Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

(Warning: contains spoilers for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them)

Not to state the obvious, but the Harry Potter franchise is massive.  To the point that people who have never read the books, and never seen the films (and I'm sure there must be one or two.  Possibly waking up from comas or something) will have heard the first 8 notes of Hedwig's Theme and thought "Oh, that's Harry Potter" without necessarily knowing how they know.  May have heard and understood some of the following words: Hogwarts.  Muggles.  Quidditch.  They're all in common parlance now, in the same way I know "heeeeeere's Johnny" is from The Shining despite the fact I've never seen it.

Pauses for a moment at the inevitable outrage of that last sentence

I'll get round to it.

I have read the Harry Potter books.  I have watched the Harry Potter films.  I have been to Harry Potter studios.  So it was with great delight that I skipped off to see Fantastic Beasts.  And, if I'm perfectly honest, the biggest surprise was that I wasn't that bothered by it. 

Skinny book from which this enormous film was made

That is not to say that it's not enjoyable, and that there aren't good bits.  I'm not even sure why I wasn't taken with it.  The only concern that I can articulate is that it doesn't feel like a film in its own right.  Now, I get that this will become part of a series.  And I understand that there is a world to build, and characters to introduce and themes to explain before we get to the apex of this spin-off.  But it feels like there's a little too much of "oh-we'll-explain-this-in-the-next-film".  I want to understand what I'm looking at in this film.  Now.  And then the next films should build on those foundations.

Take the first Star Wars film (and this works for A New Hope, The Phantom Menace, or The Force Awakens).  They stand alone and their stories work (tenuous with Phantom Menace, but stick with me).  If none of the rest of the Episodes were made, those initial three would be fine.  The sequels build upon what's there and push the story on.  The same is true for the first Harry Potter films.  But for some reason, Fantastic Beasts seem to have gone for the "tune in next time, folks" approach, which works for television, but doesn't work for film.

On to the positives.  This film looks fantastic, and may well be enhanced by 3D (not something I say lightly) as critters skitter across the screen and sparks literally fly.  The Prohibition-Era feel works well to provide a sense of paranoia and subterfuge, where no one is quite sure whose side anybody is on.

For people new to Potter, it provides an "in".  You can see this film having never looked at Potter and have a perfectly good time.  But for the fans, there are tantalising glimpses into recognisable names and characters.  We see young Dumbledore, and there are musings about the Lestrange families - hints at the back stories to the older generations that feature in Harry's life at the end of the century.  In some ways, this is very comparable to Star Wars - we know what the future holds for some of these characters, but we don't yet know how they get there.

The Fantastic Beasts are, indeed, fantastic but my highest praise goes to Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander.  There's all sorts of influences present in his portrayal - the most obvious (to me) being Matt Smith's incarnation of the Doctor; all flailing limbs, and social awkwardness, hand rubbing and hunchedness, but can switch on incredible empathy and understanding in any given moment.  There's also hints of David Attenborough in there too, as he explains the creatures in his care and how best to treat them and understand their behaviour.  Flecks of Doctor Dolittle are peppered about too.
 

These two definitely do not influence each other.  Nope.

The budding relationship between Queenie (Alison Sudol) and Kowalski (Dan Fogler) has warmth and sweetness (perhaps fitting for a character who wants to run his own bakery), and Tina (Katherine Waterston) is a strong, independent female lead, who is getting on with her own storyline which just happens to intersect with Scamander's.  And with all that going on, I'm sorry I didn't love it more. 

But sometimes the magic just isn't there.

I, Daniel Blake

(Warning: contains spoilers for I, Daniel Blake)

2016 isn't cheery.  There's celeb deaths aplenty, Brexit confusion, worldwide discord, and a Wotsit with weird hair is soon to be in charge of America.  To add to the gloom, Ken Loach decided to make a film about the benefits system in 2016.  Thanks Ken (then).


I, Daniel Blake is the story of the eponymous Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) who, after working as a joiner for all of his adult life has a heart attack when he's 59, and is advised not to work for a time by his GP, surgeon and physiotherapist.  Unfortunately, this leaves him at the mercy of the benefits system which deems him fit to work because he can still walk 50m unaided, raise his arms, and isn't incontinent (therefore not eligible for Employment and Support Allowance).  Bemused, but undeterred, he applies for Job Seekers Allowance, but the odds are stacked against him given that he has one set of skills from the one type of job he can do (but isn't allowed to do), all assistance is online (and he's computer illiterate), and even if he gets past all that and is offered a job he won't be able to take it because he's not medically fit enough.

