Altered Beast [Review: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald]

Score: 3 out of 5 stars
All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

The second Fantastic Beasts movies takes place in 1927. An Obscurius transforming-rage-monster (it's no coincidence, by the way, that Obscurius rhymes with Mr. Furious) from the first movie is missing presumed alive. It seems everybody wants a piece of him - the Ministry of Magic, the American and French Ministries, Albus Dumbledore, and the naughty wizard Grindelwald, who has inconveniently escaped his US captors. Everybody, that is, except Newt Scamander who refuses to take sides as he is perfectly happy overworking his devoted assistant Bunty and playing with his seaweed-dragon. I know, right? Hufflepuffs... In order to prevent this being a very short trilogy, the Fates, in the form of US wizard Queenie and No-Maj Jacob Kowalski, conspire to send Newt and his family of baby Nifflers after the Obscurius. The trail leads to Paris, where Grindelwald is quite possibly up to something.

There are plenty of great cinematic moments, action set pieces and characters in this film, as well as points of interest for fans of the original series of books and films. Nagini, for example, turns up and is not quite as we remember her. The hypnotic sort-of-fascist Grindelwald is played brilliantly by Johnny Depp, to the extent that you can't tell if his ability to convert followers is a magic power or just extraordinary charisma. It's a rockstar performance vaguely reminiscent of David Bowie's Tesla in The Prestige.

However there are also many disappointments. The plot hinges on Dumbledore's past with Grindelwald and the reason they are unable to move directly against each other - but we get barely a hint of the romance. The Nifflers and Bowtruckles appear to good effect once or twice but not nearly enough, and there are very few new Fantastic Beasts. Human characters also don't get their chance to shine - can we have a Bunty spin-off series please? The plot itself is disjointed and difficult to follow, lacking in flow or perhaps logic, and while in the first movie there was great pleasure in exploring all aspects of US wizard culture and the 1920s setting in general, the second doesn't really get into either real or fictionalized history in the same satisfying way.

All in all, this movie is enjoyable in places but it's less than the sum of its parts and less satisfying than the first movie or the Harry Potter series, leading to the disappointing score of 3 stars out of 5.

Flying Spaghetti Monsters [Review: Rango]

The greatest mystery of all time: why do good ol' Spaghetti Westerns suck so much, while tributes to the very same Westerns are awesome? I'm thinking of Blazing Saddles for instance, a spoof from the pre-Scary Movie era when spoofs were still allowed to be well-written movies in their own right. Mel Brooks was a large figure in this genre - you can't say he wasn't - and Blazing Saddles one of the best comedy movies ever.

Then there's Firefly. It's unbelievably cool to watch bar-room brawls, cattle rustling and train robberies in space - why, when the same plots out West leave me cold? Blame the sci-fi gene deficiency again... on the other hand, some things about the earliest Westerns are off-putting, including the unthinking racism of the cowboy and injun roles. The constant send-ups of racism in Blazing Saddles prove that the older filmmakers had no excuse (although admittedly, along with the greatness there are some misfires in there too.) I'm wondering exactly how Cowboys and Aliens will work this one out.

The animated movie Rango stars Johnny Depp as a thespian chameleon who finds himself an unwelcome stranger in Dirt, a tumbleweed town populated by lizards and other desert-dwelling animals. The animation: realistic is the wrong word, for example, if you're describing the animation of a rattlesnake with an automatic pistol for a tail. Or a Mexican guitar-playing owl. Or for that matter a chameleon wearing a bright red shirt. A better word for the animation would be "awesome" and it serves the tone of the story very well.



Like the best Westerns* there is action, tragedy, comedy, romance and gratuitous riding across sunsets. Unlike the best Westerns, there is also a village of inbred water-rustlers who ride on bats, setting the stage for a Star Wars-style canyon chase.

I raised the ghost of Blazing Saddles for a reason: Rango is as much a tribute to this movie as to the real Westerns, from the themes of reality vs fiction to the heroine, a lizard cowgirl named "Beans."

* I will admit to liking High Noon if you ply me with enough cactus juice.