Greetings from AMC Tysons

Quickie since I spent most of the evening in Tysons Corner at a free screening of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which I somehow won from being on a Warner Bros mailing list. We left the house more than two hours early, yet there was already a line when we reached the theater, and so early that we wound up eating pizza and Beyond Nuggets in the auditorium rather than run around the food court. A friend from my local Pokemon group was working the event, so we wound up sitting in great seats in the reviewer section. 

I feel ambivalent talking about the movie itself. I support people who refuse to see it because JKR is a TERF who supports organizations that do awful damage to trans women, and I know other people who refuse to see it because Warner Bros fired Johnny Depp as Grindelwald but not Amber Heard as Mera in Aquaman. Frankly, I can't stand Depp or Heard after all the things they've both admitted, though I'm not boycotting either one, and I won't pay for anything Rowling does, but I can't erase Harry Potter from my past, either -- and this was free. 

The film is lovely to look at, has Jude Law onscreen almost as much as Eddie Redmayne which is my preference, has by far the best canonical gay representation in any HP story though in some ways it's still unsatisfactory, has a plot with [magical] animals that I found disturbing especially on the big screen, has humor but some of it drags a bit, and has Mads Mikkelsen who's so much more effective as Grindelwald than Depp that I didn't miss the latter at all, especially since they started with Colin Farrell, so the shapeshifting wasn't odd. 

I never got very invested in any of the couples -- nay, any of the characters -- in the previous two films, so if you are, you might find this one frustrating until the very end. Kowalski gets lots of screen time but not exactly character development while the sisters from earlier in the franchise are barely there. On the other hand, there's lots more Lally Hicks and Theseus gets to be more interesting than I found him in the previous two movies. I'll admit that brief Hogwarts views and music excited me more than a lot of the newer stuff.

 

Oh, and we just watched the Billions season finale while I typed this. It smelled kind of fishy last week when Prince 1) slept with someone other than the wife he's obsessed with then 2) announced he was running for president, and this week it absolutely reeked of shark-jumping, with ridiculous dialogue and even more ridiculous behavior from most of the major characters. We'll see if we even bother with next season.