Review: Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them

(Warning: minor spoilers ahead)

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them originally referred to one of Harry Potter's school textbooks. For a World Book Day this was brought into reality as a slim, red little volume consisting of a fictional history of how magical creatures were hidden, followed by a bestiary of various magical creatures. Now, it is the latest installment in the financial behemoth that is the film series of Harry Potter.

Well, in a sense. Much of the background is taken from Harry Potter, and Fantastic Beasts isn't so very different in spirit from some of the later, darker Potter films. Many of the same people are involved - J. K. Rowling having written the script, David Yates returning as director, and David Heyman and Steve Kloves both serving as directors. But the characters are all new; the aesthetic has moved from a remote Scottish castle to 1920s New York; and in general, the film is very different for being an original story rather than merely the adaptation of a book.

I'll start with the good. The special effects are copious and impressive - apart from the numerous spells and explosions, Newt Scamander boasts a remarkable menagerie of magical creatures, our introduction to which is perhaps my favourite scene of the movie. The first half of the film strikes the balance between plot and light entertainment very well.

What of the problems? Ultimately, I think the film tries to do far too much. The second half of the film switches between dark drama and explosions with no rest in-between, which both makes the film less enjoyable and makes the romantic subplots less convincing. I don't object to characters falling in love, but such romances should involve actual conversations between the characters in which they get to know each other. Perhaps Newt and Tina aren't so bad on this front, but the relationship between muggle wannabe-baker Jacob Kowalski and legilimens Queenie is appalling - they begin eyeing each other up as soon as they meet, pay each other a few compliments from time to time, and then by the end of the film Queenie is declaring that she will "never meet another man like you". Perhaps being a mind-reader allows you to get to know people well in short spaces of time, but then the film could have done more to show this.

The 1920s aesthetic works well for set design. The music, however, ruins this impression. James Newton Howard's score is uninspiring, which would be OK, but also for 80% of the film utterly undistinguishable from any other film score. When the characters enter a speakeasy, and in a couple of other places, the music turns into some classic jazz, and these are the finest moments in the soundtrack; they ought to have been the rule, rather than the exception.

The final twist, a reveal in the spirit of Scooby-Doo villains, seemed unnecessary and raised more questions than it answered. Why did Grindelwald, an immensely powerful wizard capable of defeating a score of trained aurors at once, based in eastern Europe, and dedicated to taking over the world, decide to infiltrate the American magical government? How long must he have spent doing this, given that he had achieved a very senior role in this government? And why, once he was captured, was he not immediately killed? It's not like they couldn't have done so, given that several people had already been summarily executed for far lesser crimes. Instead Grindelwald proclaims that "You'll never be able to hold me!" and the American magical president, who had only two minutes earlier ordered one of these executions, mumbles back that "Well we'll do our best."

One also wonders about the differences in social morés between the magical communities of 1920s Britain and the US. The US magicians have apparently overcome both racial and sexual prejudice, to the extent that their president is a black woman. However, they retain a strict legal prohibition upon wizard-muggle relationships. (Curiously this is not matched with any sense of disgust at such relationships). Britain is sufficiently ahead on this count that Newt is able to rather bitingly refer to the American's "backwards view of relationships between magical people and muggles"; has there really not been sufficient interaction between the societies for Britain's liberalism on this subject to rub off on the other side of the Atlantic? (And indeed, where do Canadian witches and wizards stand on this? The main North American school of magic, Ilvermorny, is known to be on the upper east coast, but it is unclear on which side of the US-Canada border it lies; in either case, it seems to be the case that Ilvermorny is the most popular school of magic for both Americans and Canadians. This implies substantial interaction between the two, at a time when Canada was still merely a dominion of the British Empire).

Overall I enjoyed the film, and it was worth seeing (at least at Hungarian cinema prices, which are less than half of UK prices). But I cannot give it more than three stars out of five, and must state my opinion that while this does not plumb the depths of The Cursed Child (which I have declared to be non-canon, but rather an unusually prominent fanfic) one could miss this film, and one would not be any less of a Harry Potter fanatic for it.

Review: The Secret Life of Pets

Yesterday I was at the birthday celebration of an old school friend, a celebration which consisted of a film, Chinese buffet and visits to a couple of pubs. The point is that there were eight or nine of us at a cinema, intending to watch a film, but without any particular films that any of us strongly wanted to see. Consequently we decided to see the fluffy children's film The Secret Life of Pets, expecting that it couldn't be too bad and might deliver a few laughs. On this modest aspiration, I am happy to report that it delivered.

