A strange magic
Self-absorbed Jack is on the look-out for an anonymous actress who will make him look good on screen; Isabel, who can twitch her nose like the actress in the original sit-com, seems perfect for the part. And so the real-life witch finds herself playing a pretend witch who was pretending to be a witch pretending not to be a witch.
Confused? You won't be. It's possible to argue that Bewitched is at least attempting to equalise fiction and reality through a fictional medium, making it a meta-fiction narrative filtered through the day-glo colours of Hollywood's prism. In truth, Delia and Nora Ephron's story has an arrow-straight narrative concerned with how long it will take Isabel and Jack to dispense with the spells and Hollywood hokum and find a simple, unadorned true love.
The radiant Kidman, it's true, sprinkles a little pixie-dust on her scenes, but for the most part Bewitched is trite, predictable and flat. Nora Ephron was the director responsible for Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, and this film shares those movies' penchant for sugary, implausible romances. There are one or two throwbacks to the days when Ephron was throwing out cynical one-liners as the writer of When Harry Met Sally ("Actors look normal," Shirley MacLaine warns Kidman, "but deep down, there's no deep down"), but overall this represents a lost opportunity to have some real fun at the expense of ego-driven Hollywood, or to underscore the dearth of creativity suggested by La-La Land's alarming dependence on remakes, TV adaptations and rose-tinted nostalgia.
When it comes to nostalgia, a lack of creativity and egos run amok, the Edinburgh Comedy Festival can hack it with the best of them. At least, that seems to be the theme behind Festival, in which the lives of a number of performers and jury members attached to the annual giggle-fest are inter-linked.
Irish stand-up Conor (Billy Carter), on his ninth visit to Edinburgh, seduces BBC reviewer and juror Joan (Daniela Nardini); top British comedian Sean Sullivan (Stephen Mangan) philanders his way through proceedings while using the festival as an opportunity to score a Hollywood deal; Micheline (Amelia Bullmore) puts on a one-woman show about William Wordsworth's long-suffering sister, and finds herself enmeshed in the tawdry tale of Brother Mike's (Clive Russell) paedophile priest routine.
Any one of the storylines would have sufficed as a main plot, with one or two sub-plots to keep things ticking along, but writer-director Annie Griffin insists on giving at least ten characters equal screen-time. As a result, none of the characters receive the breadth or depth that would allow us care for them. Griffin's background is in MTV pop videos, and it shows: the tone is wildly uneven (instead of cutting back on the narrative strands, Griffin actually throws some more ideas into the mix: post-natal depression, alcoholism and paedophilia all emerge as the film wears on), the pacing is erratic, with the result that the whole movie has the feel of a very long series of comedy sketches, albeit unfunny ones, and the performances all hover between clumsy and adequate.
Making a comedy about comedy is a very difficult business indeed, and Griffin's ambition is to be applauded. Nevertheless, a few well-aimed gags poking fun at self-regarding comedians and critics is as good as Festival gets.
On the plus side, at least it doesn't descend into the realms of the unintentionally hilarious. On paper, Unleashed reads like a parody of modern melodrama: Danny (Jet Li) is a martial arts expert enforcer for Cockney gangster Bart (Bob Hoskins) until he breaks free of his sadistic boss and finds peace and happiness in the home of blind piano-tuner Sam (Morgan Freeman) and his teenage daughter Victoria (Kerry Condon). But when Bart tracks Danny down to Sam's home, Danny is forced to give up his idyllic life of cooking and playing the piano; instead he must enter a gladiator's pit to fight or die.
All well and good – until the movie begins and you realise that everyone involved is taking things a little more seriously than perhaps they should. Directed by Louis Leterrier (The Transporter) and scripted by Luc Besson (whose writing credits include Nikita, The Big Blue, The Transporter and The Fifth Element), Unleashed is a film that veers unnervingly between the ultra-violence of Danny's brutal kung-fu stylings and the pastiche of domestic bliss that is Sam's home. Implausible characters, stilted dialogue, gratuitous violence and a by-the-numbers script are only some of this film's problems; half-an-hour in, I was already pining for the narrative conundrums and intellectual rigour of Bewitched.