BEWITCHED -- worst TV show to movie ever?

We watched BEWITCHED this week.

Brian Thorn...

FDR...

Elf was a cool movie. About the only thing I know he's done (other than the
voice in Curious george) where he had a good role.

ANIM8Rfsk...

Caine was even good in Jaws 4, but as a new character here he was pretty
much a cipher. That said, they COULD have made him work if he'd been there

Jude Cormier...

and it seems he is like in every third Hollywood flick being released!

Jude Cormier...

oh how lucky you are.......so I take it you missed "Old School"?

FDR...

Or Anchorman. What a rotten one that was.

to the end of the film, and filled the imaginary Uncle Arthur role as well.
Instead, he just vanishes part way through the film. Kidman was AWFUL.
Beverly Hillbillies had 3 excellent casting coupes - Dabney Coleman as
Milburn Drysdale; Lily Tomlin as Miss Jane Hathaway; and Jim Varney was
great as Jed Clampett (that one surprises me too) with honorable mention to
Cloris Leachman as Granny. Bewitched stuck one good actor in the movie, but
it wasn't a good piece of casting, it's just that Caine is always watchable.

David B...

Yeah, he almost ruined The Wedding Crashers. Good thing he only had two short
scenes.

Putrid as "Bewitched" is, "Wild Wild West" makes it look like a Best
Picture Oscar contender.

It took 4 sessions to get through it all.

larry legallo...

Try watching it as a double bill with the Kidman Stepford Wives
remake. And then watch them both again listening to the Nora Ephron
and Frank Oz commentaries. And then you come tell me about suffering.

ANIM8Rfsk...

bwaahahahahahahahhahahaahaha

I can't imagine an Ephron commentary. It's either got to have nothing to do
with the movie, or be oblivious to the movie, or be an endless stream of
"this doesn't work 'cause I'm incompetent, and this doesn't work because
everybody else is related to me and can't get any other jobs, and this
doesn't work 'cause there wasn't anybody to tell the writer or director that
that didn't make sense 'cause I'm both of them"

Jude Cormier...

she had no real concept what "Bewitched" the series was about. Neither did
Shirley McClaine.

Jimmy...

If they had stayed true to the TV version with Jimmy Carey in the lead role this
could have been a huge success.

Jude Cormier...

exactly......but do you think Nicole Kidman could have played Samantha? Or
should another actress been considered had Jim done Darrin?

Jimmy...

Jim Carey even said once that the original Darren was one of his role models. He
would have been a perfect Darren.
Nicole Kidman was wrong for the role, but I'm not up on my young actresses to
pick one. But I would recognize a good Sam if I saw one. Kidman wasn't it.

Harkness...

Why did you bother? There are so many good movies available, yet you
seem determined to watch this universally reviled POS all the way
through.

To what end?

Do you feel that you've accomplished something?

wdstarr...

Well, for one thing now he can speak authoritatively on the subject.

ANIM8Rfsk...

It's a wonder I can speak at all.

I saw the trailer and thought "HELL NO", and I like Nicole Kidman.

John Harkness

David Matthews...

I have to agree with everyone on how bad it was. My excuse for watching is

Middlebrow...

Crow and Simpson are country singers like Michael Jackson is human.

(i.e. maybe sorta kinda if you squint and tilt your head)

quatorzejames...

crow and simpson *should* be country singers.
so should britney spears.
i guess they think they're too cool.

that David Allen Grier was in it. His name had come up in a recent thread
here and I remembered how funny he was in "Amazon Women on the Moon" but
forget it - he barely registered.

Dave in Toronto

ANIM8Rfsk...

He's the 'show within a show' director? Yeah, he had nuttin to do.

ANIM8Rfsk...

I did too. But we had free movie channels, and my Mom saw 'Bewitched' and
likes Nicole Kidman and Michael Caine and never heard of Will Farrel, and I
decided to just go along rather than attempt to dissuade her.

About half an hour into it she put her newspaper over her head and whimpered
'stop!'

I plowed through in successive sessions because I couldn't believe how bad
it was, and I couldn't believe it could keep getting WORSE -- and yet, it
did.

It was like "The Core" only not funny.

It was like a David Caruso vehicle, except with a lead that couldn't act.
Okay, it was like a David Caruso vehicle.

