{"id":50832,"date":"2016-11-24T13:45:03","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T21:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/?p=50832"},"modified":"2019-03-05T17:39:24","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T01:39:24","slug":"fantastic-beasts-and-where-to-find-them-is-fantastic-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/fantastic-beasts-and-where-to-find-them-is-fantastic-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is Fantastic Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

Take everything that you know about the Harry Potter<\/em><\/a> series – and even if nothing has irked you, and you absolutely love it – and throw that right out the window and directly in the face of a petty \u201cNo-Maj\u201d (the American word for Muggle) like myself. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them<\/em> takes you out of the drab and mundane of adolescence in Hogwarts and gives you sweet wizardry action.<\/p>\n

Fantastic Beasts<\/em> follows Newt Scamander (played by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne) and his loveable No-Maj happenstance-sidekick, Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) as they traverse the streets of 1920\u2019s New York. Attempting to out run former Auror (a wizard cop essentially) Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterson) and current Auror, Percival Graves (Colin Farrell), of the Magical Congress of The United States (MUCSA), capture myriad of “fantastical beasts” that have escaped from his magical briefcase and solve a dark riddle that\u2019s tearing the American wizarding community\u00a0out from the shadows, and into the light.<\/p>\n

With the hunt for the fantastic beasts and the Obscurus – a new addition to the canon – the underlying themes come out in the movies\u2019 dealing with discrimination and a literal witch hunt, throughout.<\/p>\n

Fear and xenophobia play at the core of the film, which seem apropos for the current zeitgeist. At times, the film seems to be running down a checklist of summer blockbuster tropes: There\u2019s the big fantastical set pieces, a surprise twist that sets up sequels to come, and all the kitsch and charm you can shake a wand at. But, as you peel back the layers beneath the shoehorned love stories and other constructs,\u00a0you find a story that deals in people having to suppress who they are and how that only leads to retaliation. When one is forced to hide who they truly are, they will only lash out in ways that only hurt those around them and themselves.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t worry though, it\u2019s not all just doom, gloom, and wizard anarchy – there is a litany of the most adorable beasts you\u2019ve ever seen. Even some of the more \u201chorror show\u201d type of beasts come across as the cuddliest creatures that could easily crush you into a human pancake or eat your brains.<\/p>\n

I admit, I\u2019m not a Harry Potter<\/em> fan. I\u2019ve never enjoyed the books and I\u2019ve found the movies, save for Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets<\/em>, to be very mediocre. Even though they\u2019ve had great directors at the helm of some; including Alfonso Cuaron and Chris Columbus. I can\u2019t find it in me to enjoy any of them. It is a bias, I know. But Fantastic Beasts<\/em> blew that bias wide open and maybe even opened my cold heart to letting the Wizarding World in.<\/p>\n

\n

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Entertainment Earth, Inc. its owners, officers, employees, affiliates, subsidiaries, partners, vendors, customers or licensors.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Take everything that you know about the Harry Potter series – and even if nothing has irked you, and you absolutely love it – and throw that right out the window and directly in the face of a petty \u201cNo-Maj\u201d (the American word for Muggle) like myself. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,108,3794],"tags":[4764,455,454,103,3985,4005,3648],"yst_prominent_words":[8639,10604,37581,9745,8889,8470,37582,6413,6021,8479,8379,30869,7008,5978,9483,8109,37580,8480,11900,8481],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50832"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50832"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64080,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50832\/revisions\/64080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50832"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.entertainmentearth.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=50832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}