A Simple Wish (1997)
A movie review by Michael J. Legeros
Copyright 1997 by Michael J. Legeros
(Univesal)
Directed by Michael Ritchie
Written by Jeff Rothberg
Cast Mara Wilson, Martin Short, Kathleen Turner, Francis
Capra, Robert Pastorelli, Amanda Plummer, Teri Garr,
Ruby Dee
MPAA Rating "PG"
Running Time 90 minutes
Reviewed at The Imperial, Cary, NC (11JUL97)
==
A SIMPLE WISH is well-cast, I'll give it that. Martin Short is the perfect choice for a bumbling fairy godmother (hey, it's the nine- ties) who botches his first assignment, granting a wish to a little girl (Myra Wilson) whose father (Robert Pastorelli) is an aspiring New York City stage actor. And who else would you want but Kathleen Turner as the evil godmother-turned-Wicked Witch of the West Side, out to claim his (and every other good witch's) wand? Short is, at times, passable, but Ms. Turner is great fun. Her character gets the shaft on screen time, though, and that's a loss. The rest of this crap is strictly for kids, with wit of the squirting-catsup-bottle-in-the-face variety. (Okay, okay, there *is* an inspired encounter between Short, Wilson, and a Nebraska redneck, but that's about it.) One hour was more than enough for me. I left around the time that a character began vomiting computer-generated frogs. Did I miss a scene of someone farting fish?
Grade: W/O
--
Mike Legeros - Movie Hell http://www.nonvirtual.com/hell/
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews