an elementary school Christmas pageant, much less a $100 million feature film. (How Ephron is allowed to keep collecting paychecks, after the unholy trinity of Mixed Nuts and You've Got Mail and Lucky Numbers, remains a mystery worthy of John Le Carre or at least Encyclopedia Brown.) She strands him in the middle of the sitcom frame and begs him to find the laughs in her barren, lazy screenplay, written with sister Delia, making him look not like a clown but a fool.
My favorite though
is this one, from the afore-unknown Flick Filosopher, written from the POV of a righteously outraged/disgusted feminist.
Sisters Nora (who directed) and Delia (who cowrote with Nora) have concocted an evil brew of misogynist tripe, faux-ironic nostalgia, and painfully false romantic comedy that purports to be an "edgy," modern updating of a 1960s sitcom. But the Ephrons seem not to have grasped that TV's Bewitched was a desperate last stand of the 1950s, one final attempt to stifle the power women wield that men find frightening, the power that was finally busting out of its girdle when the sitcom debuted in 1964.
Despite Kidman's best attempts to be charming and lovable, Isabel is one of the most abysmal and discouraging female characters to appear in a Hollywood flick in ages.
But wait! There's more that she wants, more to make a female moviegoer with any kind of self-respect moan in anguish. It's not enough that the Ephrons have given us, as a would-be superadorable romantic-comedy heroine, a powerful woman who would willingly smother her own power. Isabel also wants a man to fall in love with, which is fine on its face, but it's not just any man she's looking for. No, she wants someone special: "I want a man who needs me because he's a complete total mess." She wants to be mommy... but not a magic mommy -- she just wants some screwed-up loser she can "fix."
The "irony," the fake "hipness" comes into play as actor Jack is trying to put together a sitcom remake of, you guessed it, the 60s series Bewitched. And he wants Isabel to be his costar, because she twitches her nose in such perfect imitation of Elizabeth Montgomery, and also because Isabel is such a moron -- she's supposed to be "naive," but she comes across as actually mentally retarded
Banging one's head against the wall eventually becomes requisite. If I didn't know this was written and directed by women I'd never have believed a man wasn't the perpetrator, because Isabel is a portrait of modern femi-ninny-ty at its absolute worst: she's idiotic, wishy-washy, and subject to wild swings of "darling" irrationality.
Taken together, these reviews give further proof, as if any were needed, that what we see in films has far more to do with the viewer than the film being viewed. And on that note, I'll get to finishing a pair of reviews I wrote yesterday, to post later today and tomorrow.