Expect to see this spray painted on JobCentre walls near you soon...

 Along the way, he meets Katie (Hayley Squires) who is a single mother who has been moved to Newcastle from a homeless hostel in London because of a lack of affordable housing in the capital.  Away from familiar surroundings and her own support network, she struggles with two small children, the financial implications of relocation, and lack of suitable employment.

The film is a series of small defeats that strip the characters of a little more dignity, a little more humanity, and reduces them to ciphers that don't quite fit into the prescribed Governmental boxes.  For example, Daniel spends his days on foot taking his CV to various worksites.  However, he cannot prove to the JobCentre that he did this, so is put forward for sanction.  Katie gets caught shoplifting sanitary pads because the local foodbank cannot supply them as essential items (a small but pointed protest about the so called "Pink Tax" - https://www.listenmoneymatters.com/the-pink-tax/).

The Foodbank Scene.  Too sad to caption.

If I were to be critical about this film, it would be to say that the "victims" of the benefits system are too saintly.  They do absolutely everything they're "supposed" to.  There's not a trace of drug or alcohol use in this film.  But that "saintliness" is deliberate: it leaves us in no doubt that it is not the people who are the issue - it is the system that is broken, and it's facilitated by the people who do not question the ineffectiveness of it all.  For example - the "healthcare professionals" who perform Daniel's Fitness to Work tests (who have no medical training or qualifications, and cannot record that he has a heart condition because there is no box on the assessment form for that), the Jobcentre staff who have no time to listen to people's stories or rationale and get frustrated that their clients don't/can't follow their demands to the letter and penalise them as such.  The manager who reprimands the one "helpful" JobCentre person for offering to help Daniel navigate the assessment forms.  At a mandatory CV training course, the teacher notes that Costas in Nottingham received 1700 applications for 8 jobs (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21521125). 
"What does this tell us?" 
"...that there's not enough jobs to go round?" asks Daniel
"No," the teacher chirps, instantly pegging Daniel as a 'disruptive influence'. "It means your CV really has to instantly stand out to a potential employer."

Probably not acceptable under DWP standards

It's not entirely grim.  There are uplifting notes throughout - arguably, this is also a film about how small communities of people help each other out when things get tough (Blake's neighbours, the Foodbank).  How the same internet age that stymies Daniel is also the one that allows his neighbours to thrive as they Skype about selling knock-off branded trainers.


One thing is clear - the welfare system has been so finely honed to deter people who may be considering a life of idleness that it has forgotten the reason why it was set up in the first place: to protect the health and well-being of its citizens, especially those in financial or social need.  Yes, there are people who manipulate the system.  Of course there are.  But in trying to deal with them, there are people who actually need those benefits, (need that food, need that cash) who wind up suffering instead.


I leave you with these thoughts.
1.  It is a sad affair when society needs to be reminded of the human element of austerity via film.  But here we are in 2016, needing that reminder.
2.  There is a reticence for this film to be seen.  Why is Doctor Strange screened across all cinemas at all times of the day, but I have struggled to see this film once in the entire county?
3.  Here is a much more articulate, real life example of why this film is important:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/22/i-am-daniel-blake-millions-like-me-jack-monroe-ken-loach
4.  If you were under any doubt that this film was accurate, look to the small, sober note on the credits: "thanks to dozens of JobCentre staff who told us of their experiences and chose to remain anonymous" [paraphrased]
5.  You are Daniel Blake.  I am Daniel Blake.

Arrival

(Warning: contains spoilers for Arrival.  And The Sixth Sense)

Every so often, a film/book/television programme/advert is released and, coincidentally, its themes and messages chime with whatever is going on in the world.  John Lewis, in an attempt to make a nice advert about some trampolining animals, accidentally created a message analogous to the Trump/Clinton presidential campaign.  Sometimes film makers (or people creating their own different kinds of art) are a little more prescient and what they portray comes to pass in some way (example: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/23/back-to-the-future-writer-bad-guy-biff-was-based-on-donald-trump).

Arrival is a film I saw less than a week after the unfolding horror of Donald Trump becoming President-Elect of the United States.  And although its themes and messages are entirely coincidental, they resonate particularly because of global events.

Basic plot:  Spaceships appear over 12 cities across the world.  They just hang there.  But once every 18 hours, a small hatch opens and access is granted to whatever is inside.  Amy Adams (through means that are more plausible in the film) is an expert linguist and is recruited by the military to come and help them make sense of what’s going on.  They recruit Jeremy Renner too, for good measure, because he’s a theoretical physicist.  The film becomes an interesting debate on how we communicate in the absence of a common language.   

