Lately, there’s been a run of movie sequels aimed at women of my generation.
“Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.” “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” “Freakier Friday” And now, “Practical Magic 2.”
Some of these movies are better than others, and I – again, the target audience – have had a good time at most of them. But they have a ceiling. And to be quite honest, it’s not a very high one.
I don’t know when studios started to believe that the only way to get women to come out to the theater was to prey on their nostalgia (especially since “Barbie” did so well – although I guess, for all its strengths, that’s also praying on a certain type of nostalgia). But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Original star-driven, female-centric stories – about friendship, sisterhood, and the like – have all but disappeared. When they are made, they’re usually smaller films. But lately, when they’re big – despite the success of movies like “Book Club,” or “Little Women” – they tend to be sequels. The powers that be assume we don’t actually care about Anne Hathaway or Meryl Streep enough to come out and see them, but we do care about “The Devil Wears Prada,” and we’ll shill out our money for that.
I don’t know how right they are in that assumption. And “Practical Magic” is kind of the perfect example for how these sequels rest on the laurels of their performers, and the audience’s relationship to those performers, and squeak by on everything else.
Following the events of the first film, the Owens sisters, Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian (Nicole Kidman) are still living in the same Massachusetts town as their aunts Jet (Dianne Wiest) and Francis (Stockard Channing), where everyone knows they’re witches and is totally cool with that.
But, after the death of her second husband – which proved that the curse on the Owens sisters that kills anyone they fall in love with was still kicking – Sally rejected magic and cast a spell that made her daughters Antonia (Maisie Williams) and Kylie (Joey King) forget about magic altogether. But when Kylie grows up and falls in love with a young man who is promptly hit by a car and goes into a coma, Sally has to come clean – sending Kylie on a quest that could have catastrophic consequences.
Read Sammie’s full list on Rough Draft
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