Monthly Archives: November 2018

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald wastes no time establishing that logic, internal consistency, and coherent storytelling have no place in this film. The opening sequence is Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) escaping prison in a torrent of garish, entirely too darkly rendered CGI. There was no real attempt to have it make any sense. The thin plot called for Grindelwald to escape, so he did.

Very shortly thereafter, we learn that Credence (Ezra Miller) didn’t die at the end of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. No attempt at all to give a reason, just a bland statement that he survived. And the memory wipe at the end of the first film didn’t work on Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler). That’s right, it simply didn’t work. Men in Black II at least had the decency to come up with a weird but plausible (in the movie’s universe, anyway) method for Agent Kay to get his memories back after being wiped, but not Fantastic Beasts. Couldn’t be bothered, Kowalski’s memory wipe just didn’t work. Continue reading →

The People who made The Grinch Must Really Hate Christmas

How the Grinch Stole Christmas, made way back in 1966, is a timeless classic. You’d think, or at least hope, the studios would leave Dr. Seuss’s beloved story alone after the abomination that was Jim Carrey’s remake in 2000. But no, the Hollywood suits are back to take another shot with The Grinch.

The book is only 64 pages long, and the original animated show only runs 26 minutes, so they had to pad the story a lot to get a film with a runtime of almost an hour and a half. Cindy-Lou Who (Cameron Seely), “who was no more than two,” in the original looks to be about eight now and has a whole cadre of friends to cook up mischief with. Cindy-Lou’s mom (Rashida Jones) is a hard-working single mother, and there’s a whole story arc about that. The Grinch himself (Benedict Cumberbatch) gets a backstory about being a sad, lonely orphan during Christmas years ago. Apparently, he doesn’t hate Christmas so much as find it depressing. These stories all come off as filler, and none of them are compelling.

Max is cool. The Grinch. IMDb.com

Continue reading →

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is yet another example of Hollywood’s sad obsession with throwing massive amounts of eye candy at the screen while not bothering too much with the story. To be fair, though, the eye candy is magnificent, and the story, bland and simple as it may be, is not awful.

The film opens with a CGI heavy but still beautiful bird’s eye flight over Victorian London ending at the home of Clara Stahlbaum (Mackenzie Foy) as she and her brother, Fritz (Tom Sweet), attempt to catch a mouse with a Rube Goldberg machine constructed in the attic. Clara’s mother (Anna Madeley) has recently died, and Clara, her father (Matthew Macfadyen), her brother, and her sister (Ellie Bamber) are trying to cope with the loss as they get ready to attend a Christmas party. A Christmas gift from her late mother and a gift-giving game at the party hosted by Clara’s godfather, Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman), set the stage for the rest of the film.

Keira Knightley and Mackenzie Foy in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. IMDb.com.