Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (and Two Never-Ending Online Debates)

(This contains spoilers of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, so proceed with caution)

This past week, I saw for the very first time Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is touring and was playing in Minneapolis, part of what will be a month-long tribute to the Boy Wizard in my house (including another concert, and a rewatch of all of the Fantastic Beast & Harry Potter films that I'll be chronicling with reviews, in some cases first logged reviews, on Letterboxd).  In the decade since this play first went to Broadway, this has been a top priority for me, to the point that it was the only Harry Potter-related thing I've never read or seen.  In all likelihood, given Fantastic Beasts reception compared to the original run of movies and JK Rowling's fall-from-grace, it may well be the last original Harry Potter idea we may ever get, as the next few years it seems certain that HBO's new remake will be the #1 priority for the Wizarding World.

Before we get to the two reasons that I am actually writing this article, I want to share my thoughts on the play itself, which I really enjoyed.  I am the biggest of Harry Potter fans.  In real life, I am linked first to movies & politics, and of course the Oscars, but probably name-checked as much is Harry Potter, which pretty much everyone associated with me knows I love (and if you've been to my house, you'll also understand this because there's Harry Potter stuff in virtually every corner).  My dad, who went with me, I could see smirking as he saw his 41-year-old son grin from ear-to-ear as they played the opening music and saw Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and a host of other familiar characters on the stage (no matter how old you get, your parents always see you as a little boy in their hearts).  The show itself reads, frequently, as fan service (occasionally even fan fiction), and therefore it's not quite to the caliber of the original books.  It offers little in terms of sacrifice of main characters (we are spared the pain of seeing any of the main characters from the original series die in the end).  But it's also fun and has moments of solid magic (I loved the stuff in the alternative timeline, and the set design in this is maybe the best I've ever seen give-or-take Matilda in a stage show), and in Rowling's distinctive fashion (she is, for all of the criticism of her, someone who is good at showing the sacrifices & truths of growing up), she gives us a real parable about a young boy who is coming to terms with his own sexuality.  In a shock that is proof that I didn't have this play ruined for me through the years, Harry Potter & Draco Malfoy's sons are pretty explicitly shown to be romantic partners by the end of the play, something that might in part explain why this hasn't been made into a Warner Brothers big-screen movie given the billion-dollar implications.

Of course, the other is that Rowling herself has basically torched her reputation (making stars like Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, & Rupert Grint, were they even open to returning to the roles for likely 8-figure paydays, far more apprehensive).  It's not new news to talk about this, and indeed if you look back through the years on this blog you'll find I've weighed in a few times on the author who I grew up hero-worshiping in my twenties only to be disgusted by her in my thirties.  Cancel culture, in my opinion, has somehow not gone far enough and has perhaps in other ways gone too far.  Case in point for the latter-at a Netflix roast for Kevin Hart this weekend, Chelsea Handler made a crack about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, in the oppressive regime of Saudi Arabia where there is a long history of censorship and human rights violations...a comedy at which roast dais members Pete Davidson, Jeff Ross, & Kevin Hart all performed.  But in turn they're all still working (i.e. they're getting checks for appearing at this roast), with Hart starring in a $100M franchise entry in the Jumanji series later this year, likely making a fortune in the process.

This is, in part, because it's next-to-impossible to keep track of all of the things that people are expected to boycott or protest online.  Go on the social media of virtually any celebrity online and you will find a series of gloating and angry complaining underneath their posts.  Never mind that these platforms we're all using are owned by men with actual power who are actually destroying the planet (like Elon Musk & Mark Zuckerberg), so even using these platforms is tantamount to endorsing cruelty.  It's exhausting, and makes boycotts of entertainers impossible all-things-considered.  This is why Scream VII, despite many calls to boycott, ended up being a huge box office success, and why it appears likely that the Harry Potter TV series will be a blockbuster its first season (and perhaps its whole run)-people cannot be at 11 all the time, and if that's the expectation from online culture...you're going to find people tapping out and choosing not to protest anything.  This isn't necessarily me trying to have my cake-and-eat-it-too (I'm not endorsing complacency), but I will admit that the expectations of being a social progressive online feel, to a degree I have not experienced before, unrealistic.  I do not have the money, time, or knowledge to be able to successfully boycott every person & company whose opinions I disagree.  This doesn't mean that I won't continue to stay away from certain entertainers or places (I have never been to a Chic-Fil-A, and in a year I have devoted to action stars each week, you'll note that Mel Gibson is not one of the stars I'm going to focus on despite him being a staple of the genre and admittedly an actor whose career would be fascinating to profile), but it does mean that I am struggling to keep up with what increasingly inconsistent voices on the internet want from me.

This is in particular a situation that has come up repeatedly, and relates to Harry Potter in a different way-whether it is appropriate for an adult to be entertained by it at all.  Go on your social media, and you'll find that people are perpetually talking about the concept of Disney Adults, very much a cousin of the Harry Potter Adult.  These are people who regularly go to Disney parks, spend a significant amount on merchandise & travel expenses, and in some cases more than they have.  The latest round of this was brought on by a New Yorker article about people going into dramatic debt over the Disney trips.

I will say-you should not go into serious debt trying to live a Disney adult lifestyle, period, end of story.  I talked recently about 401k withdrawal penalties (and my support of them), and will own that I think people should be more respectful of their personal finances.  But I also think that, if you can afford it, you should do trips to places like Disney & Universal, even as an adult with no children, for a number of reasons.

For starters, these parks are fun, and not really wholly meant for children (even Walt Disney said that).  The detail, character work, and even some of the rides are created in a way to inspire magic for all ages, and honestly are way more in-depth than a child is really going to appreciate.  To pretend otherwise is to ignore that things like musical theater, Las Vegas & Atlantic City, cruise lines, and all sporting events that are things that are very much about play and make-believe, yet for some reason they are not considered to be "age inappropriate" for adults and (save for the gambling) are things generally enjoyed by children.  Additionally, given the disproportionately large amount of money that these major theme parks make as a result of childless adults visiting their parks, they basically couldn't stay in business were it not for these clients (there's a reason that they are creating things like food festivals at Epcot...to keep them coming back).  And these Disney adults are not the reason that these parks are going up in exorbitant costs-that's on larger nationwide financial policy, and also that it should cost more to take a family of four to a park than it does a single person or a couple (also, let's be honest here-the cost per person for a family of four going to a Disney park is WAY less than it is for a single or coupled group).  It's not single people's fault you can't afford this-that's on you (and, admittedly, Republican lawmakers who have made life considerably more expensive in the Trump era).

That said, and to close, I will say that Disney adults, I don't totally have your back even if I'm basically at this point counted among you (I have planned two trips to Disney/Universal locals over the past year, and will have two more if my finances hold in the next two years, albeit in four different cities for each of them).  You should have trips that see things other than Disney.  You should read/watch movies other than Disney and Harry Potter.  Occasionally, you need to challenge yourself by going to more traditionally adult spots like art museums, plays, R-rated movies, and even pick up a book written by someone like Dickens or Austen or Dostoevsky.  The play and "adulthood is hard, let's be a kid again" vibe of Disney and Harry Potter only work if you do, in fact, try to expand your mind in adulthood into things that are intended exclusively for you, not just in part.

My Thoughts on the Harry Potter Trailer

To know me is to know that I have a few passions that sort of define my personality.  In fact, if you read this blog for longer than five minutes, you could catch most of them: politics, the Oscars, travel, Lost...and Harry Potter.  Literally everyone in my universe knows that I absolutely adore Harry Potter.  From where I am writing this, I have a sword of Gryffindor, a Hedwig statue, a wand diagram framed photo, a Remembral, a stack of Chocolate Frog cards, at least 30 books & editions related to the series, a Deathly Hallows nightlight, a Hogwarts pillow, a Sorting Hat, a sticker book, a Hogwarts desk lamp, a mini wand stand, a pair of Harry's spectacles, a wand from Univeral Studios, and a Platform 9 3/4 piggy bank.  And that's literally JUST in this room.  If you walked the house, you'd find dozens, if not hundreds more things from the wizarding world.  I read the books for the first time as a teenager, and fell in love with them, to the point where they became my whole personality for a long time (perhaps still are to a degree), adored every movie (saw literally every single one, including Fantastic Beasts, opening weekend, most of them multiple times), and even have a Harry Potter Christmas tree with just ornaments for the show.  I abhor the politics of JK Rowling in real life, her transphobia is unacceptable and cruel, and heartbreaking for anyone who understood the message of a series of books about being yourself, and finding your own chosen family to celebrate the real you (I sometimes wish she'd read the Harry Potter book instead of wrote them...it'd have been a better learning opportunity for her), but I'm too vested to pretend I don't love the world that she created.

