Audient Audit: The Witches of Eastwick

This is the second in my 2019 series Audient Audit, in which I’m checking my own records to see if I really saw movies I say I saw.

Like the first movie in this series, Roxanne, The Witches of Eastwick is one of those movies I likely saw on cable at a friend’s house if I saw it at all. I knew I’d seen at least some of it as there were scenes I remembered clearly; which ones, I’ll get to in a moment.

My only disappointment in watching it on February 21^st is that I realized I might have saved it for October and gotten it to count as a Halloween-themed viewing. Similarly, I could have watched Roxanne as a Valentine’s Day-themed viewing this month. Regrets, I’ve had a few.

During the opening credits I was surprised to note something I should have already known, given that it was discussed a couple years ago, which is that the film was directed by George Miller. When Mad Max: Fury Road was such a hit a few years ago, I now remember this movie as coming up in discussion of the things Miller had done since his first run of Mad Max movies, always in the context of it seeming like a surprising choice for him. Hey, directors gotta eat too.

I was also surprised to learn, in researching the movie a bit, what a wealth of entertainment properties have been spun off of John Updike’s original novel. To my surprise, there were actually three attempted television versions of this material, though only one of them was picked up for a series and that was cancelled during its first season. Those attempts were in 1992, 2002 and 2009, the last one having gotten the farthest. Maybe it’s time for another. There was also a stage musical, and a follow-up novel that Updike wrote, The Widows of Eastwick. The film certainly leaves things wide open at the end, as I would later learn.

Given that I have this ranked at 2919^th out of 4792 on Flickchart (I’ve seen almost 500 more movies than that but have gotten way behind in adding them), I wasn’t really expecting much from this. Curiously, I hadn’t given it a Letterboxd star rating – a perfect demonstration of the conflict I’ve had about whether I’ve seen it or not, it appearing on one list but not another.

However, now that I know Miller was the director, I shouldn’t be so surprised to have really enjoyed the movie. It isn’t at all clunky, it’s well put together, and all the actors are really enjoying themselves. As a bit of un-PC side commentary, I’ve never really been all that attracted to Cher, but I found her really cute in this movie. Go figure. This is also the youngest I’ve probably ever seen Richard Jenkins, a favorite of mine.

And then there’s Jack. He really brings the gusto on his performance, as you might expect. He’s got some great monologues and some wonderful individual “Jack moments.” One indicator that I’d seen it is that I felt quite familiar with his outburst where he says, paraphrasing: “Women … were they God’s mistake, or did he DO IT TO US, on PURPOSE!” It’s likely that I’ve heard that quote in the meantime – not likely on an Oscars clips show, but something similar to that. But it did add more weight to the idea that this is my second legitimate viewing of this movie.

The other thing I remembered quite well is the ending, where Nicholson grows to giant size as his devil character rises up above the house, ready to kill the rebelling women inside. That’s my lingering impression of this movie every time I think of it, and since that undoubtedly would not have been shown in the trailers or anywhere else, that was the real decider that yes, indeed, I have seen The Witches of Eastwick before. I may not have remembered the scene where they play tennis, where Nicholson’s Daryl Van Horne does funny things with the flight of the tennis ball, but that could just be random forgetting of details over time.

It could also be that I operated under different rules back then, and might see the end of a movie without watching the rest of it. Today, I’d steadfastly avert my eyes in that scenario, but in the late 1980s that might not have been as important to me. In any case, if you remember any one part of a movie, and it’s the ending, that’s pretty good proof that you’ve “seen it,” for all intents and purposes.

Which brings me to a bit of a funny predicament.

Usually – and by “usually” I mean in the one-month history of this series – if I determined I’d already seen the movie, I would not add it in my diary on Letterboxd, which is the running log of new movies added in my viewing history. That’s also where I assign the film a star rating. Instead, it would go in my Letterboxd list of movies I’ve already seen. However, in this case, it’s a movie I think I’ve already seen, but it doesn’t have a star rating.

I’m being a bit cheeky as the solution is easy enough. I’ll just log a star rating without logging a date watched, which is what I’d do for any old movie before I started logging my viewings in real time on Letterboxd.

Isn’t it edifying to know this?

In March I believe I’m going to get out of the late 1980s and watch the three movies in the Man With No Name Trilogy. It’s terrible to admit that I haven’t seen any of these, especially since I’ve owned them on BluRay for more than a year (they were a Christmas 2017 present). Because I couldn’t believe I haven’t seen them, at some point I assumed I had seen A Fistful of Dollars, and added it to my lists. Next month we’ll find out whether that was correct or not.