Tag: Warner Bros.

  • Practical Magic 2 — A Review

    Practical Magic 2 — A Review

    Practical Magic 2 is better than its first movie. A sequel superior to the original after 28 years is certainly not something you can take for granted, because some sequels made decades later are absolute travesties. This one had an advantage, though. It had a solid source book to work from, and it seems to have followed that book much more closely. The first Practical Magic treated its source novel more like an outline than an explicit source, which turns out to be important because some of the things that seem like continuity problems in this movie really originated with changes made by the first one.

    I recently rewatched the original Practical Magic specifically to make sure I was ready for this movie, and just days after watching it, I literally forgot nearly everything I had just watched. While it’s a charming movie, it’s not terribly memorable. I actually had to look up bullet points from it just to make sure I knew what was going on.

    One thing I did not know going into Practical Magic 2 is that this isn’t simply Hollywood resurrecting a 28-year-old movie. Both movies are based on books by Alice Hoffman. The original Practical Magic was based on her 1995 novel, and Hoffman eventually wrote four books about the Owens family. Books two and three are prequels, while the fourth, The Book of Magic, continues the story and is what this movie is based on. So going directly from books one to four for the two contemporary movies actually makes a surprising amount of sense.

    I have not read these books, so let me make that perfectly clear. I’m relying on summaries of them, not pretending I know the source material firsthand. But from those summaries, the books themselves seem to flow pretty logically. The first book does not definitively say that the Owens family curse has been broken, while the fourth deals with finally breaking it. The first movie is where the problem came in because it gave us more of a Hollywood ending where the curse was apparently over. So Practical Magic 2 has to walk that back to get itself onto the storyline of the fourth book. That makes considerably more sense to me than sequel writers simply deciding, “Nope, the curse is back.”

    All the original witches are here: Sandra Bullock as Sally, Nicole Kidman as Gillian, Dianne Wiest as Jet and Stockard Channing as Franny. Obviously they had to use different actresses for Sally’s little girls because they’re not little girls anymore. Kylie is now played by Joey King and Antonia by Maisie Williams, and if the two daughters aren’t exactly clones of Sally and Gillian, they’re certainly their spiritual successors. One has the dark hair, one has the red hair, and you can pretty much see what they’re doing.

    Not long after the first movie, Sally’s new husband Gary—the man she had basically made impossible to find when she was a little girl—dies, and Sally swears off magic. We know it happens fairly soon afterward because the flashback still shows Kylie and Antonia as little girls. Sally casts a spell that not only prevents her from using magic herself, but also seems intended to suppress her daughters’ memories of the magic they have already seen. They’re standing right there while she’s doing the spell, and they’re certainly old enough to remember what has been happening around them. So Sally isn’t merely refusing to tell her daughters about their magic and the family curse; she is actively trying to erase magic from their lives. The spell is effective in one sense, because the girls grow up without knowing what they are, but ultimately it doesn’t work. Magic—and the curse—finds them anyway.

    Kylie has a boyfriend, Gideon, and she has trouble telling him that she loves him. This isn’t because she knows anything about the Owens curse, because Sally has made sure she doesn’t. Kylie finally does tell Gideon she loves him and, almost immediately, just like Sally’s first husband in the first movie, he gets hit by a car. He doesn’t die, but he does end up in a coma, and there’s your inciting incident. Kylie has just discovered in probably the worst possible way that the family history her mother has been hiding from her is very real.

    There is an entirely poorly written aspect involving a promise that was made and is then explicitly broken, followed by a child saying she’ll never trust her mother again. It becomes a whole thing, and I think it could have been much better written. The actresses manage to carry it off, but they’re doing more work than the writing is at that point.

    Kylie now has to rescue Gideon while simultaneously discovering that she is a witch. She finds a book that essentially has the magical equivalent of a chapter titled “How to Remove the Curse,” and that sends her off to England trying to find some way to break it and save him, even though she has no real idea what she is going to find once she gets there. Tom Lockland is also manipulating her from afar, magically, and this is where the movie loses me a little bit. This guy wants to steal Kylie’s magic because he doesn’t have magic, but he is somehow using magic to manipulate her into coming to him so he can steal the magic he doesn’t have. I don’t know how that works. The movie pretty much waves its hands at that one, and you just have to go with it.

