In the Twinkling of an Eye -- or the Twitching of a Nose

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Jack (Will Ferrell): So were your parents in the witch business?

Isabel (Nicole Kidman): Both of them. My mother fixed the 1986 World Series.

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I had pretty high hopes when I heard that a movie based on the Bewitched TV series was being made. I was a fan of that show when I was a child, and I have admired Nicole Kidman (who was tapped to play Elizabeth Montgomery's role) for many years.

Now, I'm not really a fan of movies based on TV shows. Occasionally, they turn out OK, but mostly I have found them to be huge disappointments. It's fair to say that my enthusiasm for the Bewitched movie was tempered.

But I like Nicole Kidman in much the same way that I liked the original Samantha. I thought she was a good fit for the role.

You know what? I still do. I had other issues with the movie. So did film critic Roger Ebert, who conceded that he didn't watch much prime–time TV and had never seen an episode of Bewitched. "When you see 500 movies a year," he wrote, "you don't have a lot of left–over yearning for watching television. In the evenings, you involve yourself in more human pursuits."

Ebert found the movie "tolerably entertaining," and so did I. Since much of it incorporated scenes from episodes of the original series — sometimes word for word, as I recall — I gather he would have found the series entertaining as well. But he had the same problem with the movie that I had — it threw together too many scenes from episodes of the series that had no unifying theme or context — other than whatever flimsy pretense was used to loosely link things together.

"Many of its parts work," he observed, "although not together. Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman are funny and likable, but they're in a plot that doesn't allow them to aim for the same ending with the same reason. It's one of those movies where you smile and laugh and are reasonably entertained, but you get no sense of a mighty enterprise sweeping you along with its comedic force. There is not a movie here. Just scenes in search of one."

That seems like fair criticism to me.

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As I say, I like Kidman, and I think she was a good choice for Samantha. But there was some real chemistry between Elizabeth Montgomery and the first Darrin (Dick York) that transcended the transition to the second Darrin (Dick Sargent), who clearly was never as comfortable with Samantha as his predecessor, midway through the series' run.

That was material for one of those inside baseball kind of jokes in the movie. Ferrell observed that, on the TV show, Darrin had been so insignificant that the producers changed actors playing the role midway through the series' run — "and no one noticed!" But the series wouldn't have survived for four more years if not for the reservoir of good will the show's fans had for Montgomery. If she was even remotely convincing in her relationship with the second Darrin, the viewers would accept him without question. She was, and they did.

And the movie needed to be mindful of that. The movie wouldn't work if there wasn't the same kind of chemistry between Samantha and Darrin as there had been on the TV show — and there wasn't. Kidman and Ferrell could read the same lines that Montgomery and York did 40 years earlier, even re–create entire scenes, but they wouldn't work without the chemistry.

Kidman needed a different Darrin. I like Ferrell, too, but he needed a different Samantha. As Ebert observed, they were never really on the same page.

And I wasn't particularly wild about the supporting cast, either. For me, Michael Caine never really worked as Samantha's father (played by Maurice Evans in the TV show). And I had some trouble accepting Steve Carell as Uncle Arthur. I suppose that really was a tough one to cast, though. I mean, who could improve on Paul Lynde?

But my real problem was with Shirley MacLaine as Endora, the role played by Agnes Moorehead on TV. Now, I admire much of the work MacLaine has done over the years, but, frankly, I have found her recent work to be a little too flamboyant, and she really let her freak flag fly in "Bewitched." Not that Moorehead wasn't a little over the top at times; the role certainly called for some of that. But MacLaine was a little too over the top for me.

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So, what we were left with was, as Ebert observed, an entertaining big–screen homage to a beloved TV series — but nothing that seemed likely to spawn a "Bewitched 2." I doubt that very many people in the audience left the theaters in 2005 hoping that a sequel would be coming along in 2006 that would let them know how things were working out between the new Samantha and Darrin.

Sadly, it is what I had been conditioned to expect — from previous attempts to make successful TV series into movies. Perhaps a little better than most, and, to be fair, "Bewitched" the movie did have some elements of creativity that the others did not. So it showed flashes of what might have been. I hoped for better.

