Beasts Aren't Fantastic, but Newt Is

Let me start with this weekend's choices: it was Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Johnny Depp or Widows, aka Ocean's 8 with guns and violence.

We chose the Beasts.

Several things caused this: we had seen the first movie (you don't need to have seen it to make no sense of this one), I think we rather like Eddie Redmayne, and we had seen the previews and ads so often for Widows that we were tired of it and its premise without seeing it.  And there's this: Viola Davis is a good, maybe great, actress, but she really doesn't inspire "I gotta see her" like say last month someone said "I gotta see Bradley Cooper."  And, no, that wasn't me. :)

The Beasts got a 37% of something like it from Rotten Tomatoes from the critics.  We knew this and went anyway.  But any review of the movie has to tell you that figuring out what goes on is a thing here -- we spent several minutes on the road home from the cinema wondering if one main character lived, died, or went to the dark side.  We're still not wholly sure.  It goes like that.

But Redmayne is winning as the shy and animalphile Newt Scamander (who makes these names up?  Oh, you do know that this is a Harry Potter send-off, written by JK Rowlings, right?) who is good with the eyes down, under the terrible side-bangs hairdo, thing and good with the CGI animals, with his winning smile.  You believe Newt is better with monstrous beasts -- a line used a couple times in the movie -- than with people.

The CGI is great, too.  I don't know what many of the things in the movie are supposed to be (I neither read the book the first movie was based on or remember much of the last movie), but they are fantastic onscreen.  It's hard not to like the recreation of Groot the Younger, the something-like-a-playtpus thing or the much, much larger tiger-dragon thing.  Fun stuff.

And then there's Depp.  As the bad guy, Grimelwald, he's okay.   Like his other campy creation, Captain Jack Sparrow, this one seems the right amount of over-the-top for what now seems to be his wheelhouse.  Spiky blonde hair, one fake eye, ghoulish coloring... Subtlety, if ever his thing, is now not his thing.

One of Grimelwald's crimes seems to be that he stares longingly into Jude Law's eyes...or Jude Law's younger self's eyes.  Yes, there's a moment that has homosexual elements that has the twitterverse twittering.  BFD.  (Law is underused here as Albus Dumbledore, the grandfatherly hero of the Potter saga, as his younger self.  It is 1927.)

Probably a couple people in secondary roles deserve mentioning -- Dan Fogler as Jacob brings a light-hearted charm as Newt's muggle sidekick, and Katherine Waterston as Tina, one of the good guys, and Newt's love interest (well, one of them, we are thinking it is also Lita, but...the plot twists) is the right kind of not comic.  And flourishes a wand with esprit.

In all, it's fun.  It's not Oscar bait.  But it was #1 this weekend at the box office, by A LOT, so it's that kind of light-hearted entertainment -- as long as you don't ponder the darkness of the ending.  Captain Jack, errr, Grimenwald, has a whole troop of supporters who were junior Hitler costumes (this is 1927) and, having said that joining him (he IS the bad guy) will prevent WWII, well, things end. 

But we're ignoring that, you should see it.  It'd be a good Thanksgiving weekend's light entertainment.  To go with the turkey and Oscar bait.

Caught in the Spider's Web

This week's installment of our fall movie reviews is the newest installment of Stieg Larsson's Millenium series, The Girl in the Spider's Web.

But first, a word on previews: why do theatres think we should get half a dozen, or more, previews?  Twenty plus minutes of something that's not the movie you came to see.  And, in the case of Spider's Web, not much that snared you in.  It was an odd mix of previews -- some action, some tending towards art films (I'm still trying to figure out where Widows falls, after seeing the preview quadzillion times).

Maybe the most interesting part of Spider's Web is the casting of Claire Foy, most famous as Queen Elizabeth in The Crown, as Lisbeth Salander. 

Foy is good in the role; the Swedish accent she uses works well enough.

Interviews have made much of this movie and its being shot during the beginnings of the #MeToo movement.  But this isn't that movie -- although it opens with Lisbeth avenging a husband who has clearly beaten his wife, that's all of it.  None of the rest of the plot deals with this -- a bit of a red herring.

As with all Larsson vehicles, you have to pay attention to the plot.  It is a bit convoluted, somehow working a sister into the plot, after all the other manipulations with computer files and hacking -- standard Lisbeth stuff.

It's entertaining enough.  And, as usual in the series, a bit masochistic. 

It's also, again typically, a bit far-fetched: we get where we believe in action thrillers that the bad guy can't hit the hero from six feet away with an automatic pistol.  Lisbeth survives with just a large graze, somehow.

And somehow survives falling from a second story; a car crash; a gas attack; being sucked tightly into a plastic skin. 

Routine stuff.

In the end, it's a pleasant enough movie.  If it's to be someone's Oscar bait, I'm not sure whose: maybe the stunt people, though it doesn't begin to compare with Mission: Impossible last summer.

Go see it.