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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