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‘Bewitched’: Be ready

Kimberly Nicoletti
Summit County Correspondent

The tagline of “Bewitched” is: “Be warned. Be ready.” But its message stops prematurely. It should read: “Be warned that this is a bad movie, and be ready to waste $9 to see it.”

It seems producers relied on millions of people like me wanting to revel in childhood memories of Samantha casting television viewers under her spell. So they didn’t bother creating a powerful spell of their own.

Instead, they spent big bucks on enchanting actors, such as Nicole Kidman. But every good witch knows you need the right ingredients for a brew, and “Bewitched” doesn’t have them.



Kidman adds a pinch of charm to the concoction, but the recipe lacks three key elements: chemistry, an acceptable accent and a successful nose twitch. Kidman obviously forgot to add a love potion to her acting brew, because she and Will Ferrell were far from boiling over with romance. Plus her accent sounded like Elmer Fudd’s. But worst of all, she couldn’t twitch her nose like the Samantha we came to know and love in weekly television doses. And to top it off, the movie made a big deal about how superior her nose twitch was to those of other actresses. If I were the director, that’s the first thing I’d downplay.

Which takes us to plot, or lack thereof. It seems lately Hollywood has an obsession with how our cultural icons began (reference “Spider-Man,” “Batman Begins” and, of course, “Revenge of the Sith.”) Though “Bewitched” doesn’t tell us how the original Samantha and Darren started, it does go through ” in painful detail ” the story of the actors behind the new-and-not-improved duo.



Shirley MacLaine, as Endora, and Michael Caine, as Nigel Bigelow, are the best parts of the movie: I won’t spoil the grocery scene, because it’s about the only entertaining part of the movie.

But I must admit, when I watched the movie Friday night, a group of young adults laughed aloud throughout the movie. However, I suspect they were under the spell of their own brew.


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