*** Big spoilers in this comment. You may wish to see the film first, despite most of the reactions posted. ***
Tiptoeing through this movie's site calls to mind images from Cole Porter's song "Miss Otis Regrets" when the mob hauls the heroine from jail to the hanging tree. Such a demure victim; such an violent, wrathful crowd! However, let me take a whirl at defending "Bewitched" (2005).
This clever variation on classic TV delighted me. No, it's not "Clueless" (1995) or "Shakespeare In Love" (1998) or "The Jane Austen Book Club" (2007), all of which run changes on genius. Yet "Bewitched" does provide talented actors with a slyly subtle script.
Set down your rope and torches for just a little while and let's explore the film a bit. Perhaps we can uncover an inner structure worth watching. Cre8tivguy1 on page 10 of this site cogently remarks: "If the original 'Bewitched' was nothing else, it was logical within its own set of established rules." I hold that Nora and Delia Ephron followed a strict logic proceeding from a premise perhaps not instantly obvious to casual viewers.
The initial question I believe we should ask: Did Aunt Clara exist in the witch Isabel's life before she accepted the role of Samantha? I'm thinking Aunt Clara didn't. Notice she never interacts with Nigel. She only drops down the chimney into Isabel's living room because the Nicole Kidman witch has taken on the part of Samantha Stevens. Isabel's own existence has begun to merge with that of the television character she's reprising.
The subtext of this script involves how TV influences our personal realities. The original "Bewitched" television show provides a template which reshapes the lives of those in contact with the remake, Jack and Isabel foremost. Once the show starts dominating the young witch's consciousness, Aunt Clara can appear when needed--a figure from the 60's series Isabel has studied, not from her actual prior life.
Isabel accepts a television character into her home as family and fails to notice that anything's odd about that. (I'm thinking that the show "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" pulled a similar insertion of an previously unknown personage. When Buffy's "little sister", a demon in disguise, suddenly showed up everyone in the cast acted as if she'd been there all along.)
The Ephron sisters offer a nice observation here on mass media culture. Face it, our society does tell us to treat imaginary folks from "The West Wing" or "The Sopranos" or "Seinfeld" as friends or even kinfolk. We don't blink at caring seriously about the lives of fictional people.
As a further demonstration of TV's effect on human beings, Uncle Arthur manifests to pep-talk Jack. He's the original small-screen Uncle Arthur who Jack has cherished in his mind all these years. Jack saw and internalized the series, now the character he liked best steps from his dreams into his objective reality to help him out.
How many television role models do you carry inside as ideals of wisdom and behavior, sources of advice and aid? Do you ever ask how Spock or Susan B. McNamara or MacGyver would handle a situation you face? Of course. The Ephrons know we do this.
Significantly, Uncle Arthur drives Jack to the couple's special place, the completely unreal sound stage Stevens house. Their special spot, scene of a date referencing "Singin' In the Rain" (1952), exists in a television studio reality. That's where Isabel feels at home, acting a role someone else created.
Many commenters have found little chemistry between the Jack and Isabel characters (not Will and Nicole, but the ego maniac and the innocent they're playing). Maybe so, maybe not, but under the influence of the "Bewitched" TV template, both evolve before our eyes to wind up as truly remade for one another, as compatible as the original Darren and Samantha. That's magic.
As the film starts, each has a disappointing, unfulfilled life. I'd say that the Kravitzes do not illogically pop from nowhere at the end to live across the street from Isabel and Jack. They're brought there to illustrate how the pair has become transformed by the characters Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York originated. The dynamics of the classic show have almost totally replaced the unsatisfactory realities Isabel and Jack each occupy at the beginning of the film.
Does Shirley MacLaine's Iris obsess Michael Caine's Nigel due to her superior witchcraft? Or does the web the revived show weaves draw him into the romantic absorption he's habitually fought against using casual self-gratification and cynical wit? Remember, he wouldn't let Isabel watch "Bewitched" as a child. Yet that program didn't merely make fun of magic-users trying to solve sit-com problems. It essentially celebrated the power of love to bridge barriers and have the final word once all the spells had been spoken.
The Ephrons' picture has a texture as light as gossamer. By contrast, Charlie Kaufman used a meat axe to carve out "Adaptation" (2002) with its bold sequences of art intersecting life. "Dark City" (1998) sinisterly developed the idea that personal realities can shift beyond our control. However much "Bewitched" the movie may look like fluff floating on the wind, it affectionately and shrewdly makes substantial points about a society molded, perhaps very much for the better, by TV and mass entertainment. Marshall McLuhan would, perhaps, have understood.
After all, the Ephron sisters know intimately how reality crossbreeds with art. Their parents, Henry and Phoebe, strip-mined their eldest daughter's life while she was living it to yield two plays and a movie. I saw "Take Her, She's Mine" (1963) not knowing that Sandra Dee played a character based on Nora's college student days. I'm wondering how the feedback of seeing herself transformed into a role--a forthright, but naïve young woman slowly shedding an over-protective father--affected her real existence. Perhaps she's just told us.
