October Movies Part 1: Finding Emily, Practical Magic 2, The Testament of Ann Lee

Let's kick the month off with reviews of three exceedingly random movies. Sounds promising right?!

Finding Emily: Written by Rachel Hirons and directed by Alicia MacDonald, this is a cute little British romcom about what happens when a young man named Owen (Spike Fearn) meets a girl named Emily at a student union bar at the fictional Manchester City University, gets her number, tries to call her later, and discovers he didn't get her complete number. Distraught, he decides he's just going to look for women named Emily who go to the university, which is how he finds Emily Raine (Angourie Rice), an American student who is getting her psychology degree in the UK. She has been struggling to write her thesis about how love is a form of destructive madness, so it feels like Owen and his desperate quest to find his lady love has fallen right into her lap. She agrees to help him, so she can secretly study him and see how his life falls apart, thereby proving her hypothesis.

Obviously, hi-jinks ensue and the two of them devise increasingly creative ways to find the real Emily, some of which may violate data privacy laws and get Owen into a lot of trouble. No points for immediately knowing how this plot is going to go -- it is very predictable -- but like with any good romcom, the journey matters more than the destination. Both of the leads are very charming, and the movie is full of swoony British vibes. This is a cozy film that will appeal to Anglophiles and is ideal for a lazy weekend afternoon. Enjoy!

Practical Magic 2: I had never watched the 1998 film Practical Magic, despite being a huge Sandra Bullock fan. So, I watched that movie in preparation for this sequel and thought it was exceedingly weird but had its charms. Which is now exactly how I feel about the sequel. Bullock and Nicole Kidman (what a cast!) play Sally and Gillian Owens, two women who were raised by their aunts (Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing) in a beautiful house in Massachusetts. Their aunts are witches, and they teach the girls how to wield their magical powers as well. But due to the doomed romance of an ancestor, the Owens women are cursed - they can never love a man. If they fall in love, that man will tragically die. In the first film, Sally falls in love, gets married, has two daughters, and then her husband dies, leading her to renounce her magic and deny her identity until circumstances force her to engage with magic again to save her sister. In this movie, the plot is almost exactly the same, except that she now has to engage with magic again to save her daughter.

I am not going to get into much more detail. If you like the first movie, you'll like this sequel, but otherwise move right along. These movies are just so tonally weird and strange, but at the end of the day, you've got Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock being fiercely feminist and extolling the virtues of sisterhood over everything else, even romantic relationships (though Lee Pace does show up to inject a little bit of romance into the proceedings, because, come on. You can't have Sandy B. in a movie and not let her be a little romantic!) This movie is all over the place, but 28 years later, at least the special effects are better, and it has its moments when you can't help but smile. Give it a chance and experience the magic!

The Testament of Ann Lee: This movie came out last year, but it has taken me this long to finally summon it on streaming and give it a go. Directed by Mona Fastvold who co-wrote the screenplay with Brady Corbet, I was hoping this would be a Brutalist-esque vibey epic about a real-life woman I had never heard about but would be thoroughly compelled by. While Amanda Seyfried cannot help but compel you with her enormous eyes and charisma, I found this movie to be a slog.

Seyfried plays the titular Ann Lee, a woman in 1730s Manchester who was persecuted in the UK for founding the Shaker movement and subsequently moved to America to preach and create a religious community. Of course, she was also persecuted there and deemed to be a witch, because that's how we always deal with charismatic women who command a following. The script really plods along, but this is also a musical for some odd reason, which means that I couldn't help but feel like we were getting a religious Mamma Mia every time Seyfried started singing. Perhaps if I was in a theater for two hours, I would allow myself to be swept along in this story and give myself over to the religious ecstasy, but this is emphatically not a movie that works on streaming unless you are very disciplined and forego all other distractions. Much like Ann Lee herself. Am I a heathen for preferring Practical Magic 2 to this critically acclaimed film? Yes. Just burn me at the stake.