Got back from Fantastic Beasts.
Nov. 27th, 2016 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofleithianAnd it was decent enough. I liked it.
Trailers I Got:
Wonder Woman: Gal Gadot will be superb. Enough said.
Beauty and the Beast: Belle is perfectly cast, the Beast is perfectly cast, Gaston is perfectly cast...everyone is perfectly cast and I cannot wait for this movie!
Rogue One: Looks awesome. Jyn Erso will kick butt without a doubt. Also, yay, Vader's back!
The movie itself:
What I Liked:
The characters were likable. It was easy to like Jacob Kowalski and Newt Scamander, as well as Tina and Queenie. Queenie was awesome, especially in her rescuing Newt and co., and Newt was genuinely a nice person. And him trying to save Credence, the gentle care towards his creatures...he was just such a sweet guy. Jacob was a genuinely nice person and I liked his initial reactions to thinking everything was a dream, as well as his amazement when climbing into Newt's suitcase (basically, there's literally a whole world in there). Doubly heartwarming considering the overall mood of paranoia in the Muggle world, though not without reason. So the main characters were easy to root for and like.
-Credence. Oh, Credence. Rowling did a beautiful job with making him a Woobie Destroyer of Worlds. Graves/Grindelwald casting him aside when he thinks -- mistakenly -- that Credence is a Squib when Credence thinks he's found a father figure in him (accentuated by how nurturing he acts earlier in the film towards him) is heartwrenching and both Newt and Tina trying to get through to him is also heartwrenching. Not to mention his scenes with his horrible adopted mother. He was so well-done that, honestly? I wanted him to survive and be redeemed. Unfortunately, not so much.
-Colin Farrell was great as the disguised Grindelwald. There's one particular scene when he's in disguise talking to Madame President about the Statute of Secrecy and how it inconveniences wizards when she's trying to justify Credence's death (and it's disturbing how she talks that way about a battered child) and Colin Farrell just kills that monologue, in a good way. There's something about his quietly menacing screen presence, and his ruthlessness (him going Palpatine on Newt Scamander was actually pretty disturbing) that actually makes the reveal of the real Grindelwald a let down.
-The worldbuilding. The different creatures, the different settings...all of them look amazing on screen. And for a moment, sometimes we are Jacob, taking in how amazing everything is.
What I Didn't:
-They could have really focused a bit more on Grindelwald. I mean, there were some great bits, like the Second Salemers (though considering how notorious the Salem Witch Trials are in history for false accusations, wouldn't some people have expressed hesitation in going after suspected witches and wizards?), but it would have been interesting to see more.
-Was Madame President's attitude towards Credence after she basically killed him supposed to be intentionally disturbing? I mean, she treated him so coldly and detachedly (and even the Nomaj he killed seemed to be treated more like an "aw crap, our world's going to be exposed" inconvenience instead of someone dying, which was also disturbing) that I'm wondering if it was deliberate or just a bit of unintentional disturbing-ness.
-Honestly, I think Johnny Depp was miscast a bit as Grindelwald even if he was just in the film for a few seconds. He just didn't have the sort of command you would expect of Grindelwald. Not in terms of his face, or the way he presents himself to Madame President. And his German accent was a little goofy. I didn't see Grindelwald; I saw Mordecai pretending to be Grindelwald. Colin Farrell was way better as the disguised Grindelwald than Johnny Depp was as the real one. I think Colm Feore could have done the job. I remember him in Storm of the Century and he did a good job at being both menacing and a bit buoyant, which would have worked for the guy. Or heck, get the guy from Deathly Hallows, unless he was somehow too old for the role. Depp just felt like an anticlimax after how just dang good Colin Farrell was. And considering we may be seeing more of Grindelwald...yeah.
(Also, if Dumbledore's showing up -- which he may be in the future -- I was thinking of getting Viggo Mortensen to play him. He could definitely carry that sort of gravity to play Dumbledore and convincingly emulate both Gambon and Harris. Especially since Dumbledore is quite a bit younger in the 1940s when he takes on Grindelwald.)
So overall? Pretty good movie. I recommend it.
Trailers I Got:
Wonder Woman: Gal Gadot will be superb. Enough said.
Beauty and the Beast: Belle is perfectly cast, the Beast is perfectly cast, Gaston is perfectly cast...everyone is perfectly cast and I cannot wait for this movie!
Rogue One: Looks awesome. Jyn Erso will kick butt without a doubt. Also, yay, Vader's back!
The movie itself:
What I Liked:
The characters were likable. It was easy to like Jacob Kowalski and Newt Scamander, as well as Tina and Queenie. Queenie was awesome, especially in her rescuing Newt and co., and Newt was genuinely a nice person. And him trying to save Credence, the gentle care towards his creatures...he was just such a sweet guy. Jacob was a genuinely nice person and I liked his initial reactions to thinking everything was a dream, as well as his amazement when climbing into Newt's suitcase (basically, there's literally a whole world in there). Doubly heartwarming considering the overall mood of paranoia in the Muggle world, though not without reason. So the main characters were easy to root for and like.
-Credence. Oh, Credence. Rowling did a beautiful job with making him a Woobie Destroyer of Worlds. Graves/Grindelwald casting him aside when he thinks -- mistakenly -- that Credence is a Squib when Credence thinks he's found a father figure in him (accentuated by how nurturing he acts earlier in the film towards him) is heartwrenching and both Newt and Tina trying to get through to him is also heartwrenching. Not to mention his scenes with his horrible adopted mother. He was so well-done that, honestly? I wanted him to survive and be redeemed. Unfortunately, not so much.