Max (Louis C.K.), Duke (Eric Stonestreet), and Katie (Ellie Kemper).

Given the initial set-up, the rest of the film is very predictable. Max is a blokish terrier living in New York with his owner, a cute young woman who plays no role after the first eight minutes. During the day he eagerly awaits her return, but also hangs out with the neighbouring pets - none of whom would suffer from a few extra brain cells. One day Katie brings home a new dog named Duke to be Max's "brother", but inevitably the two fail to get along with each other. Their rivalry, along with the incompetence of Katie's dog-walker, causes the two to be stranded across the city without their collars. From here they must get back home while avoiding capture by the hapless animal control officers, by a posse of stray cats (the leader of whom is inexplicably a cockney), and by a sewer gang of abandoned pets - led, of course, by a tiny bunny rabbit. By the end of the film Max and Duke have resolved their differences; given that the great bulk of the film somehow takes place within a single workday, I was gratified that this is presented less as actual character growth than merely coming to accept each other as "not so bad after all".

Pearson's Law of kids' films: The cuter the critter, the more vicious it is.

Overall the film is a perfectly adequate way to keep your kids amused for a couple of hours. I have to agree with another critic who remarked that it will be just as good to see on DVD as it is to see in cinema, not to mention a lot cheaper. There are plenty of children's films which will do more to keep the adults amused as well, but The Secret Life of Pets is worthy of a perfectly respectable three stars out of five.

Ken Livingstone watches a kid's movie

I'm watching Shrek for the first time since I was about 9, and there are things about it which seem really different once you've read Seeing Like a State and such things. Lord Farquad orders that all "fairy-tale creatures" should be rounded up and quarantined. Back then I thought that this was a slightly humorous, slightly dystopian thing. Now it seems like a remarkably panglossian interpretation of state process of state formation. In the real world they wouldn't have confined Pinocchio. the Seven Dwarfs et al to a swamp, they'd have killed them. See for example the Holocaust, the Balkan wars of the 90s, US treatment of Native Americans (and in particular the disease blankets).

The Past was Way Creepy

86% of people asked would rather see the lanterns with Flynn Rider than dance in the forest with Prince Philip. This is not enough, because the dancing-in-the-forest-scene from Sleeping Beauty is horrendously rapey:

I mean, what was Philip thinking?

(1) I'll creep up on this teenage girl who is all alone in the woods!

(2) I'll grab her and start dancing with her before she even knows that I'm there!

(3) Every time she gets loose from me and starts walking away, I'll grab her wrist and pull her back!

Or more to the point, what were the animators thinking? Did they realise how creepy Prince Philip's behaviour is, or did they just see it as a mixture of confidence and love-at-first-sight?

Review: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)

Perhaps the people who made this film had something of an intention to make an adaptation of the book, but it felt far more like a poorly-scripted Dungeons and Dragons campaign. A full list of things I dislike about this film would be long, impractical, and would arguably require me to watch the whole film rather than just the first hour and the last few minutes. However, here are some lowlights:

• As happened in the book, Lucy becomes desirous to use a spell which will give her the beauty of her sister Susan. As in the book, Aslan chides her for this. But whereas in the book the problem was with her jealousy, in the film this is somehow represented as a mere lack of self-confidence. But she still feels the need to apologise to Aslan over it.
• The changes to the relationship between Coriakin and the Dufflepuds. In the book, the Dufflepuds turned themselves (and, as an unintended consequence, Coriakin) invisible because they believed themselves to be ugly. In the film he unilaterally turns them invisible - and sure, it's for their own protection, but would it have been so difficult to explain what he was doing? - and is presented as being unquestionably justified.
• On a related note, Coriakin is, above all else, what leads me to compare the film to a D&D campaign. He is quite literally a Mr Exposition, launching with next to no explanation into a description of exactly must the main characters must do.

With my dislike of the film sated, I'll just note two things which amazed/shocked me. First, look at these pictures of Eustace Scrubb:

After you've finished being creeped out by how much a boy can look like a lizard, would you guess that the actor playing him was 16 at the time of filming?

Second, note the girl on the right. That's Lucy Pevensie, as portrayed by Georgie Henley. This is a picture of her looking incredibly cute upon first encountering Narnia:

This is a picture of her looking incredibly cute while talking to Mr Tumnus after her coronation:

And this is the picture which appears at the top of her page on TV Tropes;

CHILDHOOD. RUINED.

