This One's for the Girls: Catherine Called Birdy, Hocus Pocus 2, Disenchanted

Do you have young girls at home? Well here are a bunch of movies they might enjoy. Though, let's be real, I'm 35 and wanted to watch these movies too. So whatever, gather round, young and old, and stream some charming young adult movies to while away the winter blues. 

Catherine Called Birdy: Directed by Lena Dunham who adapted the screenplay from the beloved novel by Karen Cushman, this is an utterly charming movie set in medieval England, about a young girl, Catherine (nicknamed Birdy, natch) who has just turned fourteen, has gotten her period, and is therefore of marriageable age. Played by Bella Ramsey, the wondrous actress you may remember for her scene-stealing turn as Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones, prepare yourself for some rousing feminist comedy. 

The cast of this movie is absolutely stacked with Billie Piper playing Birdy's loving mother, and Andrew Scott playing her layabout father who has mismanaged the family's funds and therefore needs to marry his daughter off for a good dowry. We also get Joe Alwyn (aka Mr. Taylor Swift) as Birdy's Uncle Greg, who she is very attracted to in the manner of most teenage girls and their tendency to unfortunate crushes. 

As someone who was once a teenage girl herself, and as an Indian woman who has had to rail against arranged marriages all her life, this movie certainly struck a chord. It is fierce and funny, and I will be reading the book posthaste. The production design and costumes are all beautifully rendered, the soundtrack is filled with incongruous pop music that will keep your toes tapping, and Ramsey is an absolute star, commanding the screen in every scene and making you root for this awkward but endearing child who simply wants the freedom to be a kid for a little while longer. It's a slight but satisfying film and certainly worthy of adding to your ever-growing streaming queue.

Hocus Pocus 2: Every year, my friend Laura and I watch Hocus Pocus for Halloween. So we were very excited to do a double feature with this brand new sequel. Unfortunately, our love for the original could not be matched, but I suppose it's still a valiant effort to tap into our nostalgia and desire to revisit these witches once again.

Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker return as the Sanderson sisters, three women who were burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials. 29(!) years have passed since the events of the original film and apparently everyone has gotten over it. So of course, yet again, a virgin lights a Black Flame Candle, and the witches come back to haunt the youth of 2022 during Halloween and yet again try to cast a spell so they can be powerful forever.

The main difference here is that they've eschewed a teen romance plot. Instead, our protagonists are three young teenage girls (played by Whitney Peak, Belisssa Escobedo, and Lilia Buckingham), and they must band together with their own special brand of magic to defeat these old witches. The movie feels very Disney, and doesn't feel quotable and fun like the original, but maybe it's just a question of having to watch it a dozen more times until it seeps into my bones. It follows a lot of the same beats as  the original, has nothing particularly fresh to add on, and ends with a whimper that suggests there will be no further sequels. It's a great watch to indulge in your nostalgia, but ends up being more of a trick than a treat.

Disenchanted: My mother and I went to see Enchanted in theaters in 2007 and absolutely loved it. Now, 15(!) years later, we have this perfectly adequate sequel that went straight to streaming on Disney+. It deals with the age-old question of what happens after "happily ever after." We had left our lovely heroine Giselle (the always charming Amy Adams) with her true love, Robert (the always dashing Patrick Dempsey) and his daughter, Morgan (played by Rachel Covey in the original, but now played as a more sarcastic teenager by Gabriella Baldacchino) living in an apartment by Central Park. However, this movie opens ten years later, Giselle has had a baby, and they've decided to move to the suburbs. Gasp.

What follows is a story about the difficulties of continuing to live a fairytale life when the very real problems of parenting a baby and moody teen intervene. Giselle also finds herself up against a trio of territorial moms, played by Yvette Nicole Brown, Jayma Mays, and their leader, Maya Rudolph. Let's revel in that casting for a second. Of course, Giselle then makes a wish, things go awry, and we get a lot of special effects and magic as everyone tries to sort everything out before the stroke of midnight.

The songs aren't very memorable, the costumes are fantastic, the special effects are standard. Amy Adams is acting her heart out, particularly in some scenes that require her to play a double role of sorts, but none of that can help this film re-capture the magic of the original. What made Enchanted so...enchanting, was the fish-out-of-water concept, but here we get a wicked stepmother plot that turns our heroine into an anti-heroine and that's no fun. Like with Hocus Pocus 2, Disney is trying to cash in on our nostalgia for the original - they succeed a little, but like Giselle, our wish for more of a fairytale doesn't quite come true.