Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

IMDB Rating 7.7/10

The adventures of writer Newt Scamander in New York's secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before Harry Potter reads his book in school.

Director: David Yates

Writer: J.K. Rowling

Stars: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol

PG-13 | 2h 13min | Adventure, Family, Fantasy | 18 November 2016

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

JK Rowling sets magic in real world

So, J K Rowling has done it. For all us sceptics who felt a little bit of magic dissipate with the announcement that the Harry Potter franchise had become the latest to fall to the temptation of a spin-off — and so soon after we had said goodbye to it — the wand has delivered us Newt Scamander.

Having appeared as just the writer of a title that was part of reading material at Hogwarts, Newt can’t be more different than Harry. Yet, he is just the flip side of the coin. If Harry is a hardscrabble boy discovering magic and finding his way in that world, Newt is a well-known wizard still moved by magic who is trying to find his way in a world of muggles.

And this is firmly where Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is placed — in the real world, with its real capability of real evil. The magic and the real worlds interact yes, and the wands are wielded still to “Obliviate” witnesses every time that happens, but the danger here comes as much from the humans too.

Rowling, in her debut screenplay, adapting her own work, etches some very fine characters even as the battles are being waged, showing that she is as capable of dealing with adult emotions. Apart from Redmayne’s deliciously but also consistently awkward Newt (that tilted head is becoming a little tiresome), there is the delightful sister duo of Tina (Waterston) and Queenie (Sudol). They are nice studies in sibling companionship and tiny rivalries, even in the little time there is here.

Yates shoots the destruction wrought by the dark beings called Obscurus in stunning, swift strokes. And every time the customary fireworks between good and evil threaten to look routine, the good acting consistently lifts the film.

The references to the Harry Potter universe are few and far between. And that shows the confidence with which Rowling and Yates, pulling off yet another successful Potter-linked film, approach the material.

Perhaps the film could have picked up pace towards the end. But clearly, no one here is in a hurry. There are four sequels planned, covering an intimidating 19-year span, Rowling has revealed.

That is more than even the distance Harry covered. However, it would take Newt to about the time zone characters from the Potter books are entering the picture

Read  full review at The Indian Express

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

JK Rowling's spectacular feat of world-building

Possibly by accident, but probably not, a film about a magical zookeeper has turned out to be the most unexpectedly relevant blockbuster of 2016. Back in September 2013, when Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was unveiled, everything about this first chunk of Warner Bros’ latest mega-budget franchise seemed factory-mulched, vacuum-packed, and reheated to order with a merry microwave ping.

It was an extension of the studio’s lucrative and recently concluded Harry Potter franchise – based on a series of books by JK Rowling which were themselves, you may recall, no commercial slouch.

It would be directed by David Yates, the steady hand who’d steered Harry Potter films five to eight to popular and critical acclaim. It would star Eddie Redmayne – a handsome, dapper Oscar-winner. It would be written by Rowling herself, in her screenwriting debut, giving the project the Potterian imprimatur, positioning it more as elaboration than spin-off. And it would take place in New York City of the 1920s: a buzzy setting, popping with storytelling potential.

Well. Fantastic Beasts may take place in the build-up to the Great Depression, but its vision of an America caught in the jaws of fear and paranoia has the stony-grim ring of the here and now. Hogsmeade, USA this ain’t: the city is cold, dark and seething with suspicion, with pamphleteers pressing for a "Second Salem" – as in witch trials – to keep the country’s clandestine magic-using element in check. Mixing cultures is frowned upon, intermarriage the strictest of no-nos.

Though Fantastic Beasts is genealogically linked to Harry Potter, with nods and winks sprinkled like cake crumbs throughout the script, in practice there’s no particular reason it had to be. Exhibit A is Redmayne, whose Newt doesn’t feel like any other personality in Potteriana: from his bashfulness to his stammer and gloriously impractical fringe, he’s a sore thumb in a cobalt greatcoat, and his company’s addictive.

The film is immaculately cast, and the chemistry between its four heroes holds your eye with its firework fizz.  In jabby comedies like Good Luck Chuck and Take Me Home Tonight, Fogler’s screen persona has tended towards the sandpapery, but he’s a teddy bear in a tweed three-piece here, roving through this magical world in an adorable state of awestruck haplessness. Waterston, the breakout star of Inherent Vice, makes Tina’s thistly pragmatism grippingly heroic, while Sudol, a singer-songwriter with little previous screen experience, proves a natural at Jazz Age slink and pep, all topped off with a (Clara) Bow.

The outstanding Coleen Atwood costumes help no end – in one scene, Porpentina wears a pair of pyjamas deserving of their own special loungewear-sporting Oscar statuette – but they’re just one facet of a meticulously designed world into which you’ll be content to sink for films on end. (Which is just as well: there are another four to come.)

The same goes for Johnny Depp, whose brief and now widely reported appearance as the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (more from him next time) is staged as a celebrity “ta-daaa!” moment that would have cheapened the film at a stroke anyway, but which here induces rigor mortis levels of cringe in light of the recent unfavourable reports about the actor.