    There is a little hand-waving around the money involved, too. Kylie is a college student who can apparently afford to suddenly fly to England, and then everybody else starts following her over there. Sally runs a library. I don’t really know librarians to be that rich, but okay. Maybe there’s some generational Owens wealth they just don’t proclaim. I’ve never been one of those people who can just decide, “My life sucks. I’m going to Europe,” so maybe spontaneous international travel is cheaper and easier than I think it is.

    The more I thought about this story, though, the more I realized that Tom isn’t really the bad guy who interests me. He’s the conventional bad guy, but the real bad guy in this entire story—in fact, I’m going to argue the real bad guy in both movies—is Maria Owens. Maria is the ancestor who got her heart broken and cast a spell so that she would never suffer from love again, and that spell became the Owens family curse.

    Think about what that actually did to this family. Sally loses two loves of her life, then closes herself off from magic, closes herself off from her daughters and even closes herself off from Gillian. The relationship between those sisters was practically the heart of the first movie, and now Sally has pushed Gillian away along with everything else connected to magic. Gillian goes almost completely in the other direction. She has become the person who only loves them and leaves them. She pretends she has this wonderfully full life, but it’s actually a pretty empty one because she never stays around long enough to really love anybody.

    The movie never explicitly addresses that, but it does something much more interesting with Kylie, who is essentially Gillian’s analog in the next generation. Kylie actually gets advice on how to love without really loving, basically how to have the relationship without making herself vulnerable to the curse, and she completely rejects it. She truly loves Gideon, says so, and then goes through all of this because she refuses to accept that loving somebody means eventually having to run away from them.

    So generations of Owens women have spent their lives either hiding from love, running away from it, pushing away the people they love or watching those people die, all because one ancestor got her heart broken and decided to solve the problem magically. Maria Owens started this whole mess. Tom may be the guy doing conventionally bad-guy things in this particular movie, but Maria has been screwing over this family for generations.

    There is also Ian Wright, who gets to play the part of “Is he a bad guy or is he not a bad guy?” and I think that is handled quite well, although he is considerably more forgiving than I would be. Belladonna gets used again, and this time Gillian evidently gets the dose right because he doesn’t die. If Ian knows these sisters as well as he is supposed to, I would expect at least a little lingering resentment over the fact that they just tried to kill him, but he pretty much lets that go.

    And while I’m complaining about things that have very little to do with whether this is a good movie, I’m going to argue against women wearing combat boots. It’s just not an attractive look, and you cannot argue that they’re comfortable because I wore combat boots for roughly a decade of my life and can tell you with no reservation that they’re not comfortable. They’re utilitarian and they’re fine, but if you want to walk a dozen miles in them, you’re going to have blisters. So a girl wearing combat boots because they’re supposedly comfortable does not make logical sense to me. They look ugly. They are ugly. Get over it.

    All that being said about Maria, the more conventional bad guy is dealt with and the curse is finally ended in a very satisfying yet heart-wrenching way. Yeah, that’s a spoiler, but you know it’s going to end well. I’m not telling you how, and the how is the important part.

    That’s also probably the biggest difference between Practical Magic and Practical Magic 2: this one made me actually care about the characters. I had watched the original only days earlier and had already forgotten huge pieces of it. This movie has better characterization, a stronger plot and a better-organized story, and even when it gets a little hand-wavy about its magical logic, it works. Maybe following The Book of Magic more closely gave the filmmakers a stronger foundation to build on. Whatever the reason, Practical Magic 2 is simply a better movie than Practical Magic, and I’m giving it 3½ out of 5 stars.

    ★★★½ out of ★★★★★

  • Coyote vs. Acme Review

    Coyote vs. Acme Review

    Rating: ★★★☆☆

    I went to see Coyote vs. Acme today. It was OK.

    I’m not going to give it a particularly high rating, but I’m not going to give it a low one either. We’re going straight down the middle with three stars.