I have been upfront about my particular disdain for the concept of the upcoming TV series, though, and talked about it before on this blog.  I think that remakes, as a general rule, are aggressively boring, even those that pretend to be good.  They fall into one of two camps: they're either "fine" and are overpraised for being able to successfully navigate a new story with modern storytelling techniques, or they're just cookie-cutter carbon copies of the original.  There are (very rarely) movies that work as remakes, sometimes better than the original, though those usually aren't recreating classics (think something like the new Dune movies), but by-and-large most remakes are not good, and are the far more criminal adjective: boring.

But at this point I won't pretend that I won't watch the series, at least initially.  Curiosity, rabid Harry Potter love, and societal expectations for making this so much of my persona have made that impossible (it's like how, on rare occasion, I think I should skip the Oscars because after months of winter some degree of Seasonal Affective Disorder has taken ahold, and I just don't want to...but I always do because it would destroy a cultivated personality around said show).  I don't expect it to be good or for me to like it, but I want to see what's happening.  And so I watched the trailer with hesitance, but also because I wanted it to be good-I always want movies & TV to be good, it takes up too much of my life to hope for something else.

My initial apprehension, though, feels warranted after watching it.  The TV show, because of the billions of dollars that has been spent on the theme parks & merchandise related to the series already, looks aesthetically similar to the movies starring Daniel Radcliffe.  I'm not one of those fans who is super precious about this (I would surely compare the two, but I think artists need to be able to have a vision beyond corporate overlords to be able to work, which is why I think Prisoner of Azkaban, the most off-the-beaten-path of the original eight films, is the best one), and to be fair it's honestly the video game Hogwarts Legacy that felt more the inspiration than the movies (perhaps a warning sign that you're overdoing the CGI too much when your set looks like a video game), but this is close enough as to be indistinguishable from the world that Chris Columbus brought forth 25 years ago.  In the same way that the Disney Princess line is too lucrative for Emma Watson's Belle to suddenly show up in a bright red dress instead of yellow, no one is thinking outside the box so that the series can easily be incorporated into the theme parks.

There are moments, I will admit, that are genuinely interesting in the trailer, which I've watched a half dozen times by now.  I'm a firm believer that television and film are different (no matter how much people want to treat them as the same), and there are moments in the trailer that feel like we're allowing the story to have some breathing room, perhaps even getting out from under not just the films, but also the books.  A few that standout to me is the concept of Harry's solo relationship to Aunt Petunia, his maternal aunt (in the movies and virtually all of the novels, you only see Harry with Petunia-and-Vernon as a combined unit, which in real life would be impossible...he'd surely spend time with her without Vernon in the house on occasion, and given her complicated feelings for him, this feels like an interesting door to unlock), as well as scenes of the kids playing and Hagrid making a snow angel.  These feel like we're growing character, and having that dreaded concept of a "filler" episode (something that is severely lacking & needed in modern television).  What I want is something new, and (again), I'm very open to not just having the exact same experience.  People have pointed out this is a story for children, and today's children have not encountered this story before with kids their own age so it's "okay" they're remaking it in that regard, which ignores the fact that, say, one generation of kids got The Wizard of Oz and another got Wicked, or that Greta Gerwig's upcoming The Magician's Nephew is a completely different tale than the usual batch from Narnia.  Giving us something more, a grittier, more "you can see it in your daily life" spin on the story is easily the most enticing part for me...you need to give the audience unexpected, even if it's not what they say they want.

But so much of what I saw falls short.  It's not that they have cast bad actors.  John Lithgow, Janet McTeer, Bel Powley, Johnny Flynn...these are actors who have given strong, sometimes great performances in the past.  But they are competing against original creations that are very hard to move beyond, particularly given the confines of a very rigid storytelling that won't let us think about these characters in different ways (i.e. how Cynthia Erivo & Margaret Hamilton are playing the same character, but are doing extremely different spins on it which allows both to work).  Nick Frost comes across the worst of the bunch.  If you'll recall, I nominated Robbie Coltrane for a My Ballot Award for the first film, and did so for a reason.  He took a character with little bearing on the plot (Hagrid is beloved, but he's not consequential to Harry's journey other than to start it, certainly not in the way that Dumbledore, Snape, or even someone like Umbridge or Sirius Black are), and made it iconic, feeling like it's plucked from the pages of Rowling's novel.  Frost doesn't have the same imposing nature & the same deep voice as Coltrane did, and while you cannot judge a performance solely from a trailer (and Frost's past acting surely indicates that he has the ability to play goofy, which is necessary for Hagrid), it reads like cosplay, which will get insufferable pretty quickly in a TV series.  Spending 8-10 hours saying "this was better the first time" is a dreadful way to spend a weekend.

In many ways this resembles a Disney live-action remake-it gives you a sense of the wonder, but feels like a copy (and in this case, a copy-of-a-copy).  The book and film series were wonderful, and done correctly.  Unless you expand beyond them, it's impossible to really top them, even if you come close.  It's not just Frost.  Hans Zimmer has made many memorable film scores...but he ain't John Williams.  Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Jason Isaacs, Imelda Staunton, Stuart Craig...the movie series was just too good to work in comparison.  I mean this genuinely when I say I don't see the point of this.  It's clear they didn't want to try something new (like a story about the founders of Hogwarts) because between The Rings of Power and Fantastic Beasts, movie studios are terrified to try something new because the public never reacts in the same way (and doesn't spend the same amount of cash), and even when a series actually works outside of those confines (think things like WandaVision, Andor, and the first two seasons of The Mandalorian), they don't learn that lesson.  But I can't help, while watching this, to feel sad-that for the first time the original Harry Potter series is going to settle for "pretty good."  I will watch it, as I said above-not just because of societal obligation, but out of genuine curiosity & intoxication with this world...but I don't expect to love it.  And it's not because I'm no longer a teenager (to know me is to know that I can still muster a sense of wonder with the best of them), but because what I'm seeing...isn't magical.

Why the Harry Potter Series is a Terrible Idea

We are going to be having a fuller slate of articles this week than we have over the past two months, and I'm super excited because I am pumped to be in a position where I can actually write again without worrying about a lot of other things happening in the background of my life, and so we're going to tackle a few articles that I've been putting off or wanted to give my opinions on.  Today, we'll discuss a topic that both had its brief "Twitter moment" this past week, and yet will almost certainly be a topic for the months ahead: Warner Brothers' proposed Harry Potter series that will take place over ten years and seven seasons, each season covering one of the books.

Let's take a step back here before we dive in to give you two pieces of context.  First, I think Warner Brothers' management of their company has been a testament to how badly a legendary studio can be run into the ground.  Everything from throwing aways tens of millions by trying to boost their streaming site (movies like Godzilla vs. Kong, Dune, and The Matrix Resurrections surely saw their box offices depleted solely by putting them on streaming rather than exclusively in theaters) to completely upending the DCEU without any real logic other than "let's start over," forgetting that audiences might not want to start over.  There's this myth that superheroes are like James Bond where theatergoers will be fine starting from scratch, but with the exception of Batman, that's not really true-no one liked the post-Christopher Reeve Superman attempts, and it seems risky to recast roles like Wonder Woman & Aquaman when actors like Gal Gadot & Jason Momoa have so properly inhabited them...how do you live up to that (a lesson we'll need to remember in a second)?  Plus, the last two DCEU movies (Black Adam and Shazam 2) being high-profile flops indicate that, beyond the Caped Crusader, it's possible no one cares, a terrifying prospect for the studio.  Renaming their streaming platform "Max" when "HBO" is one of the most storied brands in television?  It's basically the equivalent of taking Nike and renaming it "Shoe Store."

Secondly, I am a huge Harry Potter fan, way more than an adult man in his thirties should probably admit to being.  I am not wearing a Harry Potter shirt right now (though I own five of them), but from where I'm typing this I can literally see a Remembrall, the Sword of Gryffindor, two Sorting Hats, Harry's glasses, a wall-hanging detailing out the mechanics of wands, and two literal stacks of Harry Potter books.  And I don't even think this is the room with the most Harry Potter stuff in my house.  I am a big enough fan that while most audiences were greeting Secrets of Dumbledore with antipathy, I was throwing a party for all of my friends that included butterbeer and Hagrid's hot pink birthday cake with green icing.  I am about as obsessed as you can get with the franchise, and am about as ideal of an audience for a TV show as you can get...

...and yet I don't want it.  In fact, it actively makes me upset that they're even trying to do it.  Part of that is that, like virtually all Millennial or Gen Z Harry Potter fans, I am completely embarrassed by the actions of JK Rowling in the past few years with her bigoted public crusade against transgender people. Rowling is one of those billionaires who could have just shut up and remained beloved, raking in money forever while being adored by fans who love the world she created...but instead gave away her entire reputation & forever tarnished everything she created by showing a cruelty toward myriad fans of her work by being wrapped in a conservative hatred of transgender people (I've seen defenses of her written, they don't work on me anymore-she's not dumb, and she knows what she's doing...nuance went out the window a while ago on this one, she's just transphobic).  Rowling has made it extremely difficult to separate art from artist, which I generally try to make a priority.

But it's more than that.  For starters, there's not a lot to add to this story.  Fans will oftentimes discuss with big-screen adaptations of major literary series (not just Harry Potter, but also Lord of the Rings, Twilight, and Game of Thrones) that certain things get cut...but that's kind of the point.  Even in a TV series, you don't want to see everything onscreen, because it just becomes tedious, basically just a video game more than something that is constructed and written.  Across eight movies, they actually did a pretty good job of getting most of the important things from the books.  Sure, they left out things like Ravenclaw's Diadem and SPEW and the Deathday Party, but those were not consequential for the films themselves, and while they're lovely side diversions in a novel (which you can get away with in a book), there was nothing really unforgivable in the films themselves that needs to be corrected.  Any fan still complaining about something missing from the movies needs to either read the books again or get a life...you got a faithful adaptation, and one that worked cinematically (which is more than most fandoms can claim)-get over it.

The other part is that within this world, there's not much they can reinvent.  People will hate if they redesign Hogwarts or Diagon Alley from what we saw in the Warner Brothers film series, and Warner has built giant, billion-dollar theme parks around those films...they can't really afford to change the design of the castle or other iconic locations that much without discarding those lucrative properties.  Even the theme music, which blares from every corner of the park, is either straight from John Williams or heavily influenced by him-they can't mess with that either without totally upending the experience.  This wasn't an issue for the Fantastic Beasts franchise, which, while it used different composers that leant into Williams' original motif (as did the last five Harry Potter movies), existed within the same universe as the original eight films (so it was just adding on rather than expanding), but it's a complete problem in a remake.  How much "newness" can there be when you can't change the set design, costumes, visual effects structure, or music design?

It's also, I'm sorry to say, bound to fail creatively.  The really remarkable thing about the original Harry Potter series isn't that it's all one big masterpiece (I love it, but I'm the target audience and incapable of being impartial about such things), but that it was the best it could be.  They landed a really strong cast of actors as the main Hogwarts trio (Radcliffe, Watson, & Grint were up there with Judy Garland as Dorothy in terms of getting exactly the right actor for an iconic part), and they filled the faculty with an entire Royal Shakespeare Company's roster of thespians.  Any of the new children will suffer by comparison (they just will) because they're not only competing with nostalgia, they're also competing with a strong cast, and the same with the adult actors-are you really going to find a cast that's better than Ralph Fiennes, Julie Walters, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Kenneth Branagh, & Imelda Staunton, cause I feel like that's going to be a challenge?  You might get some clever casting (I could easily see, say, Tom Felton playing Lucius Malfoy given his continued endorsement of the franchise on TikTok and in his memoir, which fans would eat up), but it's going to look cheap by comparison.

At best, the series will end up being The Hobbit or The Rings of Power, shows that were unfairly maligned because they were, in fact, good, but couldn't hold a candle to the originals.  And in reality, they'll likely be worse-those were new stories (ala Fantastic Beasts) that hadn't been told within this universe yet.  This is a direct remake, and will fail expectations, potentially causing WB to sink hundreds of millions into a property that will be lucrative (the curiosity factor will mean big ratings for the first season...there's no way that it won't...even I'm not committing to not tuning in to see what happens if it does become a thing, though I am still undecided if I'd actually watch), but also will look like a failure in the public's eye (and I suspect in the eye of stockholders) without something explainable like box office to point toward.

Perhaps Fantastic Beasts caused them to have a panic, but there are other ways here.  I get the logic of not letting IP this valuable just sit there, but come on-give some other types of fan service that people will be excited about instead.  There has long been demands for a Marauders prequel about a young James, Remus, Sirius, & Pettigrew and their time at Hogwarts, or a series about the four original founders of the school.  I get that it's perhaps a lost cause to get Cursed Child made with the original actors (Radcliffe, in particular, seems to actively not want to make it), but try throwing $50 million on his doorstep & greenlighting a passion project and see what happens...it's about as close to a guaranteed $1 billion box office as you can get in this world, and you could split it over two movies (one has to assume that they've tried this at this point, but I'll continue to harp on it until we get a firm announcement it ain't happening).  But a remake of the original series-no one wants it, it will be maligned, and there's so many better ideas.  That Warner can't think of them speaks to creative bankruptcy, which is hardly a good place to start with a television series.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022)

Film: Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Stars: Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Ezra Miller, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, William Nadylam, Callum Turner, Jessica Williams, Mads Mikkelsen

Director: David Yates

Oscar History: Probably not?  The first film won a surprise citation for Best Costume Design, the first film in the Harry Potter universe to do so, but the second one totally missed, and given the baggage of this  movie, it's hard to imagine Oscar latching on even if notice for Visual Effects or Production Design might be worth considering.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We have not reviewed a new movie on this blog for a number of months for a pair of reasons.  First, like many people I am feeling overwhelmed these days, the pressures of work, health, life, expectations, & the world at-large weighing down too much to be able to do any of those things at top speed.  And secondly (and less depressingly), I have a Letterboxd account where I have been doing mini-reviews of every film I see.  If you've been missing my thoughts on modern movies, please follow me there, as I review every film (first-time or repeat) that I see at this point.

But exceptions must be made (I am still deciding and will have a decision by early summer whether or not I will return to doing full reviews on the blog or if only certain new movies will get this treatment), , and few exceptions make more sense to expand upon than the newest (and potentially last) Harry Potter film, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.  For over twenty years, I have been obsessed with the world of Harry Potter.  I started reading the books as a teenager, and fell in love with the magical world they provided.  For a young closeted boy in a small midwestern town with few friends, the world of movies & books were my refuge, the place where I enjoyed spending so much of my time, and few places felt more far off & wondrous than Hogwarts.  Even as an adult, this world is a huge part of my personality (shut up-we all borrow from pop culture in 21st Century world to shape our personality...not everything can be Schopenhauer & Aristotle)...if you walk my home, you'll see little knicknacks & winks to the Harry Potter franchise everywhere.  When I went to Los Angeles last year and walked into the world of Hogwarts for the first time, I actually teared up behind my sunglasses, it was like walking into the world I'd spent my childhood imagining.

Being a fan of this franchise in 2022 requires nuance and a bit of self-reflection.  JK Rowling, who was once an icon to a generation of young writers & readers, has sullied herself in hatred & bigotry to the point where being a Harry Potter fan has become, at best, something you asterisk as being "not a fan of Rowling" and at worst, abandoning decades of fandom.  Stars of the franchise Johnny Depp & Ezra Miller have gone from being big enough deals for Warner Brothers to trust a billion-dollar franchise to them to basically unemployable in a matter of a few years (Depp isn't even in this movie, Miller's part greatly reduced from previous films).  But I'm still here-in a similar way that Star Wars became more than George Lucas and Marvel became more than Stan Lee, Harry Potter became far more than JK Rowling in the years since she first wrote it in a coffee shop.  And that teenager inside me who saw it as a refuge during a lonely period of finding myself still has his heart skip the second that he sees an aerial shot of Hogwarts or hears the strums of John Williams' iconic score.

