Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Ok. So I admit I was the one who watched all the Harry Potter films without fully understanding what was going on. Well, I did follow the first one which was utterly charming and the second to last one which was a bit like a proper film but the rest were all well, full of the sort of stuff I didn’t really understand. Wizardry you might call it. Made up stuff. So it’s fair to say that ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ probably wasn’t made for me.

It's been five years since the last Harry Potter film and it’s a surprise that it’s taken that long for them to decide to bleed the original idea dry but now they clearly have now. ‘Fantastic Beasts’ is based on a fictional textbook Harry and his classmates studied at Hogwarts and JK Rowling published as a short story in 2001.

We are now back in the 1920’s and in the interests of coining the more lucrative American market the action has been moved to New York. Former Hogwarts student and now wizard zoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) has arrived in the city on route to Arizona where he is going to release a Thunderbird into the wild.

When he arrives he is arrested by Porpetina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) aka Tina a downgraded Auror from MACUSA (Magical Congress of the United States of America) whose job it is to investigate any unregistered wizard who comes into the city.

By now Newt has lost his suitcase, which contains not only the Thunderbird but other fantastic beasts, after one of the oldest tricks in the world, the old swapped suitcase affair. Consequently his beasts end up with no-maj (aka muggle) wannabe baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler).

The charges against Newt are dismissed by Percival Graves (Colin Farrell), presumably the boss, when he examines Newt's suitcase to find nothing but doughnuts while the contents of his original suitcase escape and run amok in NYC. 

Newt and Tina along with Jacob and Tina’s mind-reading sister Queenie (Alison Sudol), who seems to have the hots for Jacob, now team up to recapture them Pokémon-go style. Queue comic chase sequences.

Yes the Niffler, a magical platypus with an expensive strain of kleptomania, is cute and funny as it attempts to cram all the world’s valuables into its bottomless stomach but Eddie Redmayne performing a mating dance with the aim of luring a rhino-style beast, an Erumpent, is beyond excruciating.

You know that studios have run out of ideas when they end up resorting to more and more special effects. An hour into this I already have a CGI related headache along with a severe case of boredom.

Headache aside, I was sort of with everything to this point but new characters such as Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), the adopted child of the wizard hating Mary Lou (Samantha Morton), keep coming at you from all angles without much in the way of an explanation. 

None of these characters added up to much which meant I didn’t really care much for any of them. What made the Harry Potter watchable was that the brilliant characters which are sadly absent here.

Rowling is capable of much better than this. We know she is, Casual Vacancy, Cormoran Strike etc. To me ‘Fantastic Beasts’ is a cluttered mess and I haven’t been so unentertained in a long time.

At least you know it's a wind up when Johnny Depp appears at the end as Grindewald... it is a wind up, isn’t it? Apparently not, this is going to be a series of five films. Wake me up when it's all over.

Control

'Control' is a biopic of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division. It is made by Anton Corbijn, the man who photographed and worked with the band. So presumably the project was very personal to him. It was also presumably very personal to his widow Deborah, as the film is based on her biography of her husband, 'Touching From a Distance'. The fact that it is all through his wife's eyes is quite thought provoking in itself. Deborah Curtis, who is played by Samantha Morton, is also involved in the production of the film, which Corbijn shot entirely in black and white, which seems very appropriate. Ian Curtis never really sang in colour, the band were all about dark brooding guitars and deep, doom-laden lyrics.
I was only 13 when he died and I didn't discover Joy Division until a few years later via the early New Order stiff. It is also true that the band were never that popular until his death made them so.

The film starts with Curtis still at school and takes us through to his death in 1980 at the age of only 23. Surprisingly he comes across as quite a likeable chap, more so than I ever though he was. He worked in the social security office and did a great job finding work for people with disabilities.

The film shows his struggle with epilepsy for which doctors give him a cocktail of pills to take, from which he suffers from the side effects. The doctors don't come out of it very well but then again he never went back to get his dosage reviewed. They also tell him to have early nights and stay off the booze, which is a tad difficult when you're trying to be a rock star.

The film also details his disastrous personal life. He married his childhood sweetheart way too soon, and then compounded his error by adding a child into the mix, again way too soon. You can't do the whole touring thing where the girls are throwing themselves at you, with a wife and kids back home. Consequently he gets off with a Belgian reporter and he's not strong enough to choose between the two women.



Curtis quickly reaches a point where juggling his home life, love life and life on the road is too much for him. Add into this his illness and the fact that he couldn't cope with the pressures brought on by the band starting to become popular; it all becomes an accident waiting to happen. Unfortunately we all know how's its going to end and it's partly a case of waiting for that to happen. The people around him don't seem to realise how bad his growing sense of despair is. When the band record the song 'Isolation', no one seems to notice that the lyrics are effectively his suicide note.



A matter of days before the bank were due to leave on their first ever tour of the USA, Curtis hanged himself from a rope in his kitchen.

The film is excellent, another great British film that deserves all the praise it will hopefully get. Sam Riley deserves enormous credit for mimicking Curtis. He has his singing style down to a tee, hunched over the mic one moment, dancing badly the next, epileptic fit the next. Also credit to all the other actors who played the band members. Although the portrayal of Peter Hook doesn't do him any favours. They also played all the songs, there's no miming to the originals here. Riley's performances of tracks like 'She's lost control', 'Transmission' and of course 'Isolation' are all excellent.

The choice of music can perhaps be a bit cliché at times. For instance the use of 'Love will tear us apart' when his marriage is falling apart and I suppose it was always going to end with 'Atmosphere' accompanying his death.

There are plenty of other great performances in the film, motor-mouth manager Rob Gretton has some of the best lines and the late Tony Wilson is also played well.

An excellent film and an excellent night, oh and we win the rugby too but a warning, if someone you love starts singing lines such as,

'In the shadowplay, acting out your own death, knowing no more'.

Be worried.