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.

The Light Between Oceans

Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) is war veteran returning from WWI to Australia. Haunted by the experience, Tom is intent on withdrawing from the human race completely and he accepts a job as the lighthouse keeper on some desolate island somewhere off the coast of Australia called Janus Rock. 

Before he departs he is given a send-off on the mainland where he meets Isabel (Alicia Vikander), who sees something she quite likes under his ridiculous WWI moustache. Well I guess the post-war man market was probably a bit depleted, so she quickly expresses a desire to get withdrawn and desolate with him on Janus. The only problem is the lighthouse has a wives only policy, so they quickly get married.

It’s an odd match with Vikander very much the toy girl here. In real life she is 28, eleven years Fassbender’s junior, but here she looks about 18 whereas he looks every day of his real age. Which is somewhat sinister for starters. 

Still they start married life on the island and we get treated to scenes of idyllic sex as the waves lap furiously up against the lighthouse. My partner says filmmakers are incapable of making a film with Fassbender without putting a sex scene in for him but in his defence it was Alicia Vikander. What's the guy supported to do? Well, he could at least look like he's enjoying it.

Fassbender’s facial expression doesn’t change much from sad/gloomy during the whole film even when he is getting down to it with Vikander. She at least gives pleasure a go and, after this film, they became a ‘real life’ couple. So she obviously wasn’t faking.

Isabel gets pregnant but has a miscarriage. Then she gets pregnant again but has another miscarriage and it is at almost this exact moment that a rowing boat is seen bobbing up and down close to the lighthouse.

The boat contains a man who is dead and a baby who is not. It is later revealed that the man was German, as if this explains why he would leave his wife, put his baby into a rowing boat and head out on to the ocean before eventually ending up at a lighthouse a hundred or so miles from anywhere. There is no attempt to explain how the husband died while the baby survived this journey.

Isabel’s urge to have children is so great that rather than ask her husband to move back to the mainland where she could get some decent antenatal care, she persuades him not to report the incident, to bury the dead man and to steal the baby to raise as their own. Erm, somewhere of course there is likely to be a grieving mother? No matter, the infant Lucy is raised by them.

 

Four years later, Tom comes across a memorial for a missing man and baby which leads him to find out who the real mother is, namely Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz). It really makes you wonder why nothing was in the local paper at the time or perhaps a few ‘missing’ posters? Why did no one say to the lighthouse keeper ‘seen any random rowing boats Tom?’ but implausible plot twists are de rigueur here. Tom promptly goes off to send a note to Hannah to let her know her baby is safe. Pillock.

Then the police gets involved and it all quickly boils down to a murder\kidnapping trial and a nasty custody battle over poor Lucy aka Grace who doesn’t know which mummy to turn to. Well she does and it’s not a popular choice.

There’s still time for more implausible plot twists as Isabel inexplicably puts her husband in jail for the alleged murder of the man in the boat and the film ends up tying itself in such a knot with its own twists and turns that the ending makes even less sense than what has gone before it. 

You’ve probably guessed by now that I didn’t enjoy it that much.

The tagline of this film is ‘you only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day’. I have forgiven my partner for taking me to see this.

Nocturnal Animals

Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is a failed artist who now runs a gallery. She is married to Hutton (Armie Hammer), her second husband, but she isn’t enjoying her life very much.

One day she receives a package from her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), almost 20 years after she divorced with him. The package contains a manuscript of a book entitled ‘Nocturnal Animals’, a phrase he often used to describe her being a chronic insomniac. It is also dedicated to her and comes with a note explaining that it was a book she inspired him to write.

When her husband departs on yet another bedroom based ‘business’ trip she starts to read it. Edward always was an aspiring novelist and her younger student-self fell for him. She thought she could marry him and make things work. Which was not something her mother (Laura Linney) agreed with her on, telling her he was weak and not her ‘equal’.

Susan always criticised his writing for being autobiographical and as she starts to read she seems to automatically cast him as the head character Tony. Tony is on holiday with his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and daughter India (Ellie Bamber) when they are driven off an isolated stretch of road by a group of men led by Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Tony’s wife and daughter are kidnapped by the men and they are eventually found naked and dead.

Susan becomes consumed by the story and its disturbing plot which hits home inside her head. It causes her to reflect back on her life with Edward. Both the good times and when she finally took her mother’s advice, all women eventually turn into their mothers, and terminated her marriage to the man she claimed to love along with his unborn child. Instead she turned to a materially perfect life and a loveless marriage to a 'real' man who was a complete bastard.

The film mixes scene from the present, the past and fiction with great style with the ‘fiction’ feeling as impressively real as the ‘real’ story. In the book Tony enlists the help of cancer struck detective Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) to hunt down the perpetrators but, even as they find them, Tony’s life spirals ever downwards as he attempts to make amends for not fighting hard enough for the ones he loved. Tony never recovers from having his wife and daughter ripped away from him in one of many parallels with the ‘real’ story. 

His book makes Susan realise what a soulmate she gave up on, what she did to him and perhaps even causes her to fall in love with him all over again. She must also be wondering whether Edward is now in the same state as Tony. Just how autobiographical is his story or has Edward simply channelled all his hurt into this dark tale so that he can move on. The film leaves us to decide for ourselves.

It is a beautiful crafted film, superbly acted particularly by Adams and Shannon, which moves along at a cracking pace. It gets under your skin and into your head in ways that not many films do.

At the end she tries to see Edward but perhaps you have to live with the choices you’ve made and their consequences for other people, whatever they may be, and move on or maybe not.

Highly recommended.