J.D. Hansel

2016

Toni Erdmann Review

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The past few years have seen a strikingly large number of films that have made a big splash unexpectedly, shaking up cinema and dividing critics.  From La La Land to Deadpool, or maybe even LEGO Batman, much of the fun of seeing a popular movie from 2016 is the experience of bafflement brought on by how unlikely it is that such a film could get a wide release in theaters with how far it strays from what studio execs normally like.  Toni Erdmann presents the European side of the story.  Some people I’ve known who’ve seen it find it entirely ordinary, whereas some critics think it’s a sign that cinema’s not dead.  As a contemporary German film, one would expect a certain set of features that this film does, in fact, have: hyper-realism, a focus on real world issues (without neatly simplifying them to straightforward sermons), unsettling use of nudity, sex, and violence, and unconventional engagement with America’s entertainment industries.  That being said, it does all this with a strange style – with a sentiment that’s difficult to pinpoint because it swings so far from being very objective, logical, and factual to being fun entertainment cinema, and then fully into raw depression.  With such a strange hodgepodge of emotion, it’s difficult for people to discern how best to categorize the film in terms of genre.

While it’s been marketed as a comedy, this feels sort of like cheating since most of the film isn’t as fun as the trailers (which give the impression of a Coen Brothers film) would have one believe.  There is clearly such a strong element of family drama in the film, and arguably some sort of political drama as well, in a sense, that there is good reason to think of this as a drama with comedic moments, but fortunately, the term “dramedy” allows us to stop worrying about such a dispute.  I would argue, however, that the film is first and foremost a comedy, and that’s because of how the film engages with Freudian comedy theory.  When the movie engages with comedy, it’s a kind of awkward comedy that doesn’t just let the viewer laugh at characters who act strangely or get into awkward situations, a la The Office, but rather makes the audience feel personally uncomfortable.  I almost feel bad about being in the room at a time when the characters are so vulnerable, and consequently I can’t help but laugh for the sake of release, and it’s also funny because of how unaware the characters seem to be of the absurdity of their own situation.  I think this is why, while the whole movie is, in a word, relentless, the funny scenes stand out as the most memorable.  The film essentially presents a panorama of all the different kinds of “confrontation with the uncomfortable” that cinema has to offer, but it’s the funny scenes that make it something particularly special.

Moana Review

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Approval Voting, Plurality, Plurality with Runoff, Approval/Disapproval Voting, Majority Judgment, Borda Count, Cumulative Voting, and Range/Score Voting are just a few of the voting systems that have been theorized in social choice theory and/or practiced by democracies.  The fairness of a democratic election is something that many of us take for granted, but there are actually a lot of problems with many of the most common methods.  Consider Approval/Disapproval Voting, in which the voter expresses which candidates he/she would accept and which candidates he/she would not – essentially the thumbs-up/thumbs-down system of Reddit (as I understand it).  For candidates in an election, it would make some amount of sense for the candidate who most people gave a “thumbs up,” even though he/she wasn’t their favorite, to surpass the candidate whom many loved most and many hated.  In this scenario, most people would get a leader of whom they approved, and fewer people would get the candidate they hated, which is fine for politics.  When assessing art, however, this seems inappropriate, as exemplified by the fact that the high-quality (but highly divisive) La La Land has a lower score on Rotten Tomatoes than the objectively “good enough” Moana.

The problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that it allows the big movie studios to create the illusion that their films are highly praised simply by making movies that are safe, simple, and reliably passable.  Moana is a perfect example of this, because approximately 3% of this movie is special and original, whereas 97% is an old, faithful “hero’s journey” that any movie buff can’t help but find predictable.  There is nothing particularly bad about Moana, but nearly all of its parts seem to exist purely to serve their function in the regular machinery of the standard animated adventure.  I’ll grant that the twist ending (if it can be called such) did surprise me, but the fifteen minutes preceding it went exactly as I predicted, creating a sense that the writers were merely lazy watchmakers.  It seems Clements and Musker assumed they were the only people to have seen the original Star Wars, and I hate to break it to them, but I’ve seen that movie too – and I felt like I’d already seen Moana.  While Frozen has certain elements that are quite predictable and embarrassingly trite, at least it manages to find the right balance of tribute and criticism in regards to earlier Disney films, whereas this film lets Maui joke about its adherence to the old formulas without making changes to address this criticism.