(Spoilers Ahead) With that preamble over, let's dive into the movie at-hand.  Where last we left off (in full transparency, there were virtually no trailers for this movie, which I went with with six friends after a themed-dinner party, and so I missed the first maybe 90 seconds of the movie based on synopses I read about the movie afterward).  Grindelwald (then Depp, now Mikkelsen) had told Credence (Miller) that he was Albus Dumbledore's brother, Queenie (Sedol) had broken up with muggle Jacob (Fogler), joining Grindelwald, while Theseus (Turner) had lost his fiancee Leta (Zoe Kravitz) in the fight with Grindelwald.

Similar to The Crimes of Grindelwald, the film continues to shift focus away from the world of Newt Scamander, more safely into the realm of Albus Dumbledore & the tried-and-true Hogwarts universe.  This film takes place almost completely in Europe, frequently the UK & Germany, and with that shift it becomes at-best an ensemble, sidelining Eddie Redmayne's Newt Scamander and almost completely removing Katherine Waterston's Tina Goldstein from the movie (she shows up at the very end, but is otherwise removed from the franchise, fueling rumors that Rowling wrote Waterston's character out of the movie due to Waterston's public criticisms of Rowling's views on transgender rights).

This decision felt like fan service in the second film of the franchise, but with Secrets of Dumbledore I find it more forgivable.  This is partially because the movie puts Law's Dumbledore centerstage, but smartly doesn't give us that much back story as to ruin the mysterious nature of the character during the Harry Potter franchise (I loathe when movies take a character that works so well by being unknowable, and then feels they need to explain them).  Much has been made over the fact that Dumbledore is gay, but not particularly gay (i.e. there's no big kiss scene between he & Grindelwald like there is between Fogler & Sudol, and there's only two mentions of his homosexuality in the film, both of which have been excised from the picture in China), and it's hard not to be disappointed that they don't do more with his homosexuality to feed the character, other than, well, making him lonely because he lost his great love.  But, I'm willing to forgive for two reasons here-one, this is still bolder than I've ever seen from a movie with $200 million-the gay moments that Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, & Marvel have thrown at us in the past decade get less screen-time than Dumbledore's sexuality does...Dumbledore, a decade after Rowling was heavily criticized for making him gay only when the books were done, is canonically gay now.  And two, it works within the story.

Dumbledore as-written was always a bit of a tragic figure, someone whose life has lived on the edge, always sacrificing but never really living.  One of the things that made he & Snape both kindred spirits AND so selfless were that they gave much of their lives so that people like Harry, Ron, & Hermione could be free to live their own lives.  That works here-we see that Dumbledore was always going to sacrifice, that he might have been the most powerful wizard alive, but he also was incapable of finding a peace in himself...instead, he gives so that the people who can have that peace (in the original series the students, in this series people like Newt, Tina, Queenie, & Jacob) will achieve it.  It feels slightly problematic that it's a gay character who does this until you remember that Rowling's world is littered with such characters (Snape, Sirius, etc) & underlines the point that magic is no replacement for human connection & love.

This is the best part of the movie, which I think is the finest of the Fantastic Beasts series, even if it never quite becomes as enchanting as the original "boy who lived" pictures.  The lighting here is off (George Richmond's cinematography needed some lessons in lighting from Bruno Delbonnel), but the effects are fun.  I loved the scene where Jessica Williams' Lally Hicks jumps atop a sea of cascading pages so she & Jacob can escape, and the production design continues to show why Stuart Craig is the best in the business (love the street designs in the scenes in Bhutan). The acting is a mixed bag, with Sudol still the best of the group & Law bringing a weight to Dumbledore that isn't always on the page (that gives the film much more depth).  Recasting Mikkelsen in the Grindelwald role generally works for the plot, though I will say that Depp's seductive Grindelwald is a completely different approach, and honestly worked better with the idea of wise Dumbledore being seduced by an actor once called the "Sexiest Man Alive" (as Law also once held that title, this recasting means we didn't get to see two actors who shared that title play a love story with each other for the first time).  I also liked Williams...I know that people have taken a lot of issue with her accent (which seems to be akin to Katherine Hepburn attempting to be from Savannah), but I thought it was ridiculous enough to kind of work.  These people are riding dragons & casting spells...an unusual accent doesn't suspend belief.

So I'm going with 4-stars here, as I had a wonderful time, even if I'm aware that I'm giving this review with rose-colored glasses (if you're not a Harry Potter fan, your mileage will vary as the film is probably too long & has at least one too many plots...cutting Credence entirely wouldn't have made narrative sense to the last two movies but would've been in total service to this film on its own, and probably would've saved the Warner marketing team a headache).  Given the film's tepid box office (it has just crossed the $200 million mark after two weeks out, and with China's theaters being partially closed still, it'll be the first installment in the series to not hit $500 million), and the ending feeling so finite (with every character either married, on their way to that, or in Dumbledore's case, about to reach their destiny), it's probable that the film's final two chapters, long-promised by Rowling, are a mirage at this point.  If that's the case, Fantastic Beasts will likely be remembered in the same way we recall the Hobbit.  An unnecessary film that fans of the series embraced (albeit not as much as the first series), but casual observers tapped out on before the ending.  Given Warner's theme park investments in the franchise, it's difficult to know what comes next-do they remake the originals, do they try giving blank checks to Radcliffe, Watson, & Grint in hopes of getting them back for a big-screen adaptation of Cursed Child (I feel confident that that would be a $1 billion movie even if this one suffered), or do they hope that love for the originals is great enough to feed their investment for a decade to come?  It's hard to say, but I can confirm that if you are a fan of Fantastic Beasts (and I think at this point I am, regardless of Potter), you don't have to worry about this leaving you behind...you get an ending that satisfies.

Revisiting Middle Earth & Hogwarts

As we all have over the course of quarantine, but specifically since January, I have been watching a lot of my favorite movie series.  I am under forty in Minnesota with (for the most part) no preexisting conditions, so while I'll be getting the vaccine as soon as I can, I am likely stuck in my current situation for at least another three months.  This means that I have a lot more time to get through movie series, and have been trying to ration them out a bit.  I don't spend a lot of time watching movies I've seen before, at least I haven't had this be the case for the past 5-6 years (TV series I'm much more likely to repeat even if movies make up a disproportionate amount of my screenings), but during quarantine we do what we can to keep our minds occupied until we might achieve some sense of normalcy, and so I am trotting out any TV show or movie series I can think of that makes me escape.  And as a result, my two favorite movie series have been trotted out for the first time in years (and the first time ever that I've watched them as a collective): Middle Earth and Harry Potter.

These are not the only film series I've watched over this pandemic (Twilight was my first which I unabashedly loved, and I'm currently getting through Star Wars, which might be my last, as after this I've got three more television series I think it'd be fun to revisit, and then I'm hopeful I'll finally be vaccinated & returning to normal), but these are my favorites.  I have read all of the Harry Potter books, but not most of Tolkien's series (just The Hobbit), but have seen & loved all of the movies.  Even the ones that other people don't like (The Hobbit trilogy, the Fantastic Beasts movies & Chamber of Secrets) I've long defended, though it has become harder to be loud about being a fan of the boy wizard series in the wake of the abhorrent political beliefs of JK Rowling.

Revisiting movies you love, truly great stories, you always learn something new and the thing that struck me about seeing them together was how well they work as a set.  For Lord of the Rings I watched them chronologically, with The Hobbit trilogy happening first and then moving into The Lord of the Rings trilogy, ending with Return of the King.  Doing this was odd because the actors who play certain parts journeyed into the past for the Hobbit...of course in the process you get to see actors like Ian McKellen & Orlando Bloom suddenly become younger jumping further into the "future" between The Battle of the Five Armies and The Fellowship of the Ring.  Only Cate Blanchett, freakishly ageless, gets out unscathed.

