REVIEW: 'The Crimes Of Grindlewald'

Hello. It's me. I'm back again.

So in-between further mental health battles, a family crisis that makes me want to seek asylum on Mars, and streaming on Twitch - I decided to wearily travel to my nearest multiplex for the first time since....shit, The Last Jedi.

I fell out with the medium of film a while back. With online video, we've moved away from the classic self-contained 90 min format. There is no film. You don't shoot on film. You don't play film reels back. When I went to the cinema to see The Crimes Of Grindlewald, I watched a projector playing a digital video file against a wall. It's a very nice quality image with a good (if a little too bass-y) sound system, but the only difference between this video and something you can upload on YouTube is enough money to send an entire city to university.

And the subject of obscene wealth brings me nicely to Harry Potter.

By parliamentary law, we in England are all required to like Harry Potter. I personally like discussing the books because they're extremely popular, mostly good, and I always want to know why. What does this borrow from? Why does it progress this way? What can we learn? Why haven't we moved on yet?

A few years ago I went on the Harry Potter Studio Tour. If you don't know, the old studio just outside London where the films were shot has been converted into almost a museum where you can see parts of the sets, props, and costumes. It's fun if you're interested in film-making and especially if you enjoy learning about Production Design. There's so many props and costumes that you can examine at your own pace to determine what influenced the design, and how it was crafted to look authentic. I think describing the tour as 'almost a museum' is accurate because this is a museum for a historical period that never happened. The fun, as with any fictional world, is filling in the history for ourselves.

But then I remembered the true purpose of the grandest museums. They exist not to educate or inspire, but they exist as a display of power. Further into London, The British Museum holds ancient relics stolen from lands we conquered. The incredible building that houses these relics was designed to demonstrate the might of Britain; as a church to the country. It doesn't celebrate what's inside, it celebrates itself.

The Harry Potter Studio tour is more or less a way of saying: "Our brand is the greatest ever." Because Harry Potter is a brand now. At the end of the tour, there's an enormous gift shop selling all kinds of Potter-related paraphernalia. Before going on a trip to Vienna, there was a Harry Potter shop in the terminal. In my local supermarket, there's a small cardboard display where you can buy Harry Potter licensed stuff. Opposite it you can get Star Wars themed odds and ends too. Harry Potter has become 'that brand' with enough merchandise to fill China. All the combined man-hours to make all this disposable paraphernalia - and what has it achieved?

Because The Crimes Of Grindlewald is an OK movie with some decent performances and a good pace behind it. But is this what we're supposed to worship? Is this what the brand always has been like. Was Harry Potter ever that good?

J.K Rowling has lost her appeal. After being hailed as the new Roald Dahl, capturing a generation of people who either never read books or haven't read anything else since, her crown rests on a troubled brow. So she's decided to return to Harry Potter because she clearly feels stuck within that area...and it's also the only thing everyone praises her for. Oh, she's also a complete transphobe; but that's another topic for another day.

We've discussed the awful Cursed Child, but there was hope when J.K Rowling turned Pottermore from an empty companion website to an official guide to the entire world of Harry Potter. With it, she can create all sorts of lore and back-story to greatly flesh out her world - and it's entirely under her control. No Star Wars Expanded Universe for us to declare non-cannon when Disney buys the franchise out, no sir!

There's potential here. One Pottermore entry that stuck out for me was the story of the Japanese equivalent of Hogwarts. In fact, it was just one incredibly creative little detail. As a student grows and matures in their magical power, their robes change colour. If they are expelled, or bring terrible shame to the school, their robes turn white. It's a tiny detail that sparks my imagination, and makes me imagine all sorts of wonderful sights this school might hold; what people would inhabit it, and what stories they could tell.

And so I could see the appeal of Fantastic Beasts for this reason. It was certainly a creative, colourful film. It just didn't have an emotional weight. Newt Scamander is the typical 'distracted, anti-social genius' who doesn't have any strong feelings for anything aside his creatures - who he has shit-tons of anyway. He already seems to know everything about magical creatures, so as a character he has no space for development. Fantastic Beast's was basically a children's movie. The highest steak was protecting the fluffy animals, and the actual plight of the human condition was non-existent. The studio just upped the violence to get a 12A rating so it can get adults to buy tickets as well.

But then the sequel that no-one asked for has come along and now it's trying to add consequence with the same characters by connecting it directly to the Harry Potter books. It's even ret-conned a couple of characters fates from the last film, so they literally don't matter because we can just hit the 'reset' switch. Even the production design is dull. It's the same saturated colour palette, with Paris looking little different from New York. The costumes are un-inspired, with everyone just wearing long-coats. Magic is supposed to be this limitless power, parts of it beyond our imagination. Can we imagine a colour that's not grey? Clothing that's not from the winter collection? A better story?

And of course, J.K Rowling continues to write Dumbledore and Grindlewald's homosexual relationship the same way Oscar Wilde and Christopher Isherwood wrote about them. Except the reason why Wilde and Isherwood were so ambiguous and coy was because if they were more explicit then they would be thrown in prison. In fact, Oscar Wilde's writing was used against him in his trial for being gay. I become more convinced every day that Dumbledore and Grindlewald aren't actually gay, but Rowling is trying to find yet another reason for people to worship her when she's not correcting the president's spelling. (Because Harry defeated Voldemort with sub-tweeting)

This was supposed to be a much longer post ranting about the supremacy of Harry Potter and such, but I'm just bored. I don't want to talk about Harry Potter anymore because it's a soulless dynasty, and this film is just another statue or something else you piss up against.