Sure, audiences may enjoy this movie a lot – for now – but eventually people will be shocked by just how little of it is memorable.  The comedy is nearly all predictable, conforming to the same comic style that has made nearly every CGI family film from the past fifteen years feel bland and lacking in wit, but the jokes still got me at times … I just can’t remember them.  The soundtrack has songs that are perfectly serviceable and that employ clever lyrics, but I can’t remember most of them either.  I would go so far as to say that there are no more than three memorable songs on the soundtrack, and that’s being gracious.  (This film’s “I Want” song is still stuck in my head, but I’m not happy about it – it’s far too contemporary and “poppy” in style, so it’s sure to become dated.)  Most of the performances are rather forgettable as well, with only The Rock having his fair share of fun in the recording booth.  That being said, as cliché and forgettable as it may have been, the music and story still worked on me, creating truly beautiful and moving moments at times that I hope I will remember.

The reason why I would recommend this movie, in spite of all I have just said, is that it has many strong moments that everyone should see, albeit in spite of itself.  True, most of the visuals have the usual, boring “Disney CGI” look – what one would expect from a PIXAR short – but some scenes threw the usual conventions away in favor of artistry.  As a giant crab sings the almost anti-melodic “Shiny,” the lights go out, and everything starts to glow in neon colors against dark blues and black.  In terms of visuals, this is about the best I’ve seen from any CG-animated film, and it is accompanied nicely by the portion of “You’re Welcome” that discards any sense of realism for a properly theatrical musical number.  The latter example makes use of Hawaiian art styles to add a special flare, making for one moment in Moana that actually makes it quite distinct in comparison to other films in its genre.  The “You’re Welcome” number is also separated from the rest of the film in that it feels like a Disney classic, as though this was the only song for which Miranda was given more than ten minutes to write it.  It even seems to borrow from Mary Poppins‘ “Jolly Holiday,” giving it a particularly timeless feeling, yet it still feels in keeping with Miranda’s background in freestyle rap music, ultimately seeming to suggest that Dick van Dyke was rapping in Mary Poppins.  Think about that one for a while – the time of the specific moment in Poppins to which I’m referring is 48:05, for those of you playing along at home.

It’s fairly odd to see this kind of film coming from Clements and Musker.  This is the team behind Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid, among others, so making a merely passable film seems beneath them.  On the other hand, this is their first time making a CG film, so hopefully their future endeavors won’t have this same sense of insecurity and will have the kind of creativity continuously that this film has sporadically.

 

La La Land Review

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SPOILER WARNING

I should not be writing this review.  I am not capable of doing the film justice having only seen it once.  There are many movies that have left my friends, family, and peers thinking they ought to watch them multiple times to make sure that they’ve taken everything in, and usually these are either mind-bending thrillers (think The Matrix or Spy Game) or pseudo-intellectual Oscar-bait like Mulholland Drive.  Most of the time, I feel no need to see these movies again – I tend to pick up on everything I want to upon my first viewing – but for La La Land, I think I’d need many more viewings before I can fully comprehend the scope of its intellectual assessment of its own situation.  As I’ve written about before, we are in a time in film history when cinema is growing more reflective than ever before, submerging itself further into the worlds it has already created to find the nooks and crannies of the Wizard World or the Death Star that it may have missed at first.  This applies to genres as well.  When the romantic comedy was revamped with When Harry Met Sally, the “rom coms” that followed in the 1990s clearly confronted the movies of Classical Hollywood and addressed “the compatibilism question” – how do we bring together the people of today with the genres of yesterday in a way that feels believable?  The musicals of today, such as Into the Woods, Muppets Most Wanted, and The Jungle Book, haven’t really addressed this question head-on, resulting in an embarrassingly awkward transition in Jungle Book from a dark, ominous shot of a giant, scary ape to a bouncy little ukulele song.  La La Land has the intelligence to recognize that we actually need to sit down and talk about the compatibilism question, but I don’t think it’s very sure of what the answer is.