It takes a long time for Amy Adams to work out that this is the sign for "dancer".

Secondarily, it is important to remember that there are 12 of these spaceships.  One in North Korea, one in China, one in England (in Devon, for some reason) etc.  Everyone dealing with this unfolding situation in very different ways.  What do we do?  Try to talk to whoever’s in the spaceship?  Blow the spaceship up?  Try to blow everyone else’s spaceships up?   So there’s also interesting (and timely) discussions about the importance of continuing to talk to the people facing the same situation as us and not just reacting to whatever we initially see and think.  Fear makes us irrational, panicky and reactive.  Amy Adams, at one point, translates the word "weapon".  Panic instantly ensues, despite her protestations that they could mean "tool", or the word could be a question.  Stay calm, everyone.  We fear change.  We fear the unknown.  We fear new things.  Should we?  Or should we wait until there's something to actually panic about?

Yeah, fair enough.  Panic...

The third (and no less significant) theme is that of language.  The film argues that the language we use shapes our thinking.  China (I think) try to communicate with their spaceship in terms of Mah-jong – their language is subsequently about winning and losing, victory and defeat.  A variation of Maslow’s Law of the Instrument is noted – “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.  What is our current language saying about us?  What does your vocabulary say about you?

So, lots of things to think about.

This is a film that has stayed with me, and I find myself pondering it and it's ramifications.  Here are some other thoughts:

1.  Brains are amazing.  Obviously.  The first time I watched The Sixth Sense, I did not get "The Twist".  Despite all the clues being there that Bruce Willis's character was dead.  Deceased.  Pining for the fjords.  The first time I realised this was during the scene where his wife (Olivia Williams) is asleep in front of their wedding video, and she turns over, and Bruce's wedding ring drops off the sofa and rolls towards him and he realises he's not wearing a wedding ring.  At that point, my brain instantly pieced together all the bits of information and the thought "HE'S A GHOST" popped, unbidden, into my head.  "Where did that thought come from?" wondered a different part of my head.  (Which in itself is strange - how can the brain trick itself?  That's bizarre!).  Somewhere in the empty cavern of my mind, little cogs had been whirring away, trying to make sense of what I was looking at.  And gave me the logical conclusion before I had consciously processed it.  Of course I know that the brain in constantly doing that, but it was one of the very few times I was very aware of it.  That I wasn't in control of some of my thinking.  And that's odd.

This in itself shouldn't mean that much.  And yet...

I mention this, because there's a similar experience in this film.  Where what you're looking at suddenly resolves itself and you realise that you're looking at something else, like a kind of brain optical illusion.  This is not quite the film you think it is.

2.  Thank goodness for the mind meld.  Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner were making great progress with the aliens, trying to understand the strange inky blotches they created and communicate in response.  But you wouldn't need to be conveying anything of great urgency:

Aliens: THERE'S A MASSIVE ASTEROID HURTLING TOWARDS EARTH AND YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE

Amy Adams:  Hold on, this will take a week to translate...

Aliens:  ARGH!  Come here and let me mind meld your face...it'll be easier.  Screw this "learning other languages" malarkey...

There's a lot to think about in this film, and it's worth seeing and worth paying attention to.  It draws on Interstellar, but takes half the time and is twice as interesting.  There's hints of Aliens, Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and surprisingly, Up.  It's an interesting foray into sci-fi for director Denis Villeneuve, whose next project is the new Blade Runner sequel.  I hope that by the time it comes out, we have not watched attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  Or anywhere else for that matter.

Doctor Strange

I was looking forward to this one for the visuals but a little worried about the Doctor’s alliterative exclamations. However, just as Thor doesn’t endlessly spout faux Nordic oaths and misplaced thees and thous in his movies, nor does the Doctor’s usual vocabulary show up here. Now it is an origin story, so I may have to worry about this later but I am hoping he doesn’t say ‘by the hoary hosts of Hoggoth,’ - at least not more than once.

Dr Strange really did seem a no-brainer for 3D even more than most blockbusters these days so I had paid the extra and got the glasses on.

I would say they may have tried too hard to give depth to the 3D, as while we were able to stare down long hallways and into huge spaces this was at the expense of objects and people in the foreground often being blurred. Either that or I need new 3D glasses or Cineworld are not showing the movie properly.

