Sandra Bullock – A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The original “Practical Magic” was released in October 1998, almost 30 years ago, setting the stage for a long-awaited sequel to a potential movie franchise that was ruined by rushing another bad screenplay, which will most likely ruin the chance for this movie to spawn more sequels. Considering the time and money it costs to create a great screenplay, missing this vital step so many times with movies like this one means the potential loss of a great deal of money.

The story is mundane and boring, about the daughters of the two main characters, Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian Owens (Nicole Kidman) — Kylie ( Joey King) and Maria (Ema Cavolli) — and a hundreds-of-years-old curse dooming any man who becomes romantically involved with them to an early death.

This leads Kylie to travel to England to try to find the source of the curse and end it for good. Sally and Gillian follow and meet up with an old friend, Ian Write (Lee Pace), and a long stretch of this story where very little happens, with a special effects climax that was just average and a predictable ending.

The Rotten Tomatoes score is a very low and correct 39%, with my rating at 10%, a big miss and another lost movie franchise opportunity.

In 2009, Sandra Bullock received the role of a lifetime, when she won best actress for “The Blind Side”. Her performance in this movie is more proof of how extremely difficult to get that one great role and once received – the odds are – it just may never happen again. Another great example of this is Mary Tyler Moore in “Ordinary People”, released in 1980 – where everybody in this movie, including director Robert Redford, never got a shot at a great movie again.

I for one was hoping that Bullock would follow up her role in the Blind Side, with more great parts like this one – but this is not how screenwriting, life or the movie industry works. The hard truth is that very few great scripts or in the case of the Blind Side, great true stories come around very often, and when they do, they should be considered miracles. Unfortunately Bullock in recent years has reverted back to the average movie roles including this latest example “The Lost City”, along with Channing Tatum with a cameo by Brad Pitt.

With the Lost City, about a writer of romance novels, somehow winding up in a remote Island looking for a treasure – there nothing new here, or even interesting. The attempts at humor with the nude scene by Channing Tatum (an obvious attempt to save the Box office), mostly fail, and too many times this movie falls into a boring coma that ultimately dooms this story.

I do not agree with the too high 76% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, giving this average film a 60% rating and a solid pass.