sends a generation to Bullock's two young daughters.
She tries to protect, not just from the villagers,
but also from her eccentric aunts, who are also witches.
Fine, but I do not want them dancing naked
under the full moon.
Of course not, dear.
The nudity is entirely optional, and you will remember.
This is an extremely well-cast movie
with Stockard Channing and Diane Weiss as the aunts
who brought up Bullock and Kidman
after the girl's parents died.
Now, a legend about these witches
says that if they fall in love with a man,
his future is truly bleak.
Bullock fears this will affect her chances
with an Arizona cop who is investigating
the disappearance of Kidman's boyfriend.
He's played by, effectively, Aidan Quinn.
But he basically kidnapped her, and it...
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
He kidnapped you?
Well, no, no, he didn't really kidnap her.
He just, he sort of, like, just a little nap.
No, she was, there was a car, and she would,
you know, thing, she, what happened was that she,
she just, you should know she has the worst taste in men.
Now, I mentioned that the script
takes witchcraft seriously.
Well, it does, because we're always talking about, Roger,
how we want some how-to films.
Like, if we're gonna cover a subject, you know,
get specific, well, we learned some new potions,
some new rules, and it is all treated seriously
by the cast, so we buy into it, too.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed Practical Magic.
Gene, I don't believe we even saw the same movie.
This movie doesn't take witchcraft seriously.
It's like a sitcom, and it's childish,
and all of it's plotting, it's characters,
and it's development, and incidentally,
this movie is a comedy, you know.
I, you haven't even suggested that.
It's not a serious movie about witchcraft.
There are some funny elements in it.
No, it's a comedy from beginning to end.
Oh, I don't think so.
In intention, it certainly is.
I think that the business involving whether these women
are gonna have any kind of relationships is dead serious.
I don't think so.
I mean, I found this movie to be really pretty dumb,
as a matter of fact, and as for the two older aunts,
I wanted to see more of them.
As for the persecution of this poor family, hey, you know,
if you've been witches for 300 years,
and the townspeople know that, why stay there
so your kids can be persecuted?
Well, that's the story, Roger.
We oughta see more of the witchcraft.
Yeah, I mean, in other words, they stay there
just so they're gonna be applied.
Even some of the rules, some of the potions were different.
They have an old book with a lot of stuff in it,
and they mix up stuff, you know, like.
The old book was new to me.
I don't think that there's really a lot of information
in this movie about witchcraft.
I think there's some of it.
Okay, next movie.
Our next movie is Love is the Devil,
based on the life and loves of Francis Bacon,
who was the greatest British painter of the 20th century,
and also, perhaps, the most miserable.
Bacon's art distorted the human figure
into grotesque and twisted shapes,
but he found beauty and passion in the ugliness,
and his style was so distinctive
that to see one of his paintings
is to recognize his work anywhere instantly.
As the movie opens, a burglar has just broken in
through the skylight to rob him.
And who might you be?
You're not much of a burglar, are you?
Take your clothes off.
Come to bed, and you can have whatever you want.
That's Derek Jacobi looking uncannily
like the real Francis Bacon.
A burglar named George,
and played by Daniel Craig, comes to stay.
He and Bacon become lovers,
and in private, the working-class man
was the dominant partner, but in public,
he feels insecure, and Bacon ridicules him.
You know, I did have a life before I met you, Francis.
You know, wide circle of friends.
The movie has extraordinary scenes of Bacon at work,
trying to exercise his demons with his art.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me?
Hear me.
This is one of the few film biographies of artists
I've seen that doesn't make excuses.
Love is the Devil suggests that genius,
in this case, was its own excuse.
Nor does the movie stretch to make connections
between the life and the art.
The connections here, I think, are pretty obvious.
Now, it's too bad that, because the estate
wouldn't allow the filmmaker to show
any of Bacon's paintings,
we don't see any of Bacon's actual work in the film,
but what's brilliant is the way the director
finds visual equivalence for it,
by shooting into reflecting surfaces,
by distorting images,
by using the human figure in ways that Bacon did
so that at the end of this film,
I think you'd be so familiar with the way
Bacon saw the world,
you would be able to walk into an art gallery,
even if you knew nothing of Francis Bacon's work,
and say, that's a Bacon.
Well, I don't know if you could do that,
but I'll tell you one thing you couldn't do.
You couldn't walk out of a theater
and attempt to draw something like that, that Bacon's work.
I don't, I think-
Not unless you were a great artist.
No, I think this raises the intellectual question.
Can you make a film about an artist
without showing the art?
And of course you can.
You liked that movie about Picasso.
We both on this show liked a movie based on a novel,
and we didn't get to see the novel on screen.
There were fake Picassos in the background
many times in that film.
This movie is basically about a man's life,
not about his art anyway.
Well, the only reason we're interested in him
is because of his art, and I want to see the art.
But listen, you're surely not saying this is a bad movie.
I didn't say it's a bad movie.
I'm saying it is a diminished movie,
a seriously diminished movie,
because you don't see the images of bodies ripped open
and evisceration and torture and blood,
and you don't see that in the film.
You feel them, you feel them, you sense them.
Roger.
You see the life that produced them,
and you see a great performance.
But that's because you and I have advanced knowledge,
and not everyone does.
Very few people are likely to see this movie
who don't know who Francis Bacon is.
They may know the name,
but I don't know if they know the art that well.
And the film should have somehow figured out a way
to reflect the art much better.
Coming up next, the tour guide becomes
as much of a tourist attraction
as Manhattan itself in The Crew.
Fasten your seat belts.