Up until now I'd have said THE AVENGERS was the worst TV show to movie,
but, wow, this was way way way way WAY worse.

weberm...

Oh well, thaks for "taking one for the team", as it were.

Mike O'Sullivan...

Don't forget "The Saint" as a contender.

Jude Cormier...

What about "Car 54, Where Are You?"?

Frank R.A.J. Maloney...

It would have been a major disappointment except for the presence of Val
Kilmer, always a bad omen.

Brian Thorn...

ANIM8Rfsk...

At least I understood WWW -- I have no idea what happened in the entire last
act of Bewitched, once the imaginary Uncle Arthur showed up. My best guess
is, Farrell went insane when Kidman proved she was a witch, and the rest of
the movie is his delusion in the madhouse.

wdstarr...

"Imaginary Uncle Arthur?" What, they couldn't afford a real one?

FDR...

Do you get a "I survived the Bewitched movie" t-shirt?

I thought "The Saint" wasn't that bad. Slow moving, no chemistry
between Kilmer and Shue, and none of the charm of the original, but a
fairly workable script as a reimagining of the series and decent
direction.

ANIM8Rfsk...

That's more credit than I'd give it. That scene where Shue, the world's
dumbest physicist, treats Kilmer for a head wound and DOESN'T NOTICE SHE'S
TREATING A GASH IN A BALD CAP???

It just doesn't have that "appallingly bad" quality to it that "Wild
Wild West" or "I Spy" have in abundance.

ANIM8Rfsk...

Yeah, the Saint was mostly just boring.

Ian J. Ball...

I haven't seen this one yet, but I can't imagine it's worse than either
"The Avengers" or "Wild Wild West" (my vote for the worst of all).

Michael O'Connor...

I remember I went to a free radio premiere for the Wild Wild West movie
(only because I was there as an employee of the radio station) and I
left halfway thru and snuck in to catch the second half of some other
movie. I finally managed to sit thru the second half on cable one day,
but only to confirm it was one of the three or four worst big budget
(relatively) movies I've seen in the last 20 years. The casting of
Will Smith was the first big problem, along with a truly ludicrous
script which involved the giant mechanical spider and white people who
willingly accepted a smart, slick, black Secret Service agent in circa
1880. With a better script and somebody like George Clooney as James
West it could have been a pretty decent movie.

Jude Cormier...

George Clooney was indeed the first choice, but pulled out for some reason.

Brian Thorn...

Probably read the script and said, "are you kidding? no way!"

I'm sorry, I try not to discriminate, but a black man in the James
West role was just plain wrong. If they couldn't get Clooney (who
would have been perfect for the role, I think), they should have tried
for Matthew McConaughey or Kevin Costner. At the time, I thought maybe
Bruce Willis or Nicholas Cage would have been good choices, too. But
Will Smith? No, no, no.

Jude Cormier...

they were thinking box office and not necessarily historically accurate :)

jimmy...

I don't think I'm a racist, but slick black cowboys 19th century are too much of
a stretch for me. Blazing saddles being the perfect exception. :)

Mike O'Sullivan...

Sidney Poitier in "Duel at Diablo" was another good exception. No
reference made at all to his race.

Middlebrow...

I'm not sure how "slick" they were but I'm sure some of these guys became
cowboys after leaving the service.

Mike O'Sullivan...

Very many, possibly 25% of the total.

Middlebrow...

Very cool! But i still doesn't address the issue of how groovy they made
the West. :-)

I loved the TV Show but never watched the Will Smith movie.

ANIM8Rfsk...

Granted, with a different cast, writer, and director, they might have had
something. :-)

Smith didn't bother me nearly as much as I'd have thought, but if they were
insistent on going 'off-white' with the lead, they could have gone with
Jackie Chan.

One big problem was 2 leads that don't LIKE each other -- who was there to
root for?

Blame Jon Peters for the giant spider. He'd been trying to stick it in
Superman, and finally got it stuck in WWW instead.

David B...

The beauty parlor fumes must've ruined his brains.

Can there have be any point, ANY, script, dailies, ANY POINT, that they
could have possibly thought this material was working?

FDR...

Now I have to watch it. I sat through many a bad movie on the US Network Up
All Night shows in the late eighties/early ninieties. I think if I could
survive them I could survive this.

Rich...

The Avengers holds that title.