It’s interesting to me that Rotten Tomatoes describes the film as having “thrillingly assured direction,” because the nature of the director’s assurance is fairly complex.  To me he seems unsure as to what the movie ought to be exactly, yet he refuses to allow it to be anything other than what it is.  The film is very technically impressive and is shot with great care, but just because he understands the film’s essence on a technical level does not mean he has a grip on what it is as a story (or as an argument).  The film is fairly insecure, sometimes suggesting that it will do a certain musical number a certain way, then backing out of it as though it would be too corny for 2016, before finally overcoming its skepticism (and embarrassment) and diving into theatricality.  Still, there is always a sense that Classical Hollywood is watching over the characters in this film, waiting to see what they’ll do with a genre that doesn’t belong to them, showing that the director knows exactly where his film stands: it is being scrutinized closely by both the past and the future, wondering if it is truly capable of pleasing both masters.

The compatibilism question takes three forms in the movie, first asking how an old-fashioned musical film can succeed today, then asking how jazz can continue to thrive, and finally asking if two different dreamers of two different dreams can have a lasting partnership.  As for question one, its answer seems to be that the contemporary drama and the classical musical are, inevitably, an awkward pairing, but it’s decided that this awkwardness is okay.  There are times when a jazzy musical number ends with a ringtone, or an old cartoonish iris-opening transition presents a profane term that would never have been used in the days of Singin’ in the Rain.  It’s an odd clash, but a cute and coquettish clash, not unlike a couple in a romantic comedy.  The film also has elements of the mid-19th century musical that don’t work very well today, and these can stir up debate and arguments among viewers pertaining to the issue of how this genre should be handled in the new century.  For example, consider how the film might be asking questions about race in much the same way that musicals like Singin’ in the Rain feature white men borrowing from black dance, and La La Land features a white man explaining black music.  The film goes so far as to include musical numbers that contribute nothing to the plot at all – an often forgotten element of the mid-century musical – and this is part of what makes the film so divisive: it has flaws built in that I suspect were carefully designed to make some viewers hate it (and make most viewers debate it).

Regarding the jazz question, the film shows its hand a bit more, presenting an explicit answer to the question through John Legend’s dialogue, and thus revealing the film’s intellectual pursuit to viewers who haven’t yet caught on.  Here too, however, the film is somewhat ambiguous, presenting the contemporary jazz music as unsatisfactory, impure, and greatly problematic for our characters.  Even the song it uses to represent the future of jazz (“Start a Fire”) is mostly comprised of pieces of older genres, mixing jazz, Motown, soul, funk, disco, and ‘80s pop, revealing a reticence to accept the modern even from the characters that claim to embrace it.  On the other hand, this choice may have just been made so that the director, who seems to prefer older music himself, can tolerate it.

The third question – the question of the couple – is the area where I am most critical of and disappointed with the film’s argumentation.  This is the reason why I almost deducted half a star (or even four of the stars) from my rating.  The problem here has to do with the logic of cinema, which generally ought to resemble a symbolic logical sentence (A ⋀ B → C → D, for example).  This is the basis for one of the holy and unbreakable rules of screenwriting: the ending may be unexpected, yet it must be set up and inevitable.  Obviously, La La Land does not follow this rule, because the decision for Mia to end up with another man comes out of the blue and seems entirely arbitrary.  There is no rational reason for her to choose to be with someone other than her true love, nor is there anything in the film’s plot that suggests she would forgo the rational/emotional/intuitive choice to serve some other purpose.  This ending is ultimately a non-sequitur, so the film’s conclusion that Mia and Sebastian’s romance cannot work is seemingly a random one with little or no basis in the logic of the story.

