I'm the last person that should be writing about these Harry Potter spin-offs if you want an unbiased perspective. I love the books but honestly, the movie adaptations are lightweight trash, especially those last four [ed. note: Frazier's opinions don't represent the entire Pop Culture squad and are blasphemous imo]. How is Half-Blood Prince lowkey the third best book in the series but the movie induced a coma? How, Sway? It's like, those movies' rep just coasts on how well cast the three leads are and everyone ignores the fact that the films (especially those last four!) wring every bit of flavor and narrative/character nuance out of the source text rendering them into the most bland quick-billion blockbusters ever. But I digress.
Whether you dig the franchise book and film or not, we all have to admit J.K. Rowling has a hard time letting go, and Hollywood sure loves to enable her. I have no idea what Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is about—because all I really needed from her were those seven fire books—besides that it will revolve around Newt Scamander, the wizard who will go on to create the expansive textbook documenting all eponymous fantastic beasts in the wizarding world. (So it's a movie about the book Rowling wrote as the textbook that her characters frequently study from in her main series of books. So it's a movie about a meta-textbook. OK.) I definitely won't see it (unless Complex dot com forces me to which, c'est la vie lmao) and was content to just ignore it like I do all of those extraneous Pottermore posts JK writes about like, exactly what type of dentist Hermione Granger's parents were.
But now I have reason to actively resent this movie, because they just scooped my boy up into the very Franchise Black Hole I'd hoped he would avoid. A month back I gave you a grip's worth of words on the genius of Colin Velcoro Farrell, and why MVP'ing a frustrating, simultaneously thin and dense season of True Detective is the move that will finally help him level up in Hollywood. I want to see him on some Jake Gyllenhaal shit, flexing those thespian chops in challenging roles that still have mainstream appeal. Where is Colin's Nightcrawler? His Enemy? It definitely does not lie with Newt Scamander. Smfh, Ray.
