Practical Magic, from Alice Hoffman’s book of the same name, came out yesterday. It’s another example of details-ain’t-right-but-it’s-got-the-ambience, complete with covens, magic shoppes and solstice celebrations.

Sometime back — from the clothing, looks like even earlier than the Salem Witch Trials — an ancestral Owens woman is about to be hanged, not for witchcraft but for fooling around with a number of the local husbands (the “hanging committee”, it appears, is made up of married women). Happily for her, the rope breaks. After having seen all those pious Puritan men, who were perhaps less than pious in the hay with her, standing there and watching her hang without so much as a smile, she lays a curse: every man with whom an Owens woman will fall in love in the future will die. The death will, of course, be announced by a death-watch beetle.

Cut to two latter-day Owens sisters, Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian (Nicole Kidman), who are raised by a couple of very eccentric maiden aunts (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest) after their own mother dies of a broken heart (due to the death of their father, natch). Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet teach the girls to do magic out of what appears to be their own Book of Shadows ⁽¹⁾, though I don’t remember hearing the term used in this film. Sally is a natural — she can light candles by blowing on them — but Gillian is less capable in the field. Both develop their own ways of fighting the curse: Sally creates a spell to invite an impossible paragon with one blue eye and one green eye to come love her, hoping that, since such a creature cannot exist, she will never fall in love and the curse will have no effect; Gillian decides to spread it around and dilute it, and leaves home for this purpose.

Well, the aunts, feeling sorry for poor lonely Sally, give her a bit of a boost, and she falls for a local vegetable hauler, who marries her, shares in creating two beautiful daughters, and then has a losing encounter with a truck. Meanwhile, Gillian has teamed up with an unshaven Bulgarian ne’er-do-well named Jimmy Angelov (Goran Visnjic), who, coming from Transsylvania as he does (the scriptwriters apparently didn’t know the difference between Bulgaria and Romania), conceives of himself as a cross between Dracula and Clint Eastwood. Gillian calls on Sally for help, the two of them find themselves in a supernatural Trouble-With-Harry situation, and to top it off an Arizona investigator from the Tucson prosecutor’s office, a chap with one green eye and one blue eye, shows up to find Angelov. Both the climax and the final scene lean heavily on genuine practical magic for their success, with some action reminiscent of Fritz Leiber’s oft-filmed witchcraft novel Conjure Wife (you gotta love the lady who shows up at the coven with a vacuum cleaner instead of a broom).

As in Charmed, the female protagonists — the witches — are shown as being no more different from the ordinary, and certainly no more evil, than most of the rest of us. (“Ordinary”, as far as I can tell, is a term that refers to a highly simplified model of a human being; I have never met such a person.) For some — hopefully few — people, the frightening thing about this movie and this TV program is that if you were to ever meet one of the protagonists, and then read Exodus 22:18, you’d be more likely to scrap the book than the person.