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What’s Brown and Sticky
Fantastic Beasts: the Secrets of Dumbledore
J.K. Rowling is a dollar billionaire. With that comes the power to fulfil your dreams. With that you could employ the best screenwriters, the best producers and directors. You could create something marvellous and inspirational. You could create something timeless and ground breaking. Instead she treads the same grubby path we are accustomed to seeing billionaires tread.
I’m not a massive fan of the Harry Potter films but they are eminently watch-able. They don’t inspire me to read the books but I have it on good authority that the books are worth reading. But if Harry Potter is the real deal then Fantastic Beasts is the Disneyfied spin off. The tricks are cheap and the effects are tacky. You can’t see the plot for the clichés. Where are the cloaks of invisibility that make story believable? The slights of hand that hide the mechanics? The credits of Fantastic Beasts: the Secrets of Dumbledore tell us that the screenplay, co-written by her, is a screenplay based on her own screenplay. This smacks of self indulgence and suggests this is part ego trip, part money making exercise and not part anything else.
One of my first thoughts, on sitting through the film, was of not believing in the story or any of the characters. The silly self animating coffee pots and teacups simply…