    Before discussing the movie itself, we probably need to discuss how we are able to watch it at all.

    Warner Bros. Discovery completed Coyote vs. Acme and then shelved it, reportedly planning to write down approximately $30 million of its roughly $70–72 million production cost. That did not mean the government handed Warner $30 million or purchased the movie. It meant Warner could report $30 million as a business loss, reducing the amount of its income subject to tax.

    Nor was the write-down necessarily a permanent death sentence. If Warner later recovered money from the movie, it would have to report that transaction and adjust its taxes accordingly. That is essentially what happened when Ketchup Entertainment purchased the completed film for a reported $50 million. Warner recovered about $50 million of the $70–72 million it had spent, ultimately leaving it with a loss of roughly $20–22 million. Any earlier tax treatment could then be balanced against the newly recovered value.

    Ketchup did not have to reconstruct an abandoned production. Coyote vs. Acme was already complete. It needed a distributor willing to buy, market and release it.

    That gives me at least a little hope that Batgirl might someday escape the same vault. Warner canceled that approximately $90 million movie in 2022 under broadly similar circumstances, but there is an important difference: Batgirl was not finished. Principal photography had wrapped, but it still required effects work, editing and possibly additional filming. Any company attempting the same rescue would therefore need more than distribution rights. It would need access to the production materials, permission to complete a movie using Warner’s DC characters and agreements with whichever original filmmakers, actors and effects artists were still available.

    I doubt that rescue will happen. Coyote vs. Acme was already finished, received encouraging test-screening reactions and still required an extraordinary campaign to reach theaters. Batgirl would require considerably more work, and reports about its test screenings were much less encouraging.

    Still, the release of this movie proves that a tax write-down does not make a film legally unreleasable forever. The money can be reported and the accounting adjusted if someone eventually makes an offer worth accepting.

    I’m not going to argue over whether Coyote vs. Acme deserved to be released or should have remained on the shelf. It’s out there now, and arguing that it should have stayed buried would just seem mean-spirited.

    The movie is based on Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker humor piece “Coyote v. Acme.” Written as an attorney’s opening statement in a product-liability lawsuit, it argues that Acme should compensate Wile E. Coyote for the innumerable injuries caused by its defective products and inadequate warnings. It is an excellent premise for a movie. (Readers without a New Yorker subscription can read the authorized reprint published by the Texas Bar Journal.)

    Calling the movie “based on” Ian Frazier’s article is generous. It borrows the title and the central idea of Wile E. Coyote filing a product-liability lawsuit against Acme, but very little else could transfer because the original is not really a story. It is a mock opening statement whose humor comes from describing cartoon catastrophes in perfectly straight legal language. The movie had to invent nearly everything required to turn that joke into a feature—and that is where most of its problems began.

    I will say that the resulting movie wasn’t particularly well written. There were plot holes you could drive a cartoon through. The judge, played by Luis Guzmán, was practically a cartoon himself, dismissing arguments whenever the story needed him to. The movie attempts to explain this early on by telling us that Acme had essentially written the laws, so of course those laws favored Acme.

    The writers then prevented themselves from using the best part of their source material. Kevin Avery is introduced as a nearly incompetent lawyer who avoids court and settles everything as quickly as possible. That gives him room for an underdog character arc, but it also means he could never convincingly deliver the sharp, meticulously reasoned argument from Frazier’s original piece. A capable product-liability attorney presenting that opening statement might have provided the movie with a genuinely great courtroom scene. Instead, the screenplay makes its lawyer too ineffectual to translate its best piece of legal writing to the screen.

    I recently read about how difficult it was for the British government to dismantle the East India Company during the nineteenth century. That company had accumulated so much power that it governed territory, collected taxes and prosecuted its own wars. By the early nineteenth century, its private army contained approximately 250,000 soldiers—larger than Britain’s own army at times—and it repeatedly defeated forces much larger than itself. Britain required legislation after legislation to strip away its powers before finally dissolving it.

    The parallel with Acme is surprisingly strong. Acme is not merely a manufacturer defending itself against a product-liability lawsuit. It has accumulated enough political, economic and military power to function like a sovereign state. It writes the laws, influences the courts and ultimately makes war against Wile E. Coyote. That is what the story is really about.

