Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

[hrj]

Well, I saw it. Lots of fabulous effects, especially in creating the creatures. But also lots of unanalyzed tropes that felt worse than lazy. The ditzy blonde with the heart of gold. The callously predatory mentor of a teenage boy where the relationship involved enough physical affection to cross the line (for me) into evoking pedophilia. The message that you can be an endearingly dorky guy and still be a hero, but if you're a tormented broken outsider, you have to die. And for a story that engages with themes about prejudice and persecution, there's a startling lack of addressing racial issues in 1920s New York, whether it's the complete glossing over of the contradictions of having a black MACUSA president who would face dual prejudices in "nomaj" society, or the substitution of non-human background characters for what would be expected to be black roles in the nightclub scenes.

It isn't awful...it's just...not very self-aware. But we sort of knew it was going to be like that, didn't we?

Comments

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

And word like this is exactly why I have no intention of going to see it. (I missed ARRIVAL, THE HANDMAIDEN isn't until spring, I'm not sure I really want to see MOANA... ROGUE ONE will probably suck way more than I am hoping. Films this year.)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd definitely say give Beasts a miss. (The more I think of how the "evil mentor" relationship was presented, the more enraged I am. Especially because [spoilerspoilerspoiler].

My review of Moana is going up next week. (Saw it last weekend, but I'm not sure I'll have anything else reviewable in the mean time and one must stick to one's arbitrary blog schedule.) I was happy I saw it, even though it does some of the standard Disney things that annoy me. (Goofy animal sidekick. Use of culturally inappropriate contemporary American pop music.) Biggest plus? Absolutely no hint of a whiff of a suggestion of a romance plot.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

MOANA seems a bit... musical and cute... for my usual tastes. But absence of romance plot is a win. That may get me to go see it!

[hrj.livejournal.com]

It's Disney. It's going to be musical and cute. But I think you might enjoy it. (No explosions, but lava monsters!)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

...officially sold.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I'm actually a bit surprised by some of this review. Most of it aside, I thought that the movie did a great job of undercutting the ditzy blonde stereotype. Her first introduction is as a sweet-voiced gold-hearted ditz... and then as soon as you actually see her getting things done when important matters are at hand, you see why she was a little bitter about how she just fetches the coffee, at her job. She's clearly someone who can think fast on her feet--whether she needs to lie, blackmail, or sneak about--in the midst of a crisis, while those around her mostly don't see past the surface.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Buy why lean so heavily on a stereotype at all?

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

Because it's putting the film in dialogue with other films set in the same era; specifically Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (and arguably, given the caper and speakeasy elements, Some Like it Hot). She's not just a ditzy blonde, she's the ulimate ditzy blonde, Marilyn (who was also the subject of Redmayne's first big film role).

I agree with fadethecat; I think it's a clever use of a trope including subversion of it and a set of related tropes. For example, the movies are absolutely full of unattractive men getting off with exceptionally attractive women and no-one bats an eye at it or bothers to query it. And here we have apparently the same set up with Kowalski. Except, guess what? The woman in question is actually a mind-reader, which probably is going to make rather a difference to whom she finds attractive and whom she doesn't.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

For the delight of subverting it, I would say. It's sort of the opposite of the "not like the other girls" trope, where you know who the Smart, Worthwhile Female Character is because she's not hitting the usual feminine tropes. Instead, you take a stereotype with particular negative connotations (Sure, she's sweet, but she's so dumb!) and then reveal depths and contradictions to those negative assumptions (...she's not dumb at all, and she resents being treated as if she is, and she can also use those assumptions to fool people who underestimate her accordingly). I think back to part of the stated purpose of the original conception of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: that you take the blond cheerleader type who usually dies early in a horror movie, and make her the monster-killing protagonist instead.

But then, trope subversion is one of my favorite, er, tropes. So I take a particular joy in that sort of thing which is not necessarily to everyone else's taste.