Wish Upon (PG-13 / unrated)
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This movie barely made a profit, and did quite poorly with critics. I've chosen not to include any links to specific reviews here, because they range from very unkind to moderately kind but still more in the vein of enjoying it ironically, whereas I enjoyed it completely un-ironically. I'm not saying it doesn't have its flaws, but none of them seemed that bad to me. And some of the flaws critics saw, I didn't see at all. And can't see even once they're pointed out. (I should also mention I watched the PG-13 version; I have no idea whether I- or critics- would like the unrated version better, worse, or about the same.)

It begins with a woman named Johanna Shannon (Elisabeth Rohm) throwing away a mysterious bundle, and then sending her young daughter, Clare, to ride her bike down the street and back. By the time Clare gets home, her mother has hanged herself. The movie then flashes forward to Clare (Joey King) as a 17-year-old high school student. She has a couple of good friends, Meredith and June, but otherwise Clare is pretty unpopular. This may have a lot to do with the fact that her father, Jonathan (Ryan Phillippe), has a hobby of dumpster-diving (along with a friend of his own). One day, Jonathan discovers a locked music box in the trash. (It's obviously the same bundle his late wife threw away all those years ago, so I don't know how it's still around, but I'll overlook that particularly oddity because I have to.) The box has Chinese writing on it, and he decides to give it to Clare as an early birthday present, because she's taking a Chinese language class in school.

When Clare receives the music box, she can't open it, and pretty much the only thing she can interpret of the writing is "seven wishes." She takes it to her teacher, but he says some of the writing is an ancient dialect or whatever, so she'd have to take it to a scholar for a full interpretation. A guy in her class named Ryan Hui offers to have his cousin interpret it for Clare, an offer she dismisses for the time being, but takes him up on later in the film. Ryan's cousin, Gina, eventually provides some help with the translation, but even she has to seek help with one part of the text from someone else. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Um... at any rate, Clare starts making wishes, at first not expecting them to come true. But when they do, she's kind of happy about it, and becomes increasingly happy about this power. Meanwhile, her dog dies soon after the first wish, and people Clare knows die with each succeeding wish, though it takes awhile before she finds out about some of them. It's longer still before she learns that the deaths are connected to her wishes. Once she does, she wants to get rid of the music box, but she's also become addicted to it (presumably supernaturally addicted, which I expect is one of the unspoken effects of the music box), so she can't bring herself to give it up. But she does get Ryan to try and help, and separately, tries to get Meredith and June to help.

And... there's not much more I want to reveal. Except by the end of the movie, Clare comes up with a plan to undo all the wishes and deaths, but I don't want to say how that works out for her. I was satisfied with how the movie ended, though. Except... there's also a mid-credits scene that implies more trouble to come....