meh beasts

My org took us to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald yesterday - an experience for which I'm extremely grateful, because it means I won't have to spend money on tickets and regret it afterwards. If you tell me J. K. Rowling wrote the screenplay for this lackluster sequel to what was already a pretty shaky start to the series, I will have to take your word for it, because it's not a conclusion I could arrive at on my own from any examination of the available data.

In the original movie, I thought the reveal that Johnny Depp was cast as Grindelwald was infinitely more horrifying than the reveal than that the character of Colin Farrell had been Grindelwald the whole time. However, I realize now that it was just the hair. In the prison break scene at the start of the second movie, where Grindelwald sports shoulder-length hair and a scraggy beard, he looks exactly as I would imagine Grindelwald would look. Sadly, he goes back to his earlier spikes-and-pornstache look the moment he gets his hands on a razor.

To be quite honest, I rather liked Johnny Depp as Grindelwald in the second movie. The principal reason for this was his propinquity on screen to an even more blundersome casting choice - to wit, that of Jude Law as Albus Dumbledore. Jude Law might have made a reasonably convincing Dumbledore if he had been given no lines and if he had been told in advance that the character he was to play was Albus Dumbledore and not a nineteenth-century pimp.

Also, I would petition for the wardrobe director for this movie not to be permitted near another set for a movie based in the Harry Potter universe. Why is everyone but the students always dressed in muggle clothes? Do you expect me to believe Albus H. Dumbledore makes a practice of wandering the corridors of Hogwarts in nothing but a waistcoat and shirt sleeves, with hands thrust deep in his pockets, as if he has nothing better to do all day? Half the charm of any Harry Potter movie is the splendor and variety of the robes the characters wear. What is a Harry Potter movie without robes? Fantastic Beasts, apparently.

This is all to say nothing of the fan fiction-grade storyline, which does not even deserve comment.