    If Acme genuinely possesses East India Company levels of power over both the human and cartoon worlds, defeating it should require more than one favorable court verdict. It should require dismantling an entire corporate government. The movie gestures toward that much more interesting idea, but never really develops it.

    Will Forte plays Wile E. Coyote’s lawyer, Kevin Avery. The surname is an obvious nod to legendary animation director Tex Avery, but the reference goes further than that. His law firm is Avery, Jones & Maltese: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, three giants of Warner Bros. animation. Jones and Maltese were the director-and-writer team most closely associated with creating Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner in the first place.

    Kevin’s legal aide is his niece, Paige Avery, played by Lana Condor. She provides both the legal and moral center of the film, and Condor does a very good job with the role. The other two people working in the nearly bankrupt law office are Sal Maltese, played by Tone Bell, and Dottie Jones, played by Martha Kelly. They are two-dimensional at best—which is particularly unfortunate because they are both live-action.

    That historical knowledge is one of the movie’s genuine pleasures. Even when its story doesn’t quite hold together, it was clearly made by people who know the cartoons and understand the history behind them.

    I’m not going to say that the voice work is spot-on, but it comes pretty close. The mixture of live action and animation is less successful. It isn’t as smooth or convincing as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, although that remains an extraordinarily high standard nearly forty years later.

    Will Forte does have exactly the right voice to sound like a cartoon character himself. I found that interesting once I noticed it. He can share a scene with an animated coyote without seeming as though he belongs to an entirely different movie.

    Here Come the Spoilers

    Kevin Avery ultimately loses the lawsuit, largely because the judge dismisses the case after another round of animated courtroom shenanigans. Then, through narrative magic, Avery and Wile E. are summoned to testify before Congress.

    That may provide a bigger stage for the climax, but it does nothing to solve the problem established by the lawsuit. Congress is not another court. Even if a congressional committee ruled entirely in Wile E.’s favor, it could not award him damages. It could investigate Acme, expose its conduct, rewrite the laws or refer possible crimes for prosecution, but it could not simply order Acme to give Wile E. a million dollars.

    That distinction matters because Avery, Jones & Maltese is out of money and preparing to close while Avery is in Washington. Winning the moral argument before Congress would not save the law firm or compensate its client.

    Naturally, the hearing does not initially go their way either. Acme has written the laws governing its own conduct, including a particularly grotesque rule allowing cartoons to be tortured because they always recover and therefore supposedly suffer no permanent injury. Acme has not merely found loopholes in the law. It has constructed an entire legal system in which making war against cartoons is perfectly lawful.

    But the movie does have a happy ending, and plenty of guest stars show up along the way. Most of your Warner Bros. cartoon favorites make at least an appearance.

    One thing the movie happily keeps consistent is that Wile E. never speaks. He communicates entirely through his familiar signs.

    The funny conceit is that he has only a limited collection of signs, yet he still manages to say quite a lot with them. Sometimes another character has to interpret what he means, but the movie never gives in and allows him to speak merely because dialogue would be easier.

    His reunion with the Road Runner at the very end is somehow both unexpected and inevitable.

    Stay through the credits, at least until the main credit scroll begins. Some amusing cardboard-style animated sequences play during the earlier portion.

    Ultimately, Coyote vs. Acme is not a bad movie. It is an adequate movie built around a very good premise. If the screenplay had been given another two or three serious passes through a strong writers’ room, it might have become something genuinely good. Instead, it was completed as it was, nearly disappeared forever and has now been released as it is.

    Three stars feels exactly right.

    Principal Cast

    • Will Forte — Kevin Avery
    • Lana Condor — Paige Avery
    • John Cena — Buddy Crane
    • Tone Bell — Sal Maltese
    • Martha Kelly — Dottie Jones
    • P. J. Byrne — Bill Pellicano
    • Luis Guzmán — the judge
    • Eric Bauza — Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd
    • Jeff Bergman — Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Yosemite Sam
    • Bob Bergen — Tweety
    • Fred Tatasciore — the Tasmanian Devil