Monday, January 8, 2018

Monday at the Movies - January 8, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, we inaugurate 2018 with its first movie reviews as we charge headlong into the seventh year of “Monday at the Movies.”

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) – I had real reservations about this film, the first of five in a prequel series to the beloved but occasionally laborious Harry Potter franchise. My misgivings ultimately proved unfounded, though it took me a year to surmount them; I found the film to be a self-contained narrative with a conclusion, and I found it to be immensely cheering. Returning to writerly duties, J.K. Rowling remembers to keep the whimsy in the wizard’s world with a clever and fun film to which a disservice is done when we brush it off as merely a prequel to Harry Potter. Eddie Redmayne stars as the wide-eyed Newt Scamander, whose bigger-on-the-inside briefcase full of magical creatures pops open in 1920s New York, drawing the attention of former Auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and biting a No-Maj (no-magic, played by Dan Fogler) on the neck. The film takes its time building a world – at once recognizable but simultaneously quite fresh in its exploration of wizards in America – and it’s to Rowling’s credit that I went from Hogwarts fatigue to genuine enthusiasm anew for the mythology. (I plied my moviegoing companion and tested her saintly patience for nearly forty minutes of exhausting detail about nifflers, no-majs, and school houses.) Moreover, the film contains at least one genuinely surprising turn, about which I am probably the last man in America not to have been spoiled. David Yates shows no signs that this is his fifth directorial outing in the Potterverse, bringing a renewed energy to the project and restoring that Spielbergian sense of awe. As someone who had previously regarded the prospect of Fantastic Beasts with cynical dread, I now say, roll on the sequel (The Crimes of Grindelwald, due in November).

Would You Rather (2012) – If the Marquis de Sade hosted a dinner party and invited the cast of Saw, it’d be something like this joyless film. Brittany Snow stars as a woman down on her luck and caring for her ailing brother; she accepts an offer to play a mysterious game on the promise of untold riches if she wins. Naturally, the invitation conceals the horrific nature of the game, a sadistic version of “would you rather.” I’ve seen this film lauded for its “restraint” within the torture porn genre, and it’s true that the film is surprisingly not gory for the number of violent acts that transpire, but it would seem that the restraint applied to Steffen Schlachtenhaufen’s script, which is the very definition of thin; everything in the film is designed solely to get bodies to the dinner table so that they can slice, electrocute, whip, and drown each other. The script sacrifices character and plot for easy scares and drops all its Chekhov’s guns for a tawdry Twilight Zone ending. If there’s any glee to be had in the film, it’s from Jeffrey Combs, who turns each line of dialogue into a fine slice of honey-baked ham as Shepard Lambrick, the game’s host, he of indeterminate wealth and profound amorality. As Lambrick’s son, Robin Lord Taylor turns up with a performance that anticipates his sociopathic Penguin on Gotham, but the film seems less interested in him as the runtime progresses. Only Combs seems to understand that he’s in a C-list horror film and elects to have the most fun possible, bathing (as Kenneth Branagh would put it) in a river of ham. By no means is this a good performance by technical standards, but it is a delight to watch in a film that is utter, utter dreck.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

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