-Colin Farrell was great as the disguised Grindelwald. There's one particular scene when he's in disguise talking to Madame President about the Statute of Secrecy and how it inconveniences wizards when she's trying to justify Credence's death (and it's disturbing how she talks that way about a battered child) and Colin Farrell just kills that monologue, in a good way. There's something about his quietly menacing screen presence, and his ruthlessness (him going Palpatine on Newt Scamander was actually pretty disturbing) that actually makes the reveal of the real Grindelwald a let down.
-The worldbuilding. The different creatures, the different settings...all of them look amazing on screen. And for a moment, sometimes we are Jacob, taking in how amazing everything is.
What I Didn't:
-They could have really focused a bit more on Grindelwald. I mean, there were some great bits, like the Second Salemers (though considering how notorious the Salem Witch Trials are in history for false accusations, wouldn't some people have expressed hesitation in going after suspected witches and wizards?), but it would have been interesting to see more.
-Was Madame President's attitude towards Credence after she basically killed him supposed to be intentionally disturbing? I mean, she treated him so coldly and detachedly (and even the Nomaj he killed seemed to be treated more like an "aw crap, our world's going to be exposed" inconvenience instead of someone dying, which was also disturbing) that I'm wondering if it was deliberate or just a bit of unintentional disturbing-ness.
-Honestly, I think Johnny Depp was miscast a bit as Grindelwald even if he was just in the film for a few seconds. He just didn't have the sort of command you would expect of Grindelwald. Not in terms of his face, or the way he presents himself to Madame President. And his German accent was a little goofy. I didn't see Grindelwald; I saw Mordecai pretending to be Grindelwald. Colin Farrell was way better as the disguised Grindelwald than Johnny Depp was as the real one. I think Colm Feore could have done the job. I remember him in Storm of the Century and he did a good job at being both menacing and a bit buoyant, which would have worked for the guy. Or heck, get the guy from Deathly Hallows, unless he was somehow too old for the role. Depp just felt like an anticlimax after how just dang good Colin Farrell was. And considering we may be seeing more of Grindelwald...yeah.
(Also, if Dumbledore's showing up -- which he may be in the future -- I was thinking of getting Viggo Mortensen to play him. He could definitely carry that sort of gravity to play Dumbledore and convincingly emulate both Gambon and Harris. Especially since Dumbledore is quite a bit younger in the 1940s when he takes on Grindelwald.)
So overall? Pretty good movie. I recommend it.
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no subject
Date: 2016-11-28 07:54 am (UTC)As for the Second Salemers – I had this notion that the leader/mother was actually a Squib. The way she acted when it came to witchcraft/wizardry seemed not entirely hysterical but chillingly knowing, plus among the at least Credence, Modesty and Chastity had magic – and she made them resent that part of of themselves... I thought that was probably a reaction to being resented herself once for being born without magic. It reminded me of Filch in Harry Potter to a degree.
The most disturbing thing about Graves's monologue at the end was that in a sense (not how he would be spinning it if he were in power), he wasn't completely wrong. These laws do not seem to protect anybody.
I loved Tina the most but thought the whole main cast was great. When it comes to Newt, I was happy to see that a scientist was portrayed in positive light. I hope we'll get to see Zoë Kravitz as Leta Lestrange in future movies and get more backstory on their friendship.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-29 02:43 am (UTC)I did think that the movie was fun, but pretty much for the scenes actually about the ‘Fantastic Creatures.’ I didn’t get why the other stuff had to be there, especially since not much of it paid off. The Muggle (I don’t think that the term ‘No-Maj’ has the same flow to it) politician and his family? He winds up being killed off and they get Obliviated before they can do any serious damage to wizards. The whole storyline with Credence? Again, the only real damage that happens is to Credence and after all of that misery that we see him go through, he’s just killed off at the end and the heroes don’t think twice about him after that, even though he was the reason why Tina was fired.
I liked Queenie and Jacob; I thought that their romance was cute. I liked Newt when he was in the menagerie briefcase with his creatures (those were my favorite scenes) and I think that the only reason why he had such trouble containing them (so many times I was wondering, “Are you a wizard or not? Use Petrificus Totalus!”) was for slapstick.
But I just could not stand Tina or the President. Tina annoyed the heck out of me. She seemed more like a rookie cop on her first day of the job, and her whole demeanor came across to me as whiny, incompetent, and dithering. I don’t know if it was the actress or the script or both, but I just found her grating. I also don’t see why they had to tack on a random, forced romantic tension scene between her and Newt at the end, because there had been no chemistry between Tina and Newt before that point. We already got a romance between Queenie and Jacob, so why the need to pair up Newt and Tina too?
And you’ve already touched on the reasons why I hated the President. I kept hoping that her arrogance and refusal to listen to Tina would come back to bite her, but it didn’t. Graves was the only one who called her out on what she did to Credence and he’d been using him the whole time! And after he was taken into custody, that was it. Nobody criticized her about Credence. Nobody protested when she demanded that the “No-Maj” be Obliviated. Like you, I don’t know if the movie meant for us to see her as a bad person, but I certainly did.
And I don’t know if the movie meant to give us another example of the pattern that’s been running through the HP books: that is of the wizarding government’s failure to protect wizarding children growing up in Muggle society. I don’t know if the movie intended for Credence to be a male version of Ariana, but he certainly resembled Harry and Tom in certain aspects. And, to a certain extent, Merope, because apparently nobody bothered to check up on him after Tina had gotten fired for defending him, just like nobody bothered to check up on Merope after her father and brother were arrested.
I agree with you about Johnny Depp being a weird choice for Grindelwald. I didn’t even notice that he had a German accent, and I couldn’t figure out what was up with his hair.