I wish, I wish I had an elephant,
an elephant who'd always play with me.
Bye-bye.
But wishes are like elephants.
They're bigger than can be.
Okay, maybe you can't give her everything her heart desires,
but with the humongous purchase power of the Visa Platinum card,
maybe you can.
And besides, you never know what she'll want next.
Hey, hey, looks like Taz just got his AT&T phone bill.
Taz, don't you make a lot of calls on Sunday?
Yeah, Taz call, Taz call.
Then you can see I have five cents on Sundays.
It's just five cents a minute every Sunday.
AT&T charges three times as much.
Taz, let's call 1-800-SUNDAYS, become an MCI customer.
Our next film called The Cruise is about a character
you won't easily forget.
On the surface, he looks and acts like the kind of frantic character
who, if you were seated next to him on a bus,
you might consider changing seats.
But that would be your loss.
His name is Timothy Levich, nicknamed Speed,
who is an ace tour guide on a Manhattan bus tour.
And he's a font of information, especially
about the literary history of certain New York City
neighborhoods.
Four blocks more H.L. Macon lives.
Four blocks more Theodore Dreiser lives.
Five blocks more Nathaniel West lives.
Five blocks more D.H. Lawrence lives lascivously.
Where Speed may lose his audience is
when the focus of his tour unintentionally
switches from Manhattan to Speed's own psyche.
I was overwhelmed.
I was reemerged into my own naivete.
I couldn't believe how angry the city was with me.
And it seemed like a vindictive woman
to be like no reason whatsoever, just by the pure rage
of its own existence.
Thank you, but where is the refund office?
Of course, you can enjoy Speed as a performance artist,
which he certainly is, and also as a most
intelligent urban poet.
But at about the two-thirds mark of this 76-minute documentary,
I was prepared to get off the bus.
I give a marginal thumbs up to director Bennett Miller,
and I sincerely hope that Speed Levich reaches peace
in his obviously troubled relationships with his parents,
especially his father.
You know, I thought it got interesting toward the end,
because you realize that this guy who
was projecting this whole persona into his job
as a tour guide is actually dealing
with all kinds of other issues that
are pressed just underneath the surface of this film
and keep trying to bubble up.
And you watch that, that's what the movie is really about.
Can Speed continue to play this role of a colorful character,
or will he throw himself under the bus?
Well, he'll keep his job until too many people complain.
But what do you normally get on a tour,
the name of that building?
He's communicating to these people
not only that architecture is something to look at,
but that literary figures are someone to feel.
Not just something to look at.
I love his whole sexual metaphor for that building.
That speech alone is worth the price of admission.
We'll be back in a moment.
["Song of the Sugar Plum Fairy"]
Woo!
I actually got in.
You broke into personnel.
Yeah, these are salaries of every person in the company.
Look, this senior VP makes about half as much
as this senior VP.
I bet he doesn't know that.
Sure he does.
I just emailed everybody in the company.
["Song of the Sugar Plum Fairy"]
When you give a solitaire, you say more.
And you say it with more brilliance, more depth, more
fire.
["Song of the Sugar Plum Fairy"]
The diamond solitaire.
A diamond is forever to be yours.
["Song of the Sugar Plum Fairy"]
A woman spends her entire life responding to a changing body.
Dealing with her monthly cycle is just another chance
to practice.
InSync MiniForms, a whole new choice in feminine protection.
No one should go hungry this holiday season.
This year, the Denver Rescue Mission
wants to see that no one will.
Please, help the Denver Rescue Mission
see that homelessness and hunger take a holiday.
This is a 7 News Doppler Max update.
I'm meteorologist Pam Dale.
What a gorgeous day it is outside.
Lots of sunshine with temperatures that have
climbed into the 60s.
I'll have a 7-day forecast at 5.
Now let's take another look at the movies
we reviewed on this week's show.
Two thumbs up for Beloved, a difficult but deeply felt film
about the lasting pain of slavery,
with strong performances by Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover,
and Tandy Newton.
Two more thumbs up for Happiness,
which walks the line between the shocking in the comic
and its portrait of lonely, desperate people.
We split, however, on practical magic.
I found it to be too scary for children and too
childish for adults.
Gene, however, thought the cast, headed by Sandra Bullock
and Nicole Kidman, made the material work.
A split decision on Love is the Devil,
the sordid and perceptive biography of British painter
Francis Bacon.
Gene thought it was crippled by not
being able to show his paintings.
Finally, two thumbs up for the documentary, The Cruise,
which opens next week in New York
and then moves on around the country.
And remember, you can hear our reviews on our website
at cisco-ebert.com.
And next week, we'll be back with reviews
of more new movies, including the satiric comedy, Pleasantville,
starring Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, and William H. Macy,
and also at Pupil, based on a novella by Stephen King
and starring Ian McKellen and Brad Redfoe.
That's next week.
And until then, the balcony is closed.
["Pupil," by Stephen King, plays in the background.]
Tonight, get the great taste of the grill
with Gordon's grilled filets, sizzling with flavors
like lemon pepper or garlic butter.
Dress with Gordon's fishermen.
There's one way to guarantee whiter teeth.
One, two, whiten.
By natural white, whitens teeth.
Safe, effective.
One, two, whiten.
By natural white, we guarantee whiter teeth.
If you like eating caramel apples,
you'll love Tootsie Caramel Apple Pops.
So good, only the stick will remain from Tootsie.
Nothing tastes like popcorn cooked in a pot on the stove,
except, mmm, new homestyle microwave popcorn from Pop Secret.
["Pupil," by Stephen King, plays in the background.]