Links, June 2014

A proposal to reduce distracted driving, by making things less distracting rather than banning them.

Middle Ages prohibitions on people having sex.

Tom Lehrer is, in my opinion at least, the greatest musical satirist to have existed - equally competent as a bitingly sharp critic of society and as a composer of wonderful melodies. This is a fascinating article on his life  - I was vaguely aware that he'd invented a drink of sorts, I didn't realise it was the FREAKING JELLY SHOT. I knew he'd studied at Harvard, but he went there when he was FIFTEEN. And I (grade eight piano, grade seven cello) would struggle to play a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto, if I even could; he would do so, with his hands playing in different keys!

It's probably too late to make this change for the 2014 World Cup, but Lindybeige's suggestion to replace the penalty shoot-out makes a lot of sense. I'd quibble with some of the details, but so far as I can tell it would a) better represent actual football, b) involve a larger proportion of the team, c) generally take less time than 30 mins of extra time plus 5-15 mins for a shootout.

A tour of British accents. It's far from complete - indeed, none of the three accents which I most regularly encounter (Estuary English, Brummy, and Mancunion) appear - but it does an excellent job of bringing out the differences between accents.

"Factors that were independently associated with increased probability of extra-marital partnerships [included]... spouse longer erect penis." Also, boys contribute more to marriage stability than girls.

Suppose Tyler was right when he wrote this post, which argues that libertarians will never achieve their goals but will always be intellectually important. That's probably bad for people in general, but possibly good for me personally, as an aspiring libertarian intellectual.

"Normal" people are strange. That has consequences for the rest of us.

As a former RPS champion, it's nice to see that I was automatically doing much of this in my normal gameplay.

Evolution, destroying all that is natural, beautiful and loving. This week: motherhood!

Poetry of Afghan women. There are some excellent lines in there, I'll quote a couple of my favourites:
When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

My lover is fair as an American soldier can be.
To him I looked dark as a Talib, so he martyred me.
See also the accompanying podcast.

A fascinating attack on home ownership. There are obvious good reasons for home ownership - principal-agent problems regarding landlords, tenants and maintenance, for example - but there are serious downsides too.

Sporting governance - all the idiocy of real politics, but without the constraints of people having ever though about economics or ethics!

I read Scott Alexander's Piano Man parody by singing it while playing along on my piano. I frequently had to stop, torn somewhere between laughing and being utterly horrified.

A genuine success of government. It'll be interesting to see if this can be replicated on a wider scale: it seems silly to me to think that government can never improve things, the key question is whether it can do so on a predictable basis without spiralling out of control or large unintended consequences.

Speaking of unintended consequences, the assault on the Bin Laden compound has led to an outbreak of Polio.

Frozen and higher education? I just had to link to this...

A new arrangement of Siegmund's Horn Call.

Is there a poster version of this really pretty picture of Elsa's ice palace?

It's often remarked when looking at maps of Africa that whole national boundaries were created by lazy bureaucrats with maps, pencils and rulers whereas "real" borders - those determined by genuine links of language and culture - are far more complicated and nuanced. This analysis of actual borders shows this to be the case largely for the Americas too. I'm quite fascinated by the tendency towards horizontal borders in the more "natural" continents or Europe and Asia - perhaps it's just a chance result caused by the existence of Russia, but I don't see any a priori reason why countries should tend to have greater variety of longitude than latitude so this is an interesting thing to think about.

Another thing I need to turn into a poster.

One of the most common arguments in favour of a need to equalise incomes and wealth is that unequal distributions lead to unequal political influence. There's a crucial problem with this: they don't.

"Because he composed the music without the benefit of knowing what the title was going to be, Copland was often amused when people told him that he had captured the beauty of the Appalachians in his music".

A profile of Paul Krugman. Reading this was what led to me deciding to actually read Pop Internationalism, as opposed to merely keeping it on my Amazon wish list.

Going by the books on this list which I have actually read, I come out as four parts Ravenclaw, four parts Gryffindor, three parts Slytherin and only one part Hufflepuff. From the same author, One Direction's What Makes You Beautiful as a Goedel sentence.

Despite what this says, The King's Gambit seems (to me) to be pretty popular online. I personally play the King's Bishop's Gambit as one of my favourite openings (others of my favourite openings include the Benko, the Queen's Gambit, the Sokolsky, and the Grand Prix Attack).

