{"id":1801,"date":"2019-03-29T09:26:21","date_gmt":"2019-03-29T13:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/?p=1801"},"modified":"2019-03-29T14:02:35","modified_gmt":"2019-03-29T18:02:35","slug":"quick-reviews-the-crimes-of-the-crimes-of-grindelwald-spoilers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/2019\/03\/29\/quick-reviews-the-crimes-of-the-crimes-of-grindelwald-spoilers\/","title":{"rendered":"Quick Reviews: The Crimes of the Crimes of Grindelwald (spoilers)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap wp-block-paragraph\">I think I want to get in the habit of cataloguing my media consumption here. I generally get just a few opportunities to view a pictures on a screen (I was going to say watch television, but that isn&#8217;t strictly true any longer)&#8211;while working out on my elliptical machine in the basement, on the weekends if I catch a movie with the kids, and falling asleep while my wife watches a show next to me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It turns out I can fall asleep while holding up a phone or tablet so she can see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, let&#8217;s kick this off with something I watched with the kids this weekend: <em>Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. &nbsp;<\/em>I&#8217;ve read all the Harry Potter books to the kids, with the exception of the last one. For some reason, they just didn&#8217;t want me to read <em>The Deathly Hallows<\/em> to them, and I know they&#8217;ve read every other Potter book on their own. I haven&#8217;t gotten a good reason why, but I suspect the death of Dumbledore hit them pretty hard and that they have heard noises about more death in the last book. <br><br>Collectively, the Lstr household thought the first movie was uneven but fun. Bottom line: This movie was uneven and somewhat joyless.  That&#8217;s despite the fact that I enjoyed each and every actor on the screen, particularly Jude Law. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_85 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-grey ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<div class=\"ez-toc-title-container\"><p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Today on the Lstrblg...<\/p>\n<\/div><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/2019\/03\/29\/quick-reviews-the-crimes-of-the-crimes-of-grindelwald-spoilers\/#Notes\" >Notes<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Notes\"><\/span>Notes<br><span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>My daughter uttered the phrase &#8220;They are not going to kill that baby, are they?&#8221; twice during this film. And the phrase &#8220;This movie murders babies&#8221; at least once.<\/li><li>Pretty much the entire ending of the first movie was undone through unconvincing exposition.  Jacob&#8217;s memory? Wasn&#8217;t wiped. The death of creepy kid? Didn&#8217;t happen. Newt&#8217;s love interest? Estranged via awkward lack of communication. I wonder if the thunderbird is back in Newt&#8217;s box somewhere. <\/li><li>Both the Ministry of Magic and Dumbledore want Newt as a their secret agent against Grindelwald because, essentially, he&#8217;s so weird and awkward that nobody would suspect he&#8217;s anything but the Magical Steve Irwin\/Doctor Who mashup that he is. Did nobody else see the first movie where he exposed Grindelwald? No, I guess the first movie didn&#8217;t happen and we&#8217;re doing this who retcon thing now.<\/li><li>Speaking of the big G. How did Grindelwald become a husky-eyed fauxbino? Maybe too much polyjuice. In the Harry Potter movies he was your standard British character actor. Couldn&#8217;t JK kept with the No Americans rule?  <\/li><li>Did this movie somehow take the position that Magic Nazis wanted to prevent WWII?<\/li><li>How poorly contrived and overly complicated was the switched\/drowned baby story? I love Rowling&#8217;s storytelling, but she&#8217;s gotten too big for an editor. She&#8217;s crossed the Lucas horizon.<\/li><li>So, is Dumbledore&#8217;s long lost, previously-never mentioned brother now the anti-Potter? <\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think I want to get in the habit of cataloguing my media consumption here. I generally get just a few opportunities to view a pictures on a screen (I was going to say watch television, but that isn&#8217;t strictly true any longer)&#8211;while working out on my elliptical machine in the basement, on the weekends [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,6,21,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dumb-thoughts","category-gregs-reference","category-stinkbug-manor","category-uninformed-critic","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Fantastic_Beasts_-_The_Crimes_of_Grindelwald_Poster.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7V2xo-t3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1801"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1820,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions\/1820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}