But this chronology works well.  One of the things that people compared The Hobbit to the original movies unfavorably with was that the 2001-03 Lord of the Rings had more source material, and therefore a stronger story, and they're right.  Not only did the initial films have a stronger plot (even in the extended versions, which give you a pretty healthy 4-hour movie for each picture), but they also had a more artistic vision than the more standard-plate Hobbit pictures.  Andrew Lesnie's Fellowship of the Ring reads as much more creative camerawork than anything approached in the technically-advanced Hobbit series, and it gives the movie more personality.

But I come away with a better appreciation for the Hobbit movies because they do set up the later films so beautifully.  Gollum, Gandalf, Galadriel, Bilbo...all of these characters who are so mysterious in the Fellowship of the Ring suddenly have more weight to their arches, and while there's always risk with prequels that the mystery comes out of the story, that doesn't happen here.  It also gives us a stronger picture of Middle Earth, and the rise of Sauron, and there are elements in the Hobbit movies (specifically the dragon Smaug) that are just spectacular.  It took 20 hours to get through (the equivalent of a couple of TV seasons), but what is most fascinating to me about Middle Earth is for a movie that was criticized by some for meandering, it tells a story that television critics would dream about in terms of sticking to a central plot.

This is true to the same degree with Harry Potter.  Eventually when all of the Fantastic Beasts films are made I'll watch those chronologically within the story but as they aren't finished (and when I started these I was hitting my pandemic wall & needed immediate relief), I decided to watch these in the order they were released.  There is something so bizarre & magical about watching these movies again with years between the last time I saw them.  I know for a fact that I have seen the first three movies at least ten times each, but heading into the 4th, and especially the back-half of the series, I was struck by how familiar it was, and somehow still new with at least 3-4 years since I'd seen any of these movies.  The artistry is something I appreciate more.  Later entries in the series really invested in quality cinematography & visual effects, and it's striking just how good Prisoner of Azkaban is in the hands of Alfonso Cuaron (just imagine if he signed up for the third Fantastic Beasts movie!).  It's still too soon to tell how Fantastic Beasts will work as a companion, but after watching The Hobbit I kind of have higher hopes for this as well-I think as a general rule prequels don't work, but my opinion shifts a little bit here if you're willing to attempt a complete, cohesive story (rather than just extending for the sake of extension).  All-in-all, this revisit was warm & deepened my love for these movies, and as many of us will spend the next few months waiting & hoping for a vaccine, I suggest you take one last look at your DVD or streaming shelves, and pick a last ride through your favorite movie series.

Ranting On...JK Rowling

I feel like any time an adult states "I love Harry Potter" some other person in the room immediately rolls their eyes, whispers something nasty under their breath or moves to another room in hopes that there might still be wine left in the bottle.  Harry Potter fandom comes with its own set of pejorative stereotypes, some fair and some less so, but there's definitely a bit of baggage that one becomes aware of as they get older from loving Harry Potter too much...which is why I don't talk about it very often on this blog.  I'm a big Harry Potter fan-I read the books as a teenager and then into my early twenties as they were released, and I was obsessed.  I'm someone who, when he gets into something, really gets into it.  This annoyed my parents to no avail when I was a child to the point where they would forbid me from owning an Oscar handbook, which I secretly bought on a school field trip; instead of having Playboys or Marlboros hidden underneath my mattress, I had a copy of the 1997 Academy Awards Handbook hidden there that I would read after I was supposed to go to sleep.  Suffice it to say, when I got into Harry Potter, I did so in a big way.

I wouldn't say that I'm as obsessed with it now, but the evidence to the contrary litters my house.  I just walked through and found Harry Potter merchandise of some sort in five rooms of my house, and that's not counting the Slytherin tee that for some reason is on my dining room table right now.  I loved the books-I read them all within 24 hours of starting them, and reread them every few years.  They are definitely one of the pop culture forces that I feel is part of my personality, and while I won't bring it up for fear of judgment, I'm always down for a two-hour discussion on the subject (Lost, my absolute top pop culture monolith, will invite a five-hour discussion if I'm allowed).

If you've paid attention to the news in the past few days, you know where I'm going with this.  The Harry Potter series, as well as the Cormoran Strike series (of which I am a devoted, if less ardent, fan) are written by JK Rowling, a British novelist who has had unparalleled commercial success with her novels in this century.  Rowling has been in the news recently for her (unsolicited) comments about transgender people, all of which are derogatory and head straight into the transphobic.  Upon an article about how Covid-19 will impact people on their menstrual cycles (the title and article made sure to use the less gender-specific "people" when referring to people who menstruate, to try to be more inclusive of transgendered men who still have a menstrual cycle), she wrote "People who menstruate. I'm sure there used to be a word for those people.  Someone help me out.  Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?"

Rowling doubled down on this repeatedly tweeting about transphobic and exclusionary comments, and received a round of criticism from both Harry Potter fans and from LGBT celebrities & allies.  This isn't the first time that Rowling has done this-she has made a point of underlining her stance on transgenderism, and has earned the descriptor of "TERF" (which stands for transphobic exclusionary radical feminist,"), which generally is given to otherwise progressively-minded women who are unwilling to accept transgender people, specifically transgender women, under the banner of "women."  Rowling has disputed this descriptor, but her public comments leave little room for doubt that it's well-bestowed.

This article isn't a conversation defending Rowling-she's wrong, and she should hear such from her fans & the people who have made her rich beyond her wildest dreams.  I do occasionally feel that the internet isn't a safe space for people to learn about an issue, but Rowling is not learning about this issue-she's a smart woman who has made these comments before, and is sticking behind them rather than growing in her attitude.  There is no defense here.

What I wanted to discuss, though, is how Harry Potter fans deal with this knowledge.  While Rowling still has books out, and so it'd be easy to boycott those if you so chose, you can't undo decades of love for a series that defined so much of you and meant so much to you.  As a young gay man who felt isolated and suffered from depression when these books came out, Harry Potter was more than just a book series-it was a retreat.  It was a way to get away from my world, where people were celebrated rather than ostracized for their differences, and where a magical escape was promised even if it was just pretend.  One of the great ironies in Rowling's transphobia is that I'm not alone here-countless LGBT youth read these books and used them as a building block to who they became as adults.  Harry Potter, by way of JK Rowling, gave them a confidence that the world could accept them, and thus the world started to do so...except of course for JK Rowling.

The gut instinct here is to "cancel" JK Rowling and move on, but I think that's dismissive of how much a work of art, and particularly a work as influential as Harry Potter, can impact your life.  I can't get rid of Harry Potter in my life-that's not possible.  I could certainly never buy the books again or get rid of my merchandise or try not to talk about it, but this is still latched onto who I am.  We need to understand that you can love the artwork of someone who is "problematic" or who in real life behaves abhorrently, and that doesn't make us bad people.  We can choose not to give any future money to Rowling or to not follow her and give her continued power & publicity, but I think it's dismissive of the impact of artists to just ask people "to hate Harry Potter now."  While your relationship with the novels is likely tainted or complicated by Rowling's real-life cruelty, it doesn't mean that the way it helped you or made you feel wasn't real, and wasn't valid.  JK Rowling may have written a book whose message she doesn't understand and certainly doesn't practice, but I'm not going to ask people who relied upon it to become who they are today to deny its role, or their passion for it, just because the author insists on making it impossible to uniformly love these books the way we once did.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)

