Curses Foiled Again

Speaking of guy movies: I queued up Practical Magic (1998). First, I love Sandra Bullock out of proportion to the way I feel about most of her movies. Second, Griffin Dunne directing a script from Akiva Goldsman, among others? Interesting.

It is the story of two sisters. They come from a long line of witches in the New England town (based on Martha's Vineyard? Shot in Washington). The first of the line was abandoned with child, and set a curse so that none of her descendants would be happy in love. Two little girls lost both parents to the curse, and move into the ancestral home with their two witch aunts, Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest.

The little girls are taunted by the neighbor kids as being witches 0- and the parents join in too. They grow up to be Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Bullock as a child makes a spell so that she'll only fall in love with her true love, who will have a list of unlikely qualities, including different color eyes. That way, she'll never fall in love, but if she does, it will break the curse. Kidman, however, is ready for love. As a teenager, she runs away with her boyfriend, and just finds a new one before the curse takes hold.

But Bullock does find a man to love, Mark Feuerstein. They have a lovely life, two young daughters, and boom - the curse. He is hilariously killed by a truck, after dodging a whole peleton of bike racers. Bullock takes the kids and moves back in with the aunts. She also finds out that the aunts gave her a little magical push to fall in love, and now forbids the aunts to teach her kids magic.

Meanwhile, Kidman has met up with Jimmy Angel (Goran Visnjic), a sexy and dangerous mobster. When he hits her, she calls Bullock, who gets her out of the situation. When Visnjic tries to stop them, they manage to dose him with belladonna in his vodka - which kills him. For some reason, they load his body into his car trunk and take him back home.

Next, for some reason, they decide to use magic to resurrect him, even though they know he'll come back evil (eviler). When he does, they kill him again and bury him by the porch. OK, they are terrible murderers, but I guess that's OK.

It's OK until:

1. He isn't staying dead - when the aunts and sisters have a margarita party, they realize that the tequila has belladonna in it. Where did it come from?
2. Aidan Quinn shows up. He's investigating Jimmy Angel, who is wanted for murdering women, and the sisters have his car in their yard - and his maybe re-animated corpse in their garden.
3. Aidan Quinn has different colored eyes.

There's an odd pacing issue here - the movie sort of starts here, the rest was setup. But that's a lot of stuff for just setup. But in some ways, it's a fun hangout movie, so that doesn't really matter. The aunts are cool, the kids are spunky, the old house is cozy, what's not to like.

I'll also spoil part of the ending which I liked. When they realize that Visnjic's corpse is too powerful for the sisters to cope with, they call on the neighbors who called them witches. They form them into a coven, with brooms and all, and the women all love it. I think this is pretty realistic. The community wouldn't shun the witches outside of a few Christian fanatics - they'd treat it like a diet craze or yoga practice, and attend the workshop. 

But overall, this was kind of a mess. The pacing issues aren't helped by a tone issue - there's a pretty serious body count for a rom-com, and a lot of the kills are silly. How are you supposed when the father of Bullock's kids gets killed for laughs?

Still, Bullock, Kidman, Channing and Wiesz were fun to watch. The margarita scene was apparently improvised in a drunken state, and that's the kind of thing you just want to see more of.

Edited to add: I semi-related news, we also watched Moloch (2022), a movie we got from the library. It's supposed folk horror from the Netherlands. It's something about corpses preserved in the bogs, and a series of child sacrifices. Atmospheric, but didn't connect with us. I can barely remember a thing about it. So that's that.