What makes this so frustrating is that the film seems to make the case that their romance could have worked had they made better choices.  This is, of course, suggested by the fantasy sequence in the film’s final act, during which Mia imagines the better way the story could have gone had things been just slightly different . . . or so it seems.  What seems hard for some viewers to notice is that this fantasy is actually a completely impossible one – their story could not have gone this way.  Sebastian could not have known that Mia wanted him to kiss her after she first heard him play their song; he could not have attended Mia’s play and remained dedicated to the source of his income that was required in order for him to open his jazz club; he could not have veered off the main road at the end and coincidentally stumble upon his own jazz club (which somehow managed to exist without him).  This is only Mia’s fantasy of what life could have been like if she had magically gotten every little thing she wanted regardless of how much it cost Sebastian and regardless of whether or not it was even humanly possible.

The reason why this ending is so important is that it relates to questions about the musical romance as a genre.  Traditionally, the Classical Hollywood romance story exists almost solely for the formation of the heterosexual couple – to convince its audience for the thousandth time that the formation of a happy and healthy romance between a man and a woman is possible.  If the film has not made this case in such a way that the viewer believes it, the narrative and/or genre does not function.  The fact that Mia and Sebastian were not able to form a lasting romantic couple means that the genre has failed – it tells us that Classical Hollywood’s way of forming a couple does not work for people in the modern world.  In other words, the fact that the genre could not serve its function today answers the first compatibilism question with a definite negative.  Whether he meant to or not, the director told us that his attempt at making a mid-20th century musical in the 20th century was a failure, regardless of how well the film has been received.  The problem with his answer, of course, is that he did not show his work, instead selecting an arbitrary ending that gives his argument a random conclusion rather than a logical and satisfactory one.

As much as I detest this laziness of writing, I still must give this movie the highest of praises because I believe it is very, very good for the future of cinema.  Even if its logical argument is very poor, at least this film is different from most of the films that the “cinematic elite” embrace in that, rather than prompting the viewer to ask meaningless questions the way that Mulholland Drive does, this film uses the argumentative power of cinema to get the audience thinking about real and important questions (in this case pertaining to the future of media).  This could lead to other films that can ask the viewer questions about ethics, laws, cultures, progress, the environment, and any intellectual topic imaginable, all without sounding preachy.  In this sense, La La Land has the potential to shape this century’s cinema into something great – something that is highly intelligent and that is beneficial to humankind.  (It’s worth noting that the film’s ending is an attempt to do the kind of “open to interpretation” endings that Lynch and other “art film” directors love, so this film’s director clearly has a fondness for the kind of pseudo-intellectual ambiguity that the “cinema elite” adores, but this element of the film hopefully won’t hinder the potential positive effects that I have outlined in this paragraph.)

Perhaps more importantly, I think this film just might be a greater movie experience than nearly any other film made within the past ten years because this movie is alive!  In a time when nearly every movie released from Hollywood is hideously drab, gray, and monochromatic, this film has color!  In a time when nearly every filmmaker tries to capture an almost depressing realism with the camera, this film has theatricality!  In a time when nearly every Hollywood soundtrack sounds like a collection of durges, this film has boogie!  Director Damien Chazelle has found that the perfect combination of visual beauty and musical beauty can sometimes be enough to form emotional beauty, using pure spectacle and unfiltered passion to overpower and enthrall me, filling me with bubbly excitement and childlike wonder from the very first scene.  Never before have I found myself tearing up within the first few minutes of a movie, and never have I given myself over to a musical number the way I did with “Fools Who Dream.”  It’s true that not every moment in the film is captivating, and I may have checked my watch over a dozen times while watching it, but its best scenes were so riveting, enchanting, and divine that its flaws are forgivable, and I may never have had so many tears fill my eyes from just one film in my entire lifetime.

Therefore, I must give this film the highest of praises – long live La La Land, the greatest work of art of this century!

