Thoughts on Fantastic Beasts

Comments on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

So, in general, they were fun films what I watched on HBO Max. The first one seemed to ebb and flow in tempo for me, and the second one has a lot of exposition. But they are enjoyable for what they are. The main character Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is quite entertaining in his varieties and very likeable, and in the second film Jude Law makes for an excellent younger Dumbledore. Most interstingly is to notice how the creatures in Fantastic Beasts look like fantastic beasts, while, in comparison, the creatures in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings looked like Pokemon. Which, I think speaks more about Marvel, but it does absolutely speak.

But I want to focus on two elements, one in each film. First, in Fantastic Beasts, I want to point to the end, to the wizards walking around New York fixing all the damage done to the buildings and structures while the people stand around 'obliviated' — their memories of the events removed. Never mind the morality of such an act, let us just look at the damage being undone. And in the final sequences a massive amount of damage was done. But whippity-snick, a wave of the wand and all the bricks are back in place. (To note, it is a surreptitiously dropped issue how the wizarding world in the U.S. is portrayed as being cruel and oppressive, but without commentary, not even by a more enlightened European culture. Perhaps Rowling only dared go so far.)

Review: Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

I first read Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) for class. I cannot trace when in my notes so perhaps it was as an undergrad. I have always carried with me a fondness for the book, remembering it as both emotional and literarily interesting. Yes, it is an emotional book, mostly in the latter half as reality comes calling on the cast of characters, but it is not as literary as I remembered it. Though, this is yet an excellently written novel, written when McCullers was but twenty-three.

The book tells the story of four persons in a moderately sized, southern town during a year right before WWII: an all-night restaurant owner, a black doctor, a Communist dwarf, and Mick, a twelve year old girl, who most would consider the main character. Time is shared with each chapter focusing on one of the four, or on the one man who links them all, Mr. Singer, a deaf-mute with a private life no one knows about who lives in the upstairs room in Mick's family's boarding house, and who becomes something of a father confessor to all four. It is a story that is equally the story of people living their lives each in their own situation, but it is also a story about people in general: the Negro race, through the eyes of Doctor Copeland, the oppressed poor, through the eyes of Mr. Blount, the dwarf, and life on the border of poverty, through the eyes of Mick. Indeed, with Blount and Copeland, long passages are devoted to their political/social beliefs: passages that are not preaching to the reader but are both commentary on the world and development of character — something seen quite clearly when Blount and Copeland meet up, and find they cannot get their own beliefs to meld.

Review: Shusaku Endo, Silence

A review — a brief critical review — of Shusaku Endo's Silence (1966). A review perhaps coming close to having spoilers, as it were, but really nothing here is not presented by the time the action is fully underway. Indeed, it is all present in the quips on the back of the book if you look hard enough. It might be worth saying that Endo is compared to Graham Greene, and people knowing that might have expectations. I know nothing of Greene; he has never breached my interest; so, I cannot speak to any comparison except to that _Silence_ is a book about Roman Catholicism, though it is also about Christianity in general, and, it can be argued, religion across the board.

The story is that of a Portuguese priest, Father Rodrigues, who (in 1637), accompanied by two other priests (who are really minor characters), decides to be smuggled into a historically acurate Japan that has outlawed Christianity, and that has brutally eliminated all surface evidence of it, and pushed what remains of the religion underground. Their purpose is to find out what happened to their once teacher, Father Ferreira, who is said to have apostatized, to have wholly renounced Catholicism — something the three cannot believe.

Only two complete the sea journey and make it on land in Japan, there to find themselves taken in by a small village of peasants who are themselves Catholic and happy to once again have a priest in their number. But their time there is short, and the inevitable happens — inevitable not only that the plot must progress but also because their mission is from the start a fool's errand — and their presence is discovered and, after the two priests decide to split up, Rodrigues is captured. Which leads, ultimately, as one of the quips on the back cover says, to "the Calvary of Father Rodruigues."

(To note, the whole of that quip, from the Jesuit magazine America, makes me question if the reviewer fully understood the book.)