A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED: The biggest problem with Bewitched is not in the cast (uniformly, they do they best that they can with the material that they're given, especially a supporting cast that includes Heather Burns, Kristin Chenoweth, and Katie Finneran, all immensely skilled comic actresses), but with the fact that they're trying to make three films at once, with none of those films being given enough attention. The first (and least interesting) is a conventional Nora Ephron romantic comedy with the complication being not that the boy and girl are geographically removed or that the boy and girl are business rivals but that the girl is a witch. The second is a "Will Ferrell acts wacky" comedy, which you see glimmers of during an extended scene when Ferrell's character can't get his lines right. The final (and most interesting) is a meta-tastic film about Hollywood making Bewitched. If only they'd gone whole hog with that angle--casting not Will Ferrell as a "fake" fading movie star, but instead casting Ben Affleck as "Ben Affleck, faded movie star" and giving us a vicious Hollywood satire, we would have had a good movie. To be fair, not every meta-portion of the movie works (in particular, an inexplicable bit involving Steve Carrell playing Paul Lynde playing "Uncle Arthur" from Bewitched, but it's the meta that makes the movie interesting--I wish there were more of it.