Rogue One Review

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MINOR SPOILER WARNING

By the end of 2016, it seemed as though everyone on the Internet was in the mood to rant about how every movie Hollywood makes is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or in-universe story.  This, of course, is not true – just watch the previews before one of the big hit dramas out in theaters today or check the homepage of Rotten Tomatoes.  Still, there is definitely a movement in cinema right now towards returning to the many stories it has told and trying to find something new here, to varying degrees of success.  Instead of relying just on the genre system that guided Classical Hollywood, which was essentially a means for the studios to make money by telling the same story over and over again, the ’80s have given us a blockbuster and franchise system, which is now moving further from focusing on original stories and towards revisiting familiar stories.  Perhaps the various modern twists on fairy tales are responsible for this obsession with re-visitation, and maybe Wicked is to blame for that trend, but regardless of the cause, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.  This just means that audiences have to learn to approach stories differently, particularly when dealing with in-universe stories that aren’t focused on the main characters from the original franchise.  This didn’t seem to be a problem for most people who saw Fantastic Beasts, but surprisingly, it has made Rogue One: A Star Wars Story a very divisive film.

I think it’s safe to say that there are very few other films in history that have been designed specifically to both contextualize and by contextualized by another film on the level that Rogue One is.  This is very new for cinema, but it isn’t for Star Wars – they’ve had TV shows in this universe that were inspired by a single (almost insignificant) line of dialogue from New Hope, so this shouldn’t seem that strange to people.  Yet, somehow, the lack of an opening crawl is too much for some people to handle.  For me, it doesn’t matter whether or not it feels like a Star Wars movie, or even a Star Wars story, so long as I believe that it’s in the same universe as Star Wars and its story makes me look at the main films with greater understanding and appreciation of their context.  This is all true for me, so any reservations I might have have been appeased, allowing me to focus just on enjoying the story.

So is it a good story?  Well, at the very least it feels like an original story.  This is one quality that other films in the franchise have not had, much to their detriment.  The villains and side-characters are all great, but the two leads are fairly uninteresting.  I will say that I understood the protagonist’s perspective throughout, rooted for her, and could tell that she was not one to be trifled with – she was fierce.  Each of the characters serves his/her purpose, the drama is intense, the humor is hilarious, the action is more awesome and impactful that most of the action scenes I’ve ever seen, and the story plays with elements of the Star Wars universe well.  (Also, Vader is amazing, his first appearance sending chills down my spine, and his second blowing me away.)

With all this in mind, I have a difficult time understanding why so many people I know have been so disappointed.  This movie has the perfect balance of serious war themes and fun excitement.  Just imagine if a good fan project was given a huge load of money and told to go crazy.  That’s the feeling of this movie.  Because of how much it seems like a fanatic’s passion project, it really feels like a victory for the fans.  This is enough to make it satisfactory, but with the added bonuses of clever references to other characters and an amazing ending, it’s very pleasing.  Sure some of the CGI is terrible, but I still see this as a film that is paving the way to great things in cinema’s future, and for that I greatly appreciate it.

Ghostbusters (2016) Review

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It’s not often safe to judge a screenplay by its movie – particularly if it’s a big studio film that was surely shaped by piles of notes from lofty executives – but if we grant that the director stayed fairly true to the screenplay he co-wrote then I must say that this is surely one of the worst-written films I’ve seen in years.  At a certain point, I  was getting upset when something in the film was really impressive or enjoyable, because I knew it was giving me false hope that was about to be crushed.  Most of the jokes were either too predictable or too stupid to be predicted, with many of the biggest laughs oddly coming from the film’s laziest running gag: Chris Hemsworth.  (The Hemsworth running gag is strange because it was received by some as being rather progressive, switching out the brainless female eye-candy of some male-oriented films with brainless eye-candy for women, but this actually just fits into two old stereotypes: the idea that women are completely hypnotized by brainless hunks, and the standard trope of sitcoms that men are myopic buffoons who would be helpless without women.)  Very little of value is added to the original story, and the way the screenplay tries to present the lead character (Wiig) as someone who follows the scientific method and relies on good evidence while portraying the skeptic as narrow-minded – even though thinking skeptically and thinking scientifically are the exact same thing – is not only ignorant, but irresponsible in an age of science denial.  Maybe if the four leading women had been given more room to show off their ad-lib skills there could have been much better humor, and I know I’ve seen at least three of them display great comedic prowess in the past, but the film usually sticks to material that does not work well for the Ghostbusters franchise, and that doesn’t work well as comedy.