Film: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
Stars: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miler, Zoe Kravitz, Callum Turner, Claudia Kim, Jude Law, Johnny Depp
Director: David Yates
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I didn't grow up with Harry Potter in the sense that many of my younger Millennial friends did.  While Harry Potter was something I was obsessed with as a youth, it was as a late youth-I think I read the first Harry Potter book when I was fifteen or sixteen (I can't remember if Goblet of Fire was out yet).  But, and I cannot impress this enough-I loved it.  It's become a boring cliche for someone to claim their adoration for the works of JK Rowling, but those seven books were full of imagination, wonder, and genuine intrigue.  Though it's been over ten years since the final book and nearly as long since the final of the eight original movies, that love is still there, and I still feel my stomach drop out when I hear the opening music of Fantastic Beasts, with James Newton Howard riffing on John Williams classic score.  But a lot has changed since I first stood on the literary steps of 4 Privet Drive.  Rowling has expanded her empire, but in doing so has created a world that feels a tad bit more generic, less specific than the creation she crafted so exquisitely over seven books.  While her politics occasionally feel a bit problematic (you can take her on from either the right or the left), it's the way that she's in many ways emerged as the Millennial George Lucas that is most troubling.  This is on full-display in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which is brimming with enough Hogwarts wonder that it's hard for me to dislike it, but even the most ardent of fans would have to admit that Rowling has taken a detour into uncharted territory: a decidedly muggle affair.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place relatively soon after the last movie left off, with Grindelwald (Depp) being transported to a different prison while Newt Scamander (Redmayne) faces a potential ban on travel after the events in New York City.  As you might expect, neither of these go as planned with Grindelwald escaping (with a good deal of ease), while Newt is banned but ends up ignoring the ban with little consequence.  He is joined by his brother Theseus (Turner, who is about as ruggedly handsome as you get in the Harry Potter universe), who is the by-the-books sibling to Newt's nerdy rebel.  Newt is quickly joined by his New York City friends Queenie (Sudol), Jacob (Folger), and love interest Tina (Waterston), who initially dislikes Newt when she thinks that he's engaged to Leta Lestrange (Kravitz), who clearly has a thing for Newt but is with Theseus (can't blame a girl).

The picture unfolds in a weird way after this.  Rowling's penchant for thick plot is evidenced here as we get a lot of characters and information, including a few winks to Harry Potter readers (Nicolas Flamel finally shows his face to the delight of readers, while Minerva McGonagall gets a cameo despite being decades to young for this movie), but nothing really happens.  This isn't always a bad thing if you're looking at this as a miniseries-there needs to be down time to lay some foundation-but it feels cheap when you're shelling out $15 to see the movie that you get so little actual progress (just set-up) & that the film cannot stand on its own.  I complained about this with the last Fantastic Beasts, but the cast being all over the place in levels of intrigue certainly hurts the film.  Forget for a second the problematic aspects of hiring Johnny Depp (or the foolishness of putting him in place of Colin Farrell)-the real problem here is that Redmayne & Waterston are so blah as leading characters.  Even Ezra Miller fails to properly intrigue (what a waste!) and Jude Law, while charming and aware of the importance of filling such an iconic character's shoes, doesn't give us much in terms of Dumbledore other than pensive stares and mischievous smiles.  For the second film in a row, it feels like Alison Sudol's Queenie is in a completely different movie, she's so much better than the rest of the cast.  Watching her become disillusioned with a prejudiced government (that won't let her marry a muggle) and thus join Grindelwald is the best part of the movie, and also makes her the only character that would feel at-home in Rowling's original world.

But while the film itself is hardly impressive, I can't say I didn't enjoy it.  Your worst day in Rowling's world is still more fun that pretty much any other franchise out there, and it felt like going home watching Hogwarts emerge on the big-screen.  I let out a squeal the first time Flamel showed up, and was grinning ear-to-ear when I heard McGonagall proclaim "10 points from Slytherin!"  In many ways I wonder if this is how people feel about the worst installments of the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings franchises; you simply don't care because you got another shot of the drug, even if it's not as potent as it once was.  As a result, I can't go below three stars because I genuinely liked it and will watch it again in the context of the series.  My patience with Rowling's storytelling may be waning, but it's not gone yet and I'll be around for another go...though she perhaps needs to hire an editor who is willing to tell her "no" at this point.

OVP: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

Film: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
Stars: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Folger, Alison Sudol, Colin Farrell, Ezra Miller, Samantha Morton, Jon Voight
Director: David Yates
Oscar History: 2 nominations /1 win(Best Production Design, Costume*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

One of the most popular articles I've ever written on the blog came a few years ago when I decided to try to review all of the Harry Potter movies in one post.  In it, I confessed that my undying love for the Harry Potter universe made it difficult for me to objectively review the films.  I experienced the same encounter with The Hobbit a few years back, as the movies were good-but-not-landmarks like their predecessors, and totally unnecessary in the long scheme of things.  So I was genuinely curious when Fantastic Beasts came out if I would feel the same way.  Unlike The Hobbit, deeply connected to the prior movies, this film is almost completely outside of the realm of the following Harry Potter movies, with only a mention of Albus Dumbledore (as opposed to The Hobbit movies, which features Bilbo, Gandalf, Gollum, and Legolas back in action, so it's harder to break it off from LOTR).  What I found was that while I was charmed by the movies, this was surely not Harry Potter, and not nearly as good even when it comes to trying to look at the films based solely on their merits.

(Spoilers Ahead) The picture, much like how The Hobbit went with a lighter touch, with as much time spent on exploring the world of New York City's wizards as the many creatures discovered by one Mr. Newt Scamander (Redmayne), who is a befuddled but kind.  He's not the innately talented wizard that Harry Potter is, but instead more of a Neville Longbottom type crossed with perhaps a splash of Dumbledore's natural curiosity.  The movie unfolds with a growing worry about the rise of Gellert Grindelwald, a sort of predecessor to Voldemort, whom we know to be the love of a young Albus Dumbledore's life through interviews that Rowling has done since the book series was published.  As we move on, madness of course ensues with Newt's creatures causing much havoc throughout the city, him being accused of helping Grindelwald while it's actually Grindelwald (in disguise as Colin Farrell's Percival Graves) who is manipulating a powerful young wizard named Credence Barebone (Miller, and no, Rowling has not lost her gift for the bon mot moniker) who is behind all of the doom-and-gloom of the city.  The day is saved when Grindelwald is stopped, Newt leaves (but promises to return to see his new friend Tina), and we are given ample room for sequels as we know that Grindelwald will continue to find ways to menace in the future.

The movie has a few lovely touches.  The best part would surely be Alison Sudol's dreamy, charming Queenie, Tina's sister who becomes enamored with Newt's muggle (or No-Maj, as it were) friend Jacob.  Pretty much any scene she's in Sudol steals, and announces herself as the obvious fan favorite of this franchise.  I also quite liked the bizarreness of Samantha Morton's performance, which was so weirdly out-of-place and much heavier than the rest of the movie was trying to accomplish.  Rowling, responding to criticism of her world a bit too aggressively in the movie, occasionally throws out things that feel tacked-on or specifically placed to earn her praise (this is by-far the most "woke" of the Harry Potter pictures in terms of progressive politics), but making the world a bit darker, resembling in some ways the turns her last three books took, is perhaps the most welcome development.

Otherwise, though, I left appreciating the nostalgia it brought but wishing that Rowling had left her world alone.  The stretching and pulling of Harry Potter feels like it has hit its breaking point, meaning we're seeing things we once found special become too commodified and commercial, and the effects in this film feel less authentic to the world of Harry Potter and more geared toward an easy translation into an amusement park.  Outside of Queenie and the strange climactic scene where Morton's sadistic mother learns the truth about her child, there's nothing special here.  There's certainly nothing cool about the magic.  Both Redmayne and Waterston underplay their characters so dreadfully that they lack charisma, and really you don't want to spend more time with them.  And the fact that they traded Colin Farrell in for Johnny Depp as the future lead of the franchise is a pretty much unforgivable sin.  All-in-all, I can't promise I won't tune in again (my HP immunities being weak), but this was hardly worth re-opening the memory of Harry Potter so quickly.

Those are my thoughts on Fantastic Beasts, which bizarrely won the Best Costume Oscar and yet another citation for Stuart Craig, but can't really compete in any way, shape, or form with the original franchise.  What were your thoughts on the picture?  It wears more poorly in the memory than I expected (I originally gave it a three-star rating, and have stuck with that even if this review reads more like a 2-star one), but I'm curious for anyone who has seen the movie multiple times-does it hold up?  Share below!

What Should Count as Canon?