The movie struck me as well paced until the final section, which seemed to drag a little and could have done with a few cuts. At an hour and fifty five minutes it’s not especially long but I think might have beneficially lost five minutes of the last twenty.

The spell casting effects were not quite what I expected. All spells produce an orange sparkler-like effect whereas in the comics spells are more varied in shape and colour. Pity about this but I thought the overall feel was right. The Eye of Agamotto and the Cloak of Levitation were present and correct. The dark dimension was a good effort.

The ridiculous aspects of superheros such as Dr Strange and Thor need skill in scripting to overcome and I think this was achieved. Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance also helped to make the Dr a reasonably believable character.

Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong give excellent support. Tilda as the Ancient One adds a much needed female, or at least androgynous, presence. Dr Strange’s usual love interest Clea does not feature but I think it’s a wise decision to save her for later. Instead he is in the process of breaking up with Dr Christine Palmer who is named after a nurse character who appeared briefly in early 70s Marvel comics.

Wikipedia recounts some of director/writer Scott Derrickson’s consideration of racial stereotyping and the careful thought he gave to casting The Ancient One and writing Wong, who was originally just a cliched oriental servant. 

Inception has been mentioned as an influence and rightly, but I would like to point to ‘Dark City’ for the idea of moving and reforming buildings. I must see Dark City again sometime soon, I believe it’s an underrated piece of work.

Dr Strange is definitely a superior Marvel flick and I recommend seeing it. I’d definitely go to a sequel.

Doctor Strange

(Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Strange)

Benedict Cumberbatch is good at playing posh sociopaths.  His IMDb page is littered with them –Sherlock, Smaug, Khan, (both Shere and otherwise).  It’s a type that he plays very well.  And now we add Doctor Stephen Strange to that list.  Massive ego – check.  Arrogance – check.  Ability to stay bizarrely calm, whatever the circumstances – check.  Exceptionally intelligent?  Charming?  Check, check.  The list goes on.  I would be crying about typecasting here, but he does always manage to bring something “other” to each of the roles, so that you can’t just copy and paste the characters from one film to another.  Arguably, you could not lift Stephen Strange and plonk him into the Grey Mountains and expect the same outcomes.  A new facet to the list of posh sociopaths is that Doctor Strange is American, and sounds a lot like Hugh Laurie’s House M.D.  Which is odd, because House is based on Sherlock… and now I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole…

 

Ooh...

Doctor Strange is a brilliant surgeon who loses his ability to be a surgeon because he is an idiot who checks his phone while driving at high speeds on twisty roads.  Those last 6 words are entirely superfluous.  He winds up in a fairly horrific accident and can surgeon no more because his hands are completely and utterly messed up.  I’m reminded of Joey Tribbiani’s explanation of the demise of his Days of Our Lives character Doctor Drake Ramoray (“they said that when they found me, the only person who could have fixed me was...me.  It’s supposed to be some kind of irony”).  I have little sympathy for him because rather than admitting that any of this is HIS OWN FAULT, he whines a lot about how all other surgeons are rubbish by comparison.  What a charmer.  Don’t text and drive, kids.

Angered by the lack of surgical skill of every other surgeon in the world (no, really), Doctor Strange winds up on a quest to Nepal to discover the secrets of how a paralysed man is currently playing basketball.  Whereupon he meets Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tilda Swinton who teach him about his own limitations and make him consider the possibility that there are other alternative universes and realities, including one where he might actually consider people other than himself.  He learns about the requisite bad guy (Mads Mikkelsen who can convey more by raising one eyebrow than most people can with all the words that exist) who is a kind of fallen angel type, convinced that he knows more than The Ancient One (Swinton) and will destroy the world to prove it.

Next, the eyeliner flick...

And that’s pretty much it.  Except it’s a Marvel film, so everything looks really cool and there’s a lot of quipping.

And it does look really cool.  The aesthetic is like being in a kaleidoscope, where realities bend and fold around each other and it feels like Escher, but it looks like Inception and Tron.  As a result, fight scenes are complex and compelling, and a welcome difference from people just punching each other into exhaustion.  The soundtrack is by Michael Giacchino who has composed for a lot of the Pixar films (Ratatouille, Inside Out, Up) and an increasing amount of sci-fi (Jurassic World, Star Trek, Fringe).  The results are light, fast paced, ethereal.  Both of this world, but also not.  Special credit to the CGI of a sentient red cloak which chooses to wrap itself around Doctor Strange, to help and hinder and occasionally reduce our hero’s efforts to mere slapstick.