What’s unfortunate is that I’m not convinced that it had to be a bad film – it certainly had a lot going for it (at least with its cast) – so here’s my laundry list of random things that could have been better.  I suspect that the film could have been much better had it been a sequel; that way there could be a stronger sense of the passing of the baton to a new generation, and the mayor and his assistant could have been handled very differently, making for a more-believable and generally less-stupid story (in which I don’t think all of the characters are total morons).  The fact that they got Bill Murray to come back for the film amazes me, although most of the cameos from original cast members were wasted on needless and unfunny parts.  I do, however, find Neil Casey’s villain to be an intriguing and well-played character whose story offers the most irony and originality to the film.  It’s fairly obvious that the musical number that plays behind the credits was meant to to go into the movie itself, and while I understand why it was cut, the movie appears to have a hole in it, which left me rather confused when the set-up for the number was awkwardly left in the middle of the scene without explanation.  I admire the attempt, however, as it was one of the main ways that the director tried to have fun with the project, which he also did with the visual style to some extent (particularly with the wonderfully Burton-esque parade).  I can very much appreciate the fact that the film has a lot of color, which has been frustratingly rare since shortly after I was born, but the fact that everything on screen either has the look of something that’s been recorded digitally or something made with CGI means the colors have less of a feeling of Technicolor and more of a resemblance to Raja Gosnell’s Scooby-Doo films from the early 2000s.

I don’t know if I can really say I was disappointed seeing as how I didn’t expect much to begin with, but I really wanted the film to be better than I expected.  My hope is that we will soon reach a time when good, funny comedy centered around women is at least as common on the big screen as it is on television, but I don’t see how we’re going to get there if we give Hollywood the message that we’ll settle for this kind of mediocrity.  I know that these performers can be funny, so let’s give them better opportunities to show off their skills.  In the meantime, skip this movie and re-watch the original – it’s a much less frustrating experience.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Review

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SPOILER ALERT

Ignorance is a very important part of how people experience the world; one might even go so far as to call it a fundamental human value.  We constantly rely on our ability to block out thoughts that distract us from the pertinent matters in our lives and that keep us from processing the situations we face in a way that makes sense to us.  There is no way for a middle-class citizen of the western world to be happy, healthy, prosperous, and content while regularly considering the unsung realities of nearly every aspect of human life: free will is illusory, life is quickly coming to an end, most of us will be forgotten by history, we all spend our money on things we desire while those who need our money starve, we unconsciously harbor many unethical biases, and so on and so forth.  In cinema, ignorance is perhaps the most important value, because the average Hollywood movie is only enjoyable if it can trick the audience into focusing only on an ignorant form of empathy (the kind that psychologists like Paul Bloom find harmful when applied to reality) so that they can be as engrossed in the story as possible.  Fantastic Beasts completely fails at keeping the viewer, or at least me, blissfully ignorant, instead leaving me questioning and challenging some of the most important premises of the narrative and making me painfully confused.

Regrettably, I found myself completely forgetting most of what I saw in this movie shortly after I left the theater, so it is very difficult for me to recall specific examples of my complaints about the film, but I know that my main problem overall while watching it was that I didn’t know how I was supposed to think or feel about anything that happened.  By the time I’d made it about a third of the way through, I had been wishing that I had read the novel, but I was informed by my sister that the book Rowling wrote with the same title as this film is not a novel, so I have no idea how anyone is expected to read this movie.  The plot’s problem on a large scale is that the context makes so little sense: why the heck should I believe that the only result of muggles finding out about the wizard world is their annihilation, and how can I do this without being frustrated with the wizarding community?  The only reason why the wizards would feel the need to kill all the non-wizards is if they were concerned that the non-wizards would be outraged that the wizards had kept their magic to themselves, in which case the non-wizards would be absolutely right – the wizarding community has been unethically ignoring the needs of those in poverty, in war, and in every horrible event that has occurred in human history, simply for their own convenience.  Rowling’s inability to keep me ignorant of this fact is detrimental to the story, and ultimately, I thought the villain proposed better policies than the president (who was an unreasonable jerk in her last scene).  This left me unsettled by the way that Newt took her side and went along with the nonsense that he knew from his experience with Queenie and Kowalski was needlessly causing pain.

