Why I'm Not Excited for 'Practical Magic 2'

I loved the movie Practical Magic. I loved it SO much. I was the dark-haired sister, and my sister was the blonde one. I would watch the movie over and over. So how did the oxytocin flip?

I'm really not joking. The part in the movie when Sandra Bullock finds her sister a mess after a bad time with a man? I did that. We didn't kill him afterwards, accidentally or otherwise. But I went to rescue her. For years, I would watch Practical Magic, and the joy of sisterhood would fill me. I'd beg my sister to watch the movie with me, and she wouldn't. She thought the film was soppy crap, and I couldn't get her to sit down on a couch for a few hours and delight in the ups and downs and magic of sisterhood.

So, I got the book by Alice Hoffman and hoped that I would get the same vibe and that my sister would read it. Sometimes I was more successful with books. I tried to read it by myself before I handed it to my sister, but I couldn't finish it. You know when someone tells you that the book was so much better than the book?

That was not the case here.

I was prying apart the words on each page, trying to find something that resembled a story. It was so vague and uninterested in itself that it was like listening to a drunk dementia patient try to tell you about their younger years. The screenplay for the film was written by Akiva Goldsman, Adam Brooks, and Robin Swicord. I have to hand it to them. They did a great job.

Continuing with my review of the novel. There wasn't anything akin to a character or character development until we get a complete history of Gillian's sex life. The description of Gillian's sex life was not like a racy novel; it was a medical experience. Personally, I'm not into racy novels, but I do understand the appeal. The author carefully explains Gillian's previous bad sex life, only to replace her really bad sex life with a kinda bad sex life. Then we had bookends for something, even if the something was unsatisfying. It wasn't a win. It was kinda pathetic.

After that, two things made me quit the book. The first one was that there was no relationship with the townspeople that was poor and was going to be corrected. The second was the author's fixation on beauty and what she thinks it does for women. It led me to ask strange questions about the author, questions I've never asked an author before. Questions like:

Do you think that people who are skinny and pretty are immune to unhappiness?

Do you think that good-looking people deserve happiness more than people who are less attractive?

Do you think that your looks stop you from being happy?

Are you unhappy with your looks?

Does that make you unhappy with everything?

I had a lot of questions.

And I rejected what she wrote thoroughly as an unhealthy experience. I flipped through the rest of the book to see if there was anything that popped out at me, and nothing did. I exchanged the book at a Wee Book Inn and moved on.

So, I never read the end. A book is not allowed to make me hollow inside for that many pages, even if the author is 'supposedly' going to make it worth it in the end.

My news feed has been packed with articles about how the new film production blew off Evan Rachel Wood for the sequel when she played one of the daughters in the original film. She's still a working actress. They say, 'They chose to recast her'. Welp, if you ask me, I'd say that they didn't want to put her next to Nicole Kidman because her features are too similar, and she is WAY younger with WAY fewer cosmetic procedures. The actors they chose for the daughters have distinctly babish faces compared to Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. Now, it is important to cast actors with different types of faces to make facial recognition easier for the audience, but it still feels kind of like the novel. That the most important thing is beauty and how beauty is used. Screw sisterhood. Who is the fairest of them all?

As for my sister and me? Welp, I can't make her rescue me. I have to rescue myself.

Am I bitter toward sisterhood? Nah, but I can't help but fear that this film is vanity and greed masquerading as sisterhood. It's so sad. The whole thing is like hugging a puppet so tightly that it comes off the puppeteer's hand.