Pakistanis would rather turn down free money than fill in an anonymous form acknowledging gratitude to the Americans giving it to them. At first I assumed this was a failure of US soft power caused by the War on Terror, although thinking over it I wonder if it has more to do with cultural factors - I'm reminded of responses to the Ultimatum Game where people would turn down generous offers for fear of acquiring costly obligations.

Andrew Cuomo might not be so terrible compared to many other Democrats - what with cutting spending and promoting civil rights he could even be one of the small-l libertarians (stereotyped as right-wing on economic policy, left-wing on social policy) thought to make up around 20% of the US population. My key worries is that he could end up running against someone like Rand Paul, in which case I daresay most self-described libertarians would flock to the Paul banner and do a lot of damage to those of us who are trying to reclaim the whole "compassion for the poor" thing from the left.

Very hi-res picture, very pretty.

Harry Potter, as Ayn Rand might have written it.

Sweden, utopian model of income equality, turns out to have high wealth inequality. I'd be interested to see the level of social mobility alongside these.

Review of Frozen

When it first came out, I had no particular interest in seeing Frozen, but after loving Tangled, hearing a couple of the songs and having it recommended by a friend I thought that I would go to see it. I certianly enjoyed the film, but I have the feeling that there was something off about it.

That thing, I believe, is that the film is undecided about what it wants to be. The first half of the story goes on in the form of musical theatre, which just happens to be animated - a sung opening number with essentially no plot relevance except to introduce the characters of Kristoff and Sven (Frozen Heart), a montage number explaining the rift between Princesses Elsa and Anna (Do You Want to Build a Snowman?), a song explaining the motivation of the protagonists (For the First Time in Forever); Anna and Hans get a jazzy falling-in-love number (Love is an Open Door), a bit of drama leading to Elsa fleeing and singing the musical's most memorable song (Let It Go). So far, so fabulous. This is where the first act ends, and it starts to turn into a drama film. Anna chases after her sister, and via songs meets Kristoff, Sven (Reindeer are Better than People) and Olaf (In Summer).

Got that? We have a first half of the film in which at least half of the time is taken up by songs, and no less than seven songs are used to explain the characters' feelings. Fairly standard for musical theatre. But in the entire rest of the story, there are only two songs, one of which is simply a refrain of For the First Time in Forever and the other of which (Fixer Upper) is, I think it is fair to say, the weakest song in the film. What I would term the third act of the story - from Elsa being captured and Anna being informed that her frozen heart can only be healed by an act of true love - does not include a single song. Every part of the film is good on its own merits, but the inconsistency means that song-lovers will be disappointed by the second half of the movie, while people who'd rather the story moved along will find the first half rather too slow.

That said, what tangential thoughts do I have on the minutae of the film?

First: It's not entirely clear what the Duke of Weselton did wrong. Sure, he's not a nice person. Lots of people aren't. Yes, he only wanted to trade with Arandelle for his own benefit, but so what? It's like the film-makers have never heard of the gains from trade. Yes, he ordered his henchmen to kill Queen Elsa, but to be fair she was a witch and this was back in a time when witches could be assumed to be evil. Besides which, in his eyes she had cursed the whole kingdom of Arandelle and if killing her was the only way to undo the curse, then is her life really to be placed over the thousands of lives her winter is threatening. (Come to think of it, presumably quite a few people died of cold during that winter, even if they did so off-screen). He happened to help Hans in his evil plan, but it wasn't out of malice - he simply wanted someone on the throne who would allow trade between Weselton and Arandelle. You could perhaps justify his maltreatment at the end based on his behaviour at the ball and such things, but cutting off trade is not just unreasonable but plain stupid.

In my review of Tangled I suggested that Disney were promoting a rose-tinted, overly optimistic, and perhaps even dangerous view of love in relation to young women. This film swings so far the other way that I almost think Tangled gives the less dangerous message. Sure, the young man who promises to spend his whole life with you may well not really mean it, but it doesn't generally mean he's intending to kill your sister and probably you too. What I find interesting from a characterisation standpoint is that the reasons for Anna and Rapunzel's naivety is the same in both cases - being kept isolated from the outer world - but they approach the outside world in very different ways. Rapunzel was terrified of the outer world until she encountered it, and prior to leaving the tower was only really interested in seeing the lanterns up close; Anna, on the other hand, was eagerly excited to encounter everything there was to see and meet.

At what point was Marshmallow (the giant snowman monster) actually named as such before Olaf called him that?