The characters, too, are somewhat problematic.  I think the film might have been more interesting had it been about Tina, whose role seemed to be more focused than Newt’s, but her part is fine as it is.  The villain’s role in the film seemed odd to me, in part because it felt like Johnny Depp was wasted, and in part because it felt like they were trying to pull a twist ending, which couldn’t have possibly worked after the cinematographer so blatantly revealed who the villain was at the beginning of the film, making the only twist at the climax the awkward revelation of a funny-looking Johnny Depp.  The kids in the cult also seemed to have their story handled clumsily: at first I suspected the child who turned into the black Tasmanian Devil watercolor thing was Ezra Miller’s character, but then the movie informed us that this couldn’t be true because you have to be younger than him to turn into the flying scribble monster, but then the movie inexplicably nullify’s its own premise, which is absolutely terrible storytelling.  It’s a little bit strange to see just how much Newt and Tina seem to like each other on a romantic level seeing as how she looks much older than him, but this, too, is forgivable.  I’ll even give Newt’s habit of mumbling unintelligibly a pass, because ultimately, my real problem in the film is with Queenie and Kowalski.

Queenie is essentially a magical Marilyn Monroe – hyper-sexualized, yet ultimately innocent, and generally content with the way men throw themselves at her – which is odd coming from a feminist storyteller like Rowling.  As a little bit of a storyteller myself, I know from experience that adding a mind-reader to the story can cause problems, especially in a romance: she’s essentially stripping him down on a psychological level, violating the most sacred form of privacy known to humankind, and it’s all shrugged off by the other characters as a little quirk.  The inclusion of this character also has serious consequences for the logic of the Potter universe, meaning I have questions about how a mind-reader can be fairly graded on his/her Hogwarts exams, or why it is that dark wizards don’t use mind-readers to extract information from (and blackmail) their enemies.  To make matters worse, the believability of the story suffers from the fact that this beautiful woman is randomly in love with a chubby baker, and as much as she says that he’s an amazing person, we aren’t given any reason to believe this.  Everything amazing about him must be in his brain, and she’s the only one who can access that, leaving the romance they shared ultimately off-screen on a purely psychological level, thus completely distancing the audience from their romantic experience.  The other problem with their relationship, of course, is the ending: she is forced to say goodbye and make him forget her, then waits a few months for some reason, and then inexplicably shows up in his life again, presumably assuming she’ll be able to have a romantic relationship with him while hiding the fact that she knows everything about his past and his psychology, which has got to be the clunkiest ending to a romantic story I have ever witnessed.

I think what bothers me most about this film is that it could have been something very special – maybe the best Potter film to date – but instead it’s as annoying as Prisoner of Azkaban.  In terms of setting, it could obviously be an enormous amount of fun to see what wizards would do in the Roaring Twenties – the Jazz Age – but the closest we get to the kind of whimsy that should have filled the film is the weird CG singer in the speakeasy that felt like a leftover from the Special Edition edits of Jabba the Hutt’s den in Return of the Jedi.  I think this could have been a fascinating drama about conflicts in the wizard community because of the laws concerning no-maj relations, or it could have been a neat story about a revolt against the wizarding establishment.  As it is, however, it’s just a weird story about an uninteresting smuggler of wild animals who wants to release a magical bird in Arizona.  I don’t understand it, and I’m not crazy about it, but I can’t say it’s not entertaining.  It’s a fine popcorn flick for anyone interested in seeing some of the weird monsters and critters Rowling’s made up for the Potter universe in an original story with a generally good cast.  It’s just not exactly … fantastic.