BEFORE: Colin Farrell carries over from "The Way Back" and gets me to this film, which I really should have watched in some form last year, if I'm being honest. But, everything in its proper place, and I've had this on my list next to tomorrow's film, which was relegated to the "unlinkables" file for a long while, so I'll be rescuing that one soon. My December re-organization of the list to program January (by counting back from the Feb. 1 film) was a great opportunity to shuffle this one up closer to the top of the list.
I spent the first 2 weeks of January finally getting copies of all 8 "Harry Potter" films - I'd seen them all before, but I didn't bother buying or saving copies on DVD - but then HBO decided to run them all in a row on New Year's Day AND make them all available On Demand at the same time. Of course I then suddenly had all kinds of dubbing problems, like a VCR that was making a noise that suggested it wanted to be put out of its misery. Then I had to figure out which of my back-up VCRs had the least amount of problems and could be called into service as my new main dubbing deck. Plus most of those films are over 2 1/2 hours long, so I really had only one tape that would hold each film.
I would like to re-watch all of the "Harry Potter" films in order, all at once, which I've never done - but I just don't have that kind of time. Maybe later this year, since I'm not planning on working at Comic-Con any more, I can take a week off from the chain and just knock those out.
THE PLOT: The adventures of magic zoologist Newt Scamander in New York's secret community of witches and wizards, 70 years before Harry Potter reads his book in school.
AFTER: My first thought regarding this film is, "Jesus, doesn't J.K Rowling have ENOUGH money by now?" But this is the world we live in, where three or four movies in a series is just not sufficient, not when you can drag the last book out into two movies (see also: Hunger Games) and then come up with a few tangential spin-off movies (see also: Rogue One). And it's really clever, the way they got out of the world of Hogwarts and Hagrid and Quidditch and Dumbledore and moved the action to 70 years earlier and all the way to NYC.
Plus, all those girls who fantasized about young Harry Potter during their teen years (the damaged boy with secret powers, no doubt a teen turn-on) are now older, some of them are in college and finally realizing that their jock boyfriends who mistreated them during senior year were, in fact, assholes, and they're looking for their first adult relationships (I'm guessing here, but work with me for a sec.) Along comes Newt Scamander, and he's charming, a bit odd but very polite, he's kind to animals and probably likes long walks on the beach, plus he's well beyond his teen years, so there's not that awkward training phase, he already knows how to use that wand, if you get my drift. So this is a very shrewd move, to appeal to that same demographic that may have aged out of the Potterverse. I get that.
Combine that with a group of beasts and monsters roughly equivalent in number to that seen in the Pokemon franchise, and that's a license to go crazy with the merchandising of toys, stuffed animals and Happy Meal collectibles after the film takes off, right?
This is another case of "hero finds himself in a strange land, and has to learn the new rules of that place to fix the situation at hand" - that's "Alice Through the Looking Glass" again, heck, that describes just about every film this week, once you take that step back from it. Only this one has cuter creatures than "Alice", like the platypus-thing and the thing that looks a bit like Baby Groot.
What's interesting to me is the American spin that's placed here on the wizard types that were once seen only at Hogwarts. In the U.S. "Muggles" are called "No-Maj" people - it makes sense that Americans would divide themselves according to a class structure that emphasizes their differences, and that the terminology would be there to make one group feel like "less than" - it would be like calling people of color "non-whites", which probably was a thing at some point. Then instead of a Ministry of Magic, there's a Magical Congress (MACUSA) which much like the real Congress, is full of rules and regulations and seemingly incapable of making decisions and presumably, passing new legislation. And come on, making foreign wizards apply for "wand permits" is a riff on ineffectual gun control in the U.S., right? But hey, at least our house elves aren't treated like slaves.
Also starring Eddie Redmayne (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Katharine Waterston (last seen in "Steve Jobs"), Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller (last seen in "Justice League"), Samantha Morton, Jon Voight (last seen in "The Champ"), Carmen Ejogo (last seen in "Alex Cross"), Ronan Raftery, Josh Cowdery, Faith Wood-Blagrove, Jenn Murray, Kevin Guthrie, the voices of Ron Perlman (last seen in "Drive"), Dan Hedaya (last seen in "The Crew"), and cameos from Johnny Depp (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Zoe Kravitz (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie").
RATING: 7 out of 10 occamies
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