I am a nerd.  Like, let's get that out of the way.  There's really no way to package someone who regularly makes spreadsheets for projects without getting paid as anything other than a nerd.  I am an awards nerd, a Lost nerd, a Harry Potter nerd, a political nerd, and about a dozen other levels of nerdy that can be applied to me with pretty accurate precision.  As a result, I occasionally entertain a number of things that aren't considered "important" except in the annals of my own internal dialogues.  This past weekend (yes, it's Wednesday, but I had a four day weekend so it really isn't that long ago), I had a conversation with my brother over whether author's comments should qualify as canon, and wanted to present my thoughts on the subject here.  It'll be a nice interruption between worrying about the president being a heartless jackass for going to Houston without seeing flood damage or flood victims, and worrying about the president killing us all because he isn't smart enough to admit he knows nothing about foreign policy, so enjoy.

For those who are unfamiliar, canon is essentially the rules and "facts" of a specific fictional world.  Technically, all works of fiction, whether they be in the form of a movie, TV show, play, comic book, or novel, have their own canon, though frequently we hear the term most associated with major franchises, particularly fantasy and science-fiction.  Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Walking Dead come to mind as major ones, but like I said-all fictional worlds have some form of canon, an accepted series of facts and events that are proven by being part of that world.

If you're still confused, let's look at an example, specifically the Harry Potter books.  In the books, examples of things that are canon are that Fred and George are twins, that Sirius Black is killed by Bellatrix Lestrange, and that Scabbers is really Peter Pettigrew.  These are facts within the universe of the books because they are stated by the author (in this case JK Rowling) within the confines of the seven books.  An example of something that isn't canon would be that the Dursleys are under the affect of a horcrux (Harry Potter) for ten years and this is why they were so mean.  This isn't actually mentioned within the books, but one could make an argument that it's true.  However, JK Rowling never explicitly states this in the series, and as a result, it's a theory rather than considered "canon."

The problem here, however, is wondering whether or not something should be considered canon, or in layman's terms, considered "the truth" and that depends entirely on what we consider to be canon.  With Harry Potter, again, for example, you can assume that the seven books in the series are canon as they were written by JK Rowling specifically chronicling the adventures of Harry Potter's time in school.  However, you could easily expand that lens to side stories that Rowling wrote about the books as they have the same definition of "canonicity" as the original seven novels.  She wrote, for example, real-world examples of three texts within the story (something like Quidditch through the Ages), or her recent play Harry Potter and the Cursed-Child, or the screenplay of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.  Then there is Pottermore, where Rowling frequently will write definitions, short stories, and texts about the world of Harry Potter.  All of this, using the canon definition of "Harry Potter works written by JK Rowling" all these would qualify as part of the canon.

But my question above, and where I think things get dicey, is whether or not we are willing to let author comments count as being "canon" or whether these are some sort of "semi-canon," tangentially related to the work but not entirely true because it didn't meet the rigid criteria set forth as being "written about the world of Harry Potter by JK Rowling."  Specifically here, for example, we can highlight Rowling calling Albus Dumbledore gay after the series ended as being in question, because as far as I can tell, it's never actually happened in one of the books or the additional writings Rowling has put forth.

One could quibble here-if Rowling says it, it must be true-after all, she's the authority on this fictional subject, and indeed, if it was written in one of the books or featured in one of the stories, we wouldn't be having this discussion, but she never did.  Despite ample opportunity (Dumbledore may be the only character that is featured in virtually every writing about Harry Potter put out, including writing the fictional forewords to two of the books), she never once made even a passing reference to Dumbledore being gay.  This is, to co-opt a word that is much maligned on Twitter, "problematic," but it also means that there's no proof of Dumbledore being gay in any of the written works about Harry Potter.  Rowling never invested in this idea enough to make it true, just floating it out into the universe.

This is a problem in defining canon because like it or not, Rowling is not the only person who helped create the final "canon" product in these cases.  Editors, publishers, producers, even illustrators, brought canon to the world of Harry Potter in a way similar to Rowling.  If there's a picture of Sybil Trelawney with a specific style of glasses in a book, those are the kinds of glasses she wears.  It's entirely possible that Rowling, were she to have pushed for Dumbledore to be gay in one of these books, would have been told no.  Now, it's hard to imagine someone pushing Rowling around on something she believed pretty fervently, but it also has to be said that she didn't care about this "fact" enough to ever put it in a single book, only bringing it up in an interview.  It's entirely plausible when actually making something true that she would have said "not a big deal" and moved on from the fact.  Additionally, Rowling has occasionally contradicted herself even within the canon (for example, whether or not the Room of Requirement was something Dumbledore was aware of is different depending on if you look at the books or at Pottermore), so this adds in another element that hasn't been "fact-checked" by an editor.

This problem is exacerbated when you go to other fictional worlds, particularly ones with multiple authors.  With a show like Lost, for example, the actual episodes and the mini-episodes would constitute canon, but would a comment from showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof count?  They weren't the only authors contributing to the canon, and as a result aren't the sole creators of the canon.  The same could be said for George Lucas & Star Wars or Stan Lee & his Marvel Universe.  Authors also change-Aaron Sorkin didn't write the last three seasons of The West Wing and Amy Sherman-Palladino didn't create the seventh season of Gilmore Girls, but these television series absolutely should be considered canon under the guise of being an episode of the show.  When you count costumers, art directors, editors, visual effects artists, and actors themselves sometimes tens of thousands of minds are used to create something that is canon, and with so many cooks in the kitchen, the only thing that really should count as canon is the actual finished product put forth before the audience, regardless of what a principle author intended or supposed while writing.

As a result, I think that only the finalized product can count as the definition of canon, and as a result, an author stating something in the real world, rather than within the confines of the fictional one, should not be considered canon, just merely an interesting artistic inspiration.  So until Rowling puts it into a screenplay or subsequent book in the series, Albus Dumbledore remains a mystery in terms of sexuality.  He might be gay in JK Rowling's mind, but until she puts it into a story, it's not canon.

Everybody's Linking for the Week

I had family in town so we're doing the rare "Everybody's Linking for the Week" rather than the weekend.  Still, though, we have a lot to cover here so let's get started!

In Entertainment...

-Obviously the saddest news out of Hollywood this week was the demise of screen legend Maureen O'Hara at the age of 95.  The actress, most noted for her collaborations with director John Ford and actor John Wayne, was a major headliner of the Golden Age of Hollywood and a wonderful actress.  My first interactions with O'Hara were as a kid, particularly in one of my collective family's favorite movies McClintock!, a comedy western with Wayne where she plays a stuck-up woman coming home with her daughter for a divorce.  The sight of O'Hara in that gorgeous dress sliding down into the mud made me uproarious with laughter.  As I got older I got to see some of the other facets of her personality, especially in film classics like Miracle on 34th Street and The Quiet Man.  The Academy Awards thankfully honored O'Hara just last year with an Honorary Oscar after years of fans pleading with them to give her that trophy.  It was a career capper for a career like few others.

-Reese Witherspoon is either A) in need of another $10 million or B) recently suffered amnesia as she is advocating for a Legally Blonde 3 for some inexplicable reason.  For those who may remember, Witherspoon nailed her ditzy blonde legal savant act in 2001, but the followup was an absolute train wreck.  Witherspoon's coming off a truly great performance in Wild, but I really wish she'd continue that line of thought before coming back to this character, as I'm tired of us getting long after-the-fact sequels to films that weren't that good in the first place (see also Men in Black III).

-In time for her latest book as Robert Galbraith (I have my copy of Career of Evil staring at me from a shelf nearby), JK Rowling will be doing her first interview as Galbraith on November 2nd, discussing why she wrote under a pseudonym and discussing the Cormoran Strike novels.

-And in news you might have missed regarding everyone's favorite chanteuse, Adele made history once again with her spellbinding "Hello" video.  Directed by Canadian filmmaker (and master of the world's greatest hair) Xavier Dolan, the video is apparently the first music video ever shot in iMax.  I previewed the song last week on the blog-now that we have the full version, anyone want to give their opinions of the full thing?  Comments are below...

In Politics...

-One of the biggest stories of the week surrounded Canadian heartthrob (and also, the new Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau and his huge win for the liberals in Canada.  The Nation looked at how Hillary Clinton may be able to emulate this, with a focus on taxing the rich, infrastructure investment, and an embrace of diversity.  Clinton has made the diversity angle a key part of her campaign (every stump speech will name-check African-Americans, Latinos, women, gays, the military, and senior citizens with utter abandon), and thanks in part to Bernie Sanders influence, Clinton has gone after a more progressive economic platform.  However, infrastructure, an issue that we do need to address in the country does seem like a major winner, particularly as it's a way to start addressing economic issues in poorer areas of the country and might help Clinton with blue-collar male voters, a group she needs to improve her status with in order to take the White House.