The music: if I hadn't already known that the songs were co-written by Robert Lopez (in collaboration with his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez) then there's a fair chance I'd have guessed. There's a range of styles used, but most if not all of the songs have little touches which sound very reminiscent of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon. The link between the chorus and the second verse of Let It Go is one such snippet; the tune of Do You Want to Build a Snowman? is another familiar kind of musical idea, or alternatively the "With you!" "With you!" sections of Love is an Open Door. The instrumental music was fine - generally unobtrusive, and the climax of the music at the end of the film perfectly matched the mood.

Review of Tangled

Last night I watched Tangled on Netflix, and having very much enjoyed it I thought I'd review it here.

I won't go through the plot in great detail, you can read it on Wikipedia if you haven't seen it yourself. This is more a collection of my thoughts on various bits of the film.

First, there's a philosophical question of who owns the magical, life-giving plant. If you believe that Gothel has a good claim to the plant, then she has a strong claim against the King and Queen to be compensated for removing her source of eternal life - ultimately, for killing her.

Near the beginning we are introduced to Rapunzel. What a girl! Pretty, nice singing voice, good at art, strong moral code (at least with regard to promises), strong-willed, enjoys dancing, and best of all she knows how to deal with intruders. (Oh, and remarkably logical with regard to her usage of Flynn when she has him captured). Flynn/Eugene is a lucky guy.

I enjoyed the sequence in the Snuggly Duckling pub. You have a room full of ruffians and quite possibly outlaws, and they are portrayed as good people. Indeed, everyone in the film seems to have a clear motive or dream, whether it's wealth, love, revenge, extended life and youth, or just to see "the lights".

Fourth, how feasible are prying pans as weapons in the real world? There's a common misconception about sword-fighting (that is, real sword-fighting, not fencing) exemplified by the phrase "a clash of blades" . If you block your opponent's sword with your own, then both swords will quickly go blunt. Ideally one would use both a sword and shield, attack with the shield, and use the sword to stab the opponent once their defences are down. In the absence of shields for either combatant, stabbing becomes high priority. A sufficiently resilient frying pan might be used feasibly as both a mace and a shield, but would suffer from a short reach. There'd be no worry of it going blunt, at least. Perhaps the biggest risk would be that the enemy could grab it and wrench it out of your hands. I'd guess it probably wouldn't be all the good, but still I'd take a frying pan over a switchblade any day.

The lanterns are very nice. Apparently in real life they're a far-eastern tradition, we should totally copy that.

All that subtext relating to virginity! Even if Mother Gothel were not an abusive kidnapper, there would be a huge problem with her parenting in that she prohibits Rapunzel from taking any risks at all. The rest of the movie, however, seems to advocate the extreme opposite, of taking wild risks with regard to your personal life as a teenager/young adult. Rapunzel runs off with a guy she's never met before, they go off in a boat together to watch the lanterns, they release their lanterns together, almost-kiss and then she gives him the crown he's been after all this time (Mother Gothel having warned her "He's only after one thing... You give him that crown and he'll no longer have any interest you," or words to that effect). And okay, immediately after that he suddenly seems interested in something else entirely and runs off away from her, but it turns out that he is actually trying to save her and they eventually end up married, happily ever after. No. Girls, if you want a relationship with a guy, and then you sleep with him and suddenly he's distracted and runs off... you probably made a mistake in sleeping with him. He's not trying to save you both, he was genuinely after only one thing, i.e. sex. Even perpetually-single virgins such as I know that. In that sense, I don't think that this is necessarily a positive message Disney is promoting - there is a fine balance to be trod between enjoying yourself, gaining experience of the world and staying safe and it doesn't seem obvious that downplaying the risk of the first and demonising advocates of the latter is a useful signal to send to children.

The whole tear-healing thing seemed rather deus ex machina to me. It turns out, however, that this is a reference to the original story by the brothers Grimm, in which this mechanism happens to repair the Prince's eyes after they are pierced by thorns. The original also featured teen pregnancy but little else to concern, which marks it as remarkably mild by the standards of historical culture. There are some brutal songs celebrating domestic violence, and anyone who thinks of Shakespeare as good, clean fun has clearly never read him.

The end really put me in mind of a gospel classic entitled "Soon and very soon". I can't find any sufficiently celebratory performances on Youtube, so you'll have to sit through mine. (Technical note: that is, when I can sort out the upload, the server keeps disconnecting, possibly as a public service to protect you from my playing).

I recommend the film to anyone reading this, and I intend to watch it again.

PS. I forgot to mention the music. It's by Alan Menken so of course it's good, but he has written better. "I've Got a Dream" was very fun, as noted above.