Did I like it?  Yes, probably.  It’s not the best Marvel film, but it’s perfectly alright.  And it’s well worth the price of a cinema ticket – it’s one of those films that’s worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find.  My hesitations?  It all felt a little formulaic to me.  Strange learns valuable lessons about his own limitations after losing the one valued thing he had, and simultaneously learns that he is gifted and amazing in a whole different way and is even more of a tortured genius.  He learns this via Eastern philosophies, an Ancient guru (also a flawed genius).  I’m annoyed that at he doesn’t seem to recognise that his predicament is entirely of his own making.  I’m concerned about the portrayal of women.  So much so that I’m going to put it onto a new paragraph.

Marvel don’t have a great relationship with women, and it’s particularly evident in this film.  I count three women – Christine (Rachel McAdams), The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) and one of Kaecilius’s henchmen, that IMDb has listed as “blonde zealot” (alongside “brunette zealot” and “tall zealot”.  HR needs to have a word with Kaecilius).  IMDb tells me that there are more, but they are so thinly and slightly written that I don’t even remember seeing them.  And one of them is Meera Syal.  How did I not notice her?  Let’s hold this film up to a couple of easy “feminism” tests:

• The Bechdel Test. 

There should be a) at least two female characters b) named c) who talk about something other than men.  Ideally, those characters should still be alive by the end of the film. 

A low bar, and not necessarily an accurate one but, at times, surprisingly hard to clear.

Does Doctor Strange pass this test?  No.  The female characters don’t talk to each other.  Most of the female characters aren’t named.

Let’s turn our attention to those two named women – Christine and The Ancient One (acronym “TAO” – a Chinese word signifying “way” or “path”.  How apt.) 

• The “sexy lamp” test. 

Can you take out the female character and replace her with a sexy lamp and have the plot remain intact?

I don't actually know what a sexy lamp looks like.

Does Doctor Strange pass this test?  Barely. 

Arguably Christine is a qualified medical practitioner, and without her, Strange would have died in this film.  But both times we see her in her role of qualified medical practitioner (at the start of the film with the “brain dead” patient and when Strange comes to the hospital as a patient)  Strange has to very specifically guide her actions.  The message is writ large – without him, she is nothing.  She might as well just be a sexy lamp.  And this is poor from a franchise as big as Marvel in 2016.

“Ah, wait, but what about The Ancient One” I hear you cry.  Fair enough.  TAO is completely androgynous and (if I remember correctly) makes a point about the unimportance of gender.  Which is an interesting (and arguably progressive) point.  Which is completely undermined by Strange’s assumption that someone who is as wise as TAO is heralded to be must be a man.  He introduces himself politely and deferentially to an elderly man, and when his mistake is made clear to him, he does not transfer any of that courtesy or respect to her.  Boo, Marvel.  Boo.

The Ancient One.  An elderly, Asian mystic.  Played by this white woman.

·         The Mako Mori test. 

At least one female character gets her own narrative arc that is not about supporting the man’s story.

Does Doctor Strange pass this test?  No.

The female characters serve one function – to shine a bit more light on the enigma that is Doctor Strange.  By the end of the film, we’ve barely learned anything more about them.  Christine, in particular, is a problematic character because she literally spends the film pandering to the needs of Strange, but it’s coated in the guise of “independent woman who takes none of his nonsense”.  Except that each time we see her, she is waiting for him to turn up so she can forward the plot a bit more.  Even when he unexpectedly pops up in the hospital, she is casually lounging around doing nothing WHILE WORKING IN THE EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT OF A HOSPITAL IN NEW YORK!       

·         The Furiosa Test

Do people on the internet get mad about the film being “too feminist” and complain that “it’s so hard to be a man in films now”?

Does Doctor Strange pass this test.  No.  Not a murmur.  Which I’m less concerned about in this instance.  I don’t want every film to be an angry lecture about women and how important they are.  I just want there to be decent female characters out there.  And I want to be not surprised when I find them (in the same way I’m not surprised when I see a film about powerful, white men).  And I’m concerned that for Christine, at least, someone out there will be convinced that this film empowers woman because Christine is an actual doctor (can women even be that??)

Gosh.  Until I started writing this, I didn’t even know I had that much to say.

And that’s even without looking at the criticisms that the film has racist overtones.  Go and google that argument for yourselves.

In conclusion:  it’s worth seeing and it’s worth seeing at the cinema because it looks great, and aesthetically it’s a good film to get a tiny bit overwhelmed by on a big screen.  But consider the Strange-ness of the messages that this film contains.