Read full review at Telegraph

‘Fantastic Beasts’ Unleashes J.K. Rowling’s Magic on Old New York

“Is anyone safe?” That alarmed question nearly shrieks off a newspaper in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” rattling the story almost before it’s begun. A big, splashy footnote to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter screen series, it opens a new subdivision in the wizardry world that she created, even as it turns back the clock. Unlike Harry’s reality, which unfolds in a present that looks like ours but with dragons, “Fantastic Beasts” takes place in a 1926 New York, where dark forces cut swaths of destruction alongside chugging Model T’s. Ms. Rowling is just getting revved up, but her time frame suggests her sights are on another world catastrophe.

Some of the behind-the-scenes gang are back, including the director David Yates, who has brought some of his old Potter crew with him and gives this new machine a steady, smooth hand. Steve Kloves, who adapted most of the Potter movies with a light, charmed touch, has returned as a producer, while Ms. Rowling has taken sole screenwriting credit. It’s no wonder that this fantasy — with its cheery enchantments and portentous inky swirls, its steely grays and tight pacing — feels familiar. We’ve been here, done that (at least some of it), except that this time out the wizard isn’t a boy on the verge of manhood but a man idling in boyhood, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne).

Ms. Rowling has built her script on the thin foundation of her 2001 bestiary, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” which purports to be a duplicate of a textbook from Hogwarts, Harry’s school of witchcraft and wizardry. It’s a slender volume, adorned with childish scrawls (“you liar”) and filled with descriptions of creatures like the winged doxy and a dragon known as the antipodean opaleye. Given the expanding Potter universe — this is the first of five projected “Fantastic Beasts” features — the book could pass for a product catalog for potential merch, one that Ms. Rowling embellishes with comedic passages, glimmers of romance and parallel action scenes.

The characters stealing along the periphery tug harder on the imagination, notably Mary Lou Barebone (a creepily effective Samantha Morton), an anti-magic proselytizer spreading old-fashioned fire, brimstone and intolerance on city streets. Unlike the Potter movies, which grew darker and heavier as Harry and the series developed, “Fantastic Beasts” is playing peekaboo with the abyss right from the start. Particularly striking in this respect are the furtive meetings between one of Mary Lou’s charges, Credence (Ezra Miller, bringing to mind a lost Addams Family relative), and a charismatic enigma, Percival Graves (Colin Farrell, doing much with little), with uncertain designs.

These scenes read like sexual predation, especially when Mr. Farrell’s character leans close to Mr. Miller’s, his voice seductively purring as their two black silhouettes nearly blur into one. They’re especially unsettling because they play into deeply noxious stereotypes that can still emerge when an older man meets a sensitive lad in the shadows, a suggestion that is further complicated by the movie’s free-floating Fascist iconography. With his slicked, shaved hair and swirling black coat, Percival looks a few alterations and goose steps away from the Waffen-SS. It’s no wonder that I miss Harry and the rest of the kids: Where’s the new generation that’s ready to fight?

Read Full review at New york times

Rowling’s magic is back

JK Rowling has a knack of using her literature as a metaphor to draw attention to real issues. In the past, with Harry Potter, she has commented on bigotry, intolerance and used the desire for ‘pure wizard blood’ as an allegory for racial superiority. With Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the author takes her first stab at screenwriting and upping the ante. She draws attention to human ignorance and the refusal to acknowledge animal conservation among other things, where a lack of information often translates to fear and abject dismissal of equal rights.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is spectacular to look at, the effects will blow fans and the uninitiated away. Combat scenes with teleportation executed at break-neck speeds have the audience’s eyeballs whizzing all over the big screen albeit without any complaint. Then there’s the breath-taking world inside Scamander’s suitcase where his creatures live. The highlight of course is watching Rowling’s imagination come to fruition: the animals and creatures. Whether it’s the sneaky niffler, a little fur ball with a penchant for everything shiny or the thunderbird, a magnificent magnified eagle-like bird with an enchantingly elongated tail, Scamander’s friends are all beautiful. Watching Redmayne as the introverted and unassuming magizoologist care and worry about the animals is endearing, even if you’re not a lover of creatures big and small. The film will more than once, furiously tug on your heartstrings.

However , Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is not great because of its cinematic excellence. The plot is at most competent and the characters can’t do much but play second fiddle to the real stars of the films: the animals and special effects. Instead of the amplified focus on retrieving Scamander’s creatures, perhaps the film could have elaborated on other aspects. For instance, expand on the existing animosity between magical and no-maj (muggles in Potter speak) folk in the city, particularly the extremist group New Salem Philanthropic Society (the NSPS, or The Second-Salemers) led by Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton) whose aim is to expose and eradicate witches and wizards.

For his part David Yates who gave us the last four Harry Potter films does a fantastic job of directing a feature that seamlessly transitions between humorous, dark and even sinister: there are explicit allusions to child abuse, death sentences, and an extremist group looking to annihilate wizards and witches. And its shortcomings notwithstanding, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is thoroughly enigmatic and essential to be experienced on the big screen.

Read full review at The Hindu