We went out tonight and saw Fantastic Beasts and where to find them with the Arg and the Kristen. It was fun…but kind of a mess.
I realized something tonight: I am a huge, huge proponent of tropes as the foundation of a story. PLEASE. Give me a trope to hold onto…and THEN give me the new stuff, the twists, the unconventional. If I don’t have that pillar of something familiar at the center of your story, I most often get lost. And that’s what happened with Fantastic Beasts; I got lost along the way.
The good: it was full of some truly fun creatures and some likable characters, and some fun and adventure.
The bad: no idea what this movie was about, no idea who’s journey it was supposed to be, and no idea literally what happened and why it was significant in the world of magic. Oh…and there were so many fucking plot holes I can’t even begin to name them all…and they all seemed to come about because they were trying to set up a franchise. Too much arbitrary stuff thrown in, there was no time for justification…and when you don’t justify things, they have no impact…and when you pack too much shit into your movie, you don’t have time to properly set up plot points, and suddenly we’re in the land of convenience where things just happen and get fixed for no reason at all.
Don’t get me wrong…there was enough charm in this movie to make it modestly watchable. It’s not a total shit-show. The Ho hated Eddie Redmayne and the lead girl and her sister and the sidekick muggle…I didn’t *hate* them – I thought they were charming and nice enough – but in the end that’s just not enough to really, actually care about them.
So…see it if you’re hankering for a movie…but otherwise skip it and watch it when it inevitably plays on HBO or Showtime. It’s certainly no Harry Potter.
Other than that, I am fucking exhausted. I didn’t rest enough today…I’ll have to try and do that tomorrow. We’ll see. Josh is coming over for editing.
night!