-Easily the most press-shy of the former presidents, George W. Bush was all over the news this past week.  First it was his comments about Sen. Ted Cruz, whom he attacked in a pretty harsh way for a former president who has eschewed political fights constantly since he left the White House six years ago.  This is a bit surprising not only because Cruz is a former Bush employee (he was a domestic policy advisor to the then governor when he ran for president in 2000), but also because Cruz isn't exactly who Jeb Bush has been attacking on the stump.  The Florida governor has been most heartily going after Donald Trump, and most pundits (including yours truly) view Marco Rubio as the candidate that poses the biggest issue between Jeb and the nomination, so it's strange that President Bush decided to attack his home state's junior senator instead, as this was clearly a calculation from the governor's team.  The second thing that came up was the continued attacks on Jeb Bush for his defense of his brother, particularly in regard to how he "kept America safe" while he also attacks Sec. Clinton for her role in Benghazi.  The Atlantic wrote a piece agreeing with Donald Trump that George W. Bush didn't do enough to protect the United States in the months preceding 9/11, something that has become taboo to discuss in most corners of American politics.  Personally I think this may be one of the few advantages Trump's candidacy poses for the GOP-his stances on positions and ability to call out what he considers BS (which occasionally is and occasionally isn't just that) is more valuable than the ludicrous assertions of Ben Carson which just go as hard right as possible without more valuable discussion as a result.

-At the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner this past weekend, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders went after Sec. Hillary Clinton by name about her stances on the big banks.  Sanders attacks on Clinton are the most pointed so far of the campaign, and a surprising change-of-pace for the senator, as #feelthebern has been celebrating his atypical approach to politics.  As a result of this, I wonder how this will do for his campaign, particularly for a man that has been using his bully pulpit to decry negative campaigning.

Shameless Self-Promotion of the Week...

-With the news that Gilmore Girls is back (HOORAY!!!), I want to know why Pushing Daisies isn't next.

YouTube Video of the Week...

-This video is super long, admittedly, but if you wanted to understand everything about the new paid YouTube (or YouTube Red, not to be confused with RedTube which is VERY different and highly NSFW) and why ESPN can't put YouTube videos out any more, please watch Hank Green explain it as only he knows how:

Just One More...

-The Christian Science Monitor takes a look at what scientists are doing to try and save the snow leopard as climate change has resulted in much of their territory being decreased.  This is particularly important considering articles like these, where they list out species that have gone extinct only in the past 15 years.

Everybody's Linking for the Weekend

Sorry for the lack of afternoon articles the past two days.  I ended up going to the movies on Thursday (Trainwreck-you'll get my thoughts soon), and then yesterday I had the wonderful experience of buying four new tires for my car.  There's nothing quite like spending $800 you had absolutely no intention of spending-going to the mechanic's is a bit like playing Russian Roulette with your checking account.  Anyway, though, we have a ton of links to get through today, and I might sneak in a rant sometime this weekend (MIGHT!) since I deprived you of one this weekend.  Either way, you'll get afternoon articles:

In Entertainment...

-Chris Columbus (aka the guy who directed the first two Harry Potter movies and not the guy you learned about in first grade) wants to direct more Harry Potter movies, the problem of course being that there are no more Harry Potter books left.  To him I say "back off!"  This is not just because the first two HP films are arguably the least creative and interesting, but also because I think it's time to let HP rest people.  Jo Rowling can write Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them's script and continue sharing random facts on her must-read Twitter and maybe someday create that Harry Potter encyclopedia we were promised a decade ago, but I think that's it.  The books are wonderful the way they are.  We don't need an L. Frank Baum situation where we keep going to the well before everyone's sick of it.  Leave them wanting more is a phrase in entertainment that almost no one listens to anymore (just look at the needless Terminator sequel you didn't see a few weeks ago for an example), but the reality is that if you want to keep your film as a "classic" and not just "the good one" you need to stop while you're ahead.  Chris Columbus can go back to making Home Alone 5 or something instead.

-Variety came up with the Top 12 Digital Stars of 2015, with Pewdiepie appropriately at Number One. This seems correct, of course, and I think that we could all probably agree that Pewds (with his 38 million-odd followers, choice pop culture appearances, and multi-million dollar salary) is correctly positioned at the top.  But the rest of the list has me raising eyebrows.  Not including Grace Helbig, Tyler Oakley, and Connor Franta in particular seems like a miss of the zeitgeist considering their books, TV shows, and general omnipresence on the Internet, particularly when you consider Mighty Car Mods doesn't even have 2 million subscribers.  Still, it's interesting to see such mainstream press coupling YouTube's entrance into the mainstream (Smosh had its movie come out yesterday and the trailer for Lily Singh's new documentary is also out).

-Selma director Ava DuVernay had a lot of fascinating things to say at the BlogHer keynote speech she gave this past week.  Click here for a full rundown, but I was particularly struck by some of her rationale for turning down the Black Panther movie-so frequently we hear about how women are not put in charge of major Hollywood franchises, and so it was fascinating to see a woman turn down the opportunity, and her justification why was one of my favorite principles from a director (creating a cohesive body of work).

In Politics...

Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi with Hillary Clinton

-The big scuttle of the week in the world of politics was once again surrounding Donald Trump, and this time it was his threats to run as a Third Party candidate.  538 wrote about how third-party candidates rarely do as well as they initially were going to do in the primaries (only George Wallace actually gained of major third party candidates in the past fifty years from his initial standing in the polls), but that even a smaller percentage of the vote could be dire for the Republicans if he were to run.  I've also heard that Trump likely couldn't run for president without financial help from the public-his access to liquid cash isn't enough for him to be able to make it past about $300 million worth of spending (a fortune, but not a big enough one for him to run until November 2016).  Like everyone, I'm curious to see how long this lasts, but if he manages to simmer a bit, I think his support may be somewhat real and not a Herman Cain-style aberration.

-James Hansen, the godfather of the Climate Change movement, has announced perhaps his most dire warnings about global warming yet, talking about how the 2-degree number that is so frequently referenced is too high.  Hansen, though, does talk about how the 2-degree number may be reached, but also undid.  I know I sort of flood you with climate change articles during these roundups, but it's an important topic and new science regarding it has been coming to the forefront all of the time, so this is certainly not the last one you'll see here.

-Roll Call does a fascinating look at the longstanding feud between the two top Democrats in the House: Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer.  The two, who were interns together in the 1960's in Sen. Brewster's office, have taken decidedly different paths with their careers to get to roughly the same spot and it's particularly interesting to see how Pelosi's throwing Hoyer under the bus with Jack Murtha as her in-mind replacement caused her so many problems in her race to become the first female Speaker.  I still to this day can't figure out if Hoyer will actually get one session as the Minority Leader in respect for his many years as Number 2 or if the entire slate gets cleaned out the second Pelosi retires.

Shameless Self-Promotion of the Week...

-I am super into the Lindsey Graham cell phone-destroying video.  One of those rare instances where politicians are actually funny and not just "politician-funny."

YouTube Video of the Week...

-Apparently it's just going to be a Pewdiepie week, as I'm putting in Pewds' surrealist and shade-throwing (yes, it's clearly meant for shade-throwing) "YouTube High School" series which features Toby Turner, Tyler Oakley, and Marcus Butler all getting royally-burned.  I subscribe to all three, but I have to agree with the criticisms that Pewds is throwing their way, and it's nice to see a little bit of constructive criticism on YouTube considering a lot of channels have gotten way too toothless recently.  If you missed the original, click here (Tanya Burr gets the worst brunt of that one):

Just One More...

-Buzz Aldrin used his celebrity for good this past week in honor of the 46th anniversary of the moon-landing, talking about getting a man on Mars as well as potentially starting colonies on the Moon and Mars.  I am all for this, and think it's about time we start to explore the final frontier, so bravo Buzz.