Tiptoeing through this movie's site calls to mind images from Cole Porter's song "Miss Otis Regrets" when the mob hauls the heroine from jail to the hanging tree. Such a demure victim; such an violent, wrathful crowd! However, let me take a whirl at defending "Bewitched" (2005).
This clever variation on classic TV delighted me. No, it's not "Clueless" (1995) or "Shakespeare In Love" (1998) or "The Jane Austen Book Club" (2007), all of which run changes on genius. Yet "Bewitched" does provide talented actors with a slyly subtle script.
Set down your rope and torches for just a little while and let's explore the film a bit. Perhaps we can uncover an inner structure worth watching. Cre8tivguy1 on page 10 of this site cogently remarks: "If the original 'Bewitched' was nothing else, it was logical within its own set of established rules." I hold that Nora and Delia Ephron followed a strict logic proceeding from a premise perhaps not instantly obvious to casual viewers.
The initial question I believe we should ask: Did Aunt Clara exist in the witch Isabel's life before she accepted the role of Samantha? I'm thinking Aunt Clara didn't. Notice she never interacts with Nigel. She only drops down the chimney into Isabel's living room because the Nicole Kidman witch has taken on the part of Samantha Stevens. Isabel's own existence has begun to merge with that of the television character she's reprising.
The subtext of this script involves how TV influences our personal realities. The original "Bewitched" television show provides a template which reshapes the lives of those in contact with the remake, Jack and Isabel foremost. Once the show starts dominating the young witch's consciousness, Aunt Clara can appear when needed--a figure from the 60's series Isabel has studied, not from her actual prior life.
Isabel accepts a television character into her home as family and fails to notice that anything's odd about that. (I'm thinking that the show "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" pulled a similar insertion of an previously unknown personage. When Buffy's "little sister", a demon in disguise, suddenly showed up everyone in the cast acted as if she'd been there all along.)
The Ephron sisters offer a nice observation here on mass media culture. Face it, our society does tell us to treat imaginary folks from "The West Wing" or "The Sopranos" or "Seinfeld" as friends or even kinfolk. We don't blink at caring seriously about the lives of fictional people.
As a further demonstration of TV's effect on human beings, Uncle Arthur manifests to pep-talk Jack. He's the original small-screen Uncle Arthur who Jack has cherished in his mind all these years. Jack saw and internalized the series, now the character he liked best steps from his dreams into his objective reality to help him out.
How many television role models do you carry inside as ideals of wisdom and behavior, sources of advice and aid? Do you ever ask how Spock or Susan B. McNamara or MacGyver would handle a situation you face? Of course. The Ephrons know we do this.
Significantly, Uncle Arthur drives Jack to the couple's special place, the completely unreal sound stage Stevens house. Their special spot, scene of a date referencing "Singin' In the Rain" (1952), exists in a television studio reality. That's where Isabel feels at home, acting a role someone else created.
Many commenters have found little chemistry between the Jack and Isabel characters (not Will and Nicole, but the ego maniac and the innocent they're playing). Maybe so, maybe not, but under the influence of the "Bewitched" TV template, both evolve before our eyes to wind up as truly remade for one another, as compatible as the original Darren and Samantha. That's magic.
As the film starts, each has a disappointing, unfulfilled life. I'd say that the Kravitzes do not illogically pop from nowhere at the end to live across the street from Isabel and Jack. They're brought there to illustrate how the pair has become transformed by the characters Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York originated. The dynamics of the classic show have almost totally replaced the unsatisfactory realities Isabel and Jack each occupy at the beginning of the film.
Does Shirley MacLaine's Iris obsess Michael Caine's Nigel due to her superior witchcraft? Or does the web the revived show weaves draw him into the romantic absorption he's habitually fought against using casual self-gratification and cynical wit? Remember, he wouldn't let Isabel watch "Bewitched" as a child. Yet that program didn't merely make fun of magic-users trying to solve sit-com problems. It essentially celebrated the power of love to bridge barriers and have the final word once all the spells had been spoken.
The Ephrons' picture has a texture as light as gossamer. By contrast, Charlie Kaufman used a meat axe to carve out "Adaptation" (2002) with its bold sequences of art intersecting life. "Dark City" (1998) sinisterly developed the idea that personal realities can shift beyond our control. However much "Bewitched" the movie may look like fluff floating on the wind, it affectionately and shrewdly makes substantial points about a society molded, perhaps very much for the better, by TV and mass entertainment. Marshall McLuhan would, perhaps, have understood.
After all, the Ephron sisters know intimately how reality crossbreeds with art. Their parents, Henry and Phoebe, strip-mined their eldest daughter's life while she was living it to yield two plays and a movie. I saw "Take Her, She's Mine" (1963) not knowing that Sandra Dee played a character based on Nora's college student days. I'm wondering how the feedback of seeing herself transformed into a role--a forthright, but naïve young woman slowly shedding an over-protective father--affected her real existence. Perhaps she's just told us.