I didn't get it.

Animal Kingdom

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When I was growing up, there was only one single–screen theater in my central Arkansas hometown.

New releases came to my town when the distributors decided they had gotten all they could from larger markets. It could take a year or two for a movie to come to my hometown — if it ever did.

I suppose it goes without saying that the original "Planet of the Apes," which premiered on this day in 1968, wasn't showing at my hometown theater 45 years ago. It may have been showing somewhere in Little Rock. First–run movies usually did.

In fact, I'm inclined to think it may have been two years or more before it came to my hometown because, when I saw it, my hometown theater showed it as the first part of a double feature in which the movie's sequel was the second feature.

And the sequel came out two years after the original.

Logically, then, the original must have been at least 2 years old at that time. But that, of course, assumes that the sequel would have been showing in my hometown when it was first released — and, frankly, that defies logic. First–run movies hardly ever played in my hometown.

So I think it must have been a year, if not two, after the sequel was released when that double feature played in my hometown theater.

Oh, well ...

Whenever that double feature came to my hometown, I remember pleading with my parents to let me see it — and, to my great surprise, they did even though I was quite young (and my memory is that they usually weren't inclined to allow me to see anything they thought was beyond my years).

Anyway, after an unexpectedly easy time convincing my parents to let me see it, I spent one rainy Saturday afternoon at my hometown movie theater, watching the first two "Planet of the Apes" movies.

Those movies had a profound influence on me. They opened my mind to thoughts I had never had before.

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I guess everyone remembers the iconic final scene in which Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison (his human companion, the alluring but mute Nova) learn the truth about the ape planet.

Likewise, I suppose everyone remembers when Heston, upon being captured by the apes, instructed them to "get your stinkin' paws off me."

Oddly, I suppose, those scenes and the dialogue really didn't register with me as much at the time as the general theme of the movie and its sequel, that the roles of the animals and the humans had been reversed.

That theme, as I understand it, was warmly received by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

As it should be, perhaps — and also, I suspect, as many, if not most, would expect it to be.

Even those who were not connected to the SPCA found that "Planet of the Apes" was a thought–provoking tale. Every time I have seen or thought of that movie since the first time I saw it, though, it has evoked thoughts of Heston.

I'm not entirely sure of this, but I really think that rainy Saturday afternoon was the first time I saw Heston in a movie (well, two movies, actually — Heston was in both of the movies I saw that day, but he was more prominently featured in the first).

Most people's first thoughts may be of "The Ten Commandments" or "Ben–Hur" when they think of Heston. I think of those performances, too, but the first thing I think of is the "Planet of the Apes" movies.

Like one domino falling into another, that initial thought will remind me of something or someone else. Inevitably, I am reminded of the rather obvious role reversals in that movie. For example, when Heston was being chased through Ape City, he interrupted a funeral service for an ape who was being lauded as the "font of simian kindness."

The ape who was presiding over the service said that the departed had once confided in him, "I never met an ape I didn't like."

Some of the more adult references went over my head. But I wasn't completely immune to some adult aspects of the movie.

Perhaps because I was young and drawn to beautiful women even then, I tend to think of Harrison as well when I think of those movies, although the first two "Planet of the Apes" were probably the high points of her fairly brief show business career.

She never spoke in the first one and only a few times in the second. I don't remember much about her voice.

The voices of the apes — most notably, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans — do evoke associative memories, I suppose. I've seen them all in other things — I had probably seen some, if not all, before I saw "Planet of the Apes" — but their voices always make me think of that movie.

I've seen Evans, for example, on Bewitched — many times — in the role of Samantha's father. But when I hear his voice, I still think of Dr. Zaius.

Likewise, I have seen Hunter (who had been in movies for a quarter of a century when she played Zira) and McDowall in many things. I may even have seen them in things before I saw "Planet of the Apes."

But their voices always take me back to that afternoon when